When I want to talk about the underlying economic engine, I talk about free markets, free trade, or even more clearly, economic freedom. That cannot evolve, although the amount of freedom we enjoy can obviously change.

Nor did I argue that any real world system is rightly described as “socialist.” I agree with you, with the exception of the 1917-21 period in Russia, which really was an attempt to abolish the market etc., making it pretty damn close.

You’re doing a variant of affirming the consequent here. While socialism, if it ever comes to pass, may well be marked by an absence of markets in the sense we would understand them (and IMO even that’s far from clear), and absence of markets or even the attempt to contrive such a state does not entail socialism. The ruling regime in Russia post-November 7 (NS) 1917 was faced with a massive crisis. Russia was what we would call “a failed state”. The government’s measures, which came to be known as “war communism” were an attempt (failed) to avoid calamity by people who were very much making it up as they went along. The fact was though that the “market” for necessary goods had already failed. A large agricultural subsistence state organised along feudal lines had conscripted its largely peasant population to fight in a war and this (along with the general backwardness of transport infrastructure) had led to a run down in inventories of food, which was compounded by a subsequent drought-forced crop failure, civil war and the conflict over the land question. As soon as the civil war ended, the state introduced NEP i.e. a more liberalised market regime.

Your analysis of recent events is hard to square with your own argument that Bush wasn’t really a free market guy.

In his mind, he was a free market guy, but my point was that free markets are not meaningfully possible, and his attempt to legislate as if they were ended up making a dog’s breakfast of the markets that existed. The world works independently of how we think it operates.

what then is a socialist if not one who subscribes to socialism

Someone who

a) asserts that socialism is possible and desirable
b) works to lay the political, cultural and material foundations for socialism at some point in the future, allowing that he or she may not live to see the results of his or her efforts

b) would include such things as pressing for more inclusive governance including over production, more equitable collaboration between communities regardless of jurisdiction, increases in labor productivity, transparency in trade and so forth

I should add that rational people (of which socialists are a subset) always take the world and its human and material resources as they find them and work to advance the common utility through the most efficient and effective means along timelines of value to the humans we are dealing with. In the current context, resort to markets is likely to be the method imposing the smallest transaction costs and which will be easiest to deal with collective action problems, and so we should certainly use them, resorting where necessary to transfer payments to resolve serious inequities.

Thank you for proving the author’s point when you say:

“As recent events have shown, outside of highly intrusive oversight by arms-length third parties with authority, markets inevitably infringe upon transfer by consent, security of property, enforcement of promises and so forth.”