There are more and more of us who think that it is necessary to achieve between us what these decades (almost one century) with a historical perspective, of intransigence, socialist and communist ideological obsession with all their procession of economic and human obstruction and misery, have become "a bad night in a bad inn" for later generations and the history of humanity. To help to achieve it seriously from an intellectual point of view, I believe that my colleague from the University Of Alcalá de Henares, professor Huerta de Soto, has written a new interesting and documented book entitled "Socialism, Economic Calculation and Managerial Function" that came into my hands a few days ago.

The most serious criticism that, at half volley, I would dare to make, is his overwhelming insistence and scope in demonstrating with intellectual rotundity something that I believe at this point is evident: that socialism is not freedom but rather as he says in a more academic way "socialism is coercion" and for that reason, it is uneconomical. Only those ideologically blind and stubborn, however cultured they are, are able to try to defend what is already a museum piece for future historians. Even the General Secretary of the Socialist Party is aware that it is necessary not only to erase the word 'labourer' from the political party initials, but also the word 'socialist' should be crossed out (they will have to invent something quickly because if not the PSOE - Spanish Socialist Labour Party- would be reduced to 'Spanish Party', which is something, let us say, not very aesthetic in a democracy).

Maybe some pages could have been saved but it is not bad anyway to clarify things as soon as possible and, as the very author writes, to prepare for the future so that us economists do not trip up over the same stone again. Nor must we make an intellectual fool of ourselves as dramatically as the great majority of us have done in not foreseeing the fall of the formidable Soviet Empire and its consequences. Very few were able to foresee that such an economic, political and military framework would dissolve with the speed and sweetness of a sugar lump in hot water as indeed happened.

All in all, I believe the most important in his investigation is in chapter II dedicated to the entrepreneurial function. That analysis does look without complexes and with happiness to the future, opening up a highly exemplary fan of intellectual and practical options. The entrepreneurial function, according to Kirzner, is not limited and necessarily connected to the monetary and mercantile aspect, but rather it extends to the conscious action of all people because of the mere fact of being, since even though one does not have anything, he always has at least the property of his very humanity: freedom. His idea of the entrepreneurial function "is intimately related to a concept of human action understood, on one hand, as an essential and eminently creative characteristic of all human beings and on the other hand, as the group of coordinating abilities that make the spontaneous emergence, maintenance and development of civilization possible." Let us say that the manager-worker dilemma disappears. We are all managers. The great majority are employed managers, but managers from the moment that anyone acts to modify the present and achieve objectives (profit) in the future. The venturesome attitude consists of continually trying to actively look for, discover, create or notice new and more convenient and human goals and means. Without mentioning Shackle, but with some of his main contributions, he tells us that the future is always uncertain in the sense that it is still to come and the actor-manager-worker only has a certain idea, imagination or expectation of it that he hopes to make reality by means of his personal action and interaction with other actors. A kind of fusion takes place continually in the mind between the experiences of the past that it picks up in its memory in the habitual course of a thousand different daily details, and their simultaneous and creative projection towards the future.

Wanting to interpret the author's thoughts, I would dare to say that each one of us is an eternity that walks misled by today's daily roads without soaking up the deep significance of each insignificance. The ancestral past eternity lives today even in the most insignificant and original action of each person and is projected, with the flexibility of responsible personal liberty, throughout the whole interpersonal unfolding of the age-old future eternity.

I have the impression that Huerta de Soto is one more of those small, uncommon and sensible people crazy about freedom that abound in these worlds of continuous direct or subliminal coercions. I join him too in his long-term optimistic boldness in defence of true freedom.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
Diario 16, Friday 9th July 1993