ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Austrian School of Economics versus Cooperative movement and Corporatism
Author: Trincado Aznar Estrella
The debates engaged between the Austrian School of Economics and the German Historicism or the defenders of Socialist Calculation are well-known, but the debate by the Austrian School on industrial democracy has been generally neglected. According to Mises, cooperatives are not a method of world reconstruction. The Cooperative Movement wanted to eliminate entrepreneurs and capitalists altogether as "useless exploiters". But, for Mises, the elimination of the private businessman, the "middleman," increases sales costs. Actually, according to Mises, the competitive market economy can be more democratic than the cooperative organization as it gives control of production management to the most efficient. So, Mises says, private profit-seeking businesses, not cooperatives, are harbingers of economic improvement. This may be linked to the debate on corporatism that has been denouncing the increasing socialist tendency of the economy, where individuals lose their power and control and where vertical integration creates more and more bureaucratic governance. All these debates make a sense in the Austrian Economists methodology, where the more policy-relevant questions are presented in terms of comparative institutions.
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