Not after 73 years (1917 to 1990) in Russia.
80% of people voted to keep the Soviet system.
A general rule to constrain the talented seems to work contrary to the public good. No Bach, no Mozart no Leonardo, no Edison, no Einstein, etc. Now if you only mean those with political talent and the charisma to move crowds, that is somewhat different.
Now why do you suppose that any of these people would be constrained? Under socialism they'd have plenty of freedom to pursue their passions, arts, musics, crafts, etc. They might also work other jobs, but the point is that under capitalism these freedoms only exist for those who have money; working shorter hours with more holidays, I don't see how artists would be prevented from doing arts. People like Einstein could work on their theory of relativity without having to slave 40 hours a week as a patent clerk. They might work 20 hours a week on some other socially necessary labor, but on the balance he's still discovering relativity.
Birdjaguar said:
If one has established a QoL minimum and safety net that meets all the requirements, why would you need to cut off the ability of greater wealth for the skilled? If wealth did not lead to political power, why cap it at some artificially low level?
This is the argument of the current Chinese socialists, and it's a good point. Maybe this is one way to approach it. At the same time there is no denying wealth and markets are the twin engines of capitalist power.
Birdjaguar said:
You anticipated my post above. How would you get there? Would you just steal all the fancy homes and tear them down? Give them to government officials? Open them to public use? Who would then own all that wealth? Much of it would not be cash to be spent, but it would be cars, clothes, houses, art, that no longer had any value. If Mr. billionaire owns ten houses and you take them from him, what happens to them? No one can own them, no taxes can be collected on them. What happens to my house? It's paid for. Do I move out? Do I now have to rent it back from the state? Who is going to pay for a new roof in 5 years?
Well suppose you were a worker's republic and your primary objective was seizing the means of production and ending society's life support for the indulgences of the capitalist class. I think a lot of your questions demand context.
Suppose a capitalist lives in a very large home with a very large footprint, suppose also they are an active reactionary agent trying to destroy the worker's republic. Their fate is as
vae victis.
Now suppose you have a well-off person, capitalist or no, in a very large home with a very large footprint, and they are ambivalent about if not supportive of the worker's republic. They don't necessarily need to have their property seized,
but, suppose that this is a large estate in Los Angeles - a desert city - where water is a precious commodity. It is a
fact, then, that this well-off person's lush green estate can no longer be supported by an equitable distribution of water. If they have swimming pools, private water parks, baths, it stands to reason that an ecologically responsible state cannot support this indulgent wastefulness. So the water will be rationed.
Now suppose it is a truly
giant estate, and for whatever reason it does end up seized by the state. That would be passed along to the urban planning department for their decision on what to do with it. Could it become a mall, museum, a public promenade that people could go relax in? Who knows! But most people's houses would not be touched. Why bother? A billionaire owning acres of land guzzling limited resources is different than families living in their homes. Everybody is pretty much dimly aware of this fact in reality even if they want to pretend it's the same thing.
Confiscating large amounts of real estate and private industrial or productive property is one thing, but as you say, there's no real purpose in taking people's luxury sports cars and fur coats. At best they can be resold, at worst it's just stuff nobody needs. I say you let people keep their sometimes environmentally wasteful personal property, and if it's especially wasteful you tax it. No need to be dramatic.
The important thing is reforming the system that allows billionaires to own ten homes and consume all these sybaritic luxuries. That tap will be shut off. So go ahead and let the former elites live their lives, some even continuing to occupy the tasteless mcmansions they own, because if all that remains of their privilege is some exotic personal effects like sports cars and fur coats, they're effectively neutered.
Birdjaguar said:
Good luck with eliminating private property.
As a Marxist, I believe private property will eliminate itself.
Capitalism is self-cannibalizing. See: the inexorably growing wealth gap.
I certainly don't see how this can work, you'll always need economic growth, if only because we're still drawing down on the natural capital reserves of the ecosystem. You need growth just to stay afloat. And, of course, growth is necessary to retain self-defense capability.
Yeah but you don't need
that much. You need enough to sustain retiring populations and employ new populations productively and in such a way those new populations can build their lives. Japan's economy crashed in the 90's and their solution was to just eat the debt. They accepted low growth and have been trundling along at that low level ever since. Foreign observers say this was a death knell, that with this low growth Japan is dooming itself, but at the same time the Japanese quality of life is still good, they're still making products, and Japanese society is continuing on in a stable and prosperous fashion. They are still
capitalist, but they have opted to preserve social stability at the cost of growth. I think if we do look at the actual situation Japanese people are in, we have no reason to suppose this low growth is actually deleterious. When the Chinese system crashes and China takes the same path, we'll also see how this rationale can be generalized.
What
is deleterious to the Japanese economy is the population decline, but that has nothing to do with growth
per se. In an abstract sense you can say growth encourages immigration, and it does sometimes, but the question of immigration in Japan is a topic substantially its own.
At any rate, we do observe that in the presence of industrialization, even a socialist state
will grow, and it'll grow reasonably fast. The Soviet growth rates are testament to this. But we also observe that once a state is industrialized, it can't industrialize again and capitalize on those same gains: a worker does not need two wrenches, so to speak. (Unless you make it so he must buy a second... there's a reason planned obsolescence is a form of rent seeking). What we observe therefore is a tendency of the rate of profits to fall as a country industrializes. My thesis is simply this: once industrialized, a socialist economy does not need and cannot actually benefit from "growth" in the capitalist sense.
I added my comments in on the appropriate lines. I'd be curious how you get from the here and now to your new world order without the destruction of what exists. for example, I kinda assume that in your new world insurance would no longer be needed. What new jobs would you find for the 1.2 million people who work in that industry?
Firstly this is a bad assumption. Insurance specialists deal a lot in planning and risk analysis which would be useful in a socialist economy. Secondly, yes, some people would be out a job. I'm thinking of a lot of financial parasites and investment bankers that have overstayed their welcome.
Thirdly, the destruction of what exists is generally inevitable. Many of those people who you expect will
hypothetically become out of a job under socialism
will already be out of a job under capitalism, as capitalism fails. Socialism's unenviable task will be cleaning up the ruins and rebuilding the broken parts of the economy. You may disagree with this hypothesis, but I've been fairly resolute all along in my insistence that socialism arises in response to capitalist failure, so feel free to treat my arguments as hypothetical in that case.
