Why Aren't Socialism and/or Communism better than Capitalism and/or Liberalism?

[REDY]

I wonder what the purchasing power of those 90% percent was compared to the 60% today.

Hmm for salary you should buy about 3 jeans made of USA

No, I'm advertising free distribution, shortages is what it becomes if you go with the nonsensical sabotage thing you describe as ordering tons of stuff you don't need and can't use anyway, which will make me come up with some limit-the-madness things like "one man, one item of". Then people will yell about their freedoms being stomped, I guess.

This would at least produce great selection of three wishes jokes

 

[Galgus]

Ah, sorry, I tend to be lazy in response formatting.

Spoiler :

...please pardon me if I omit something important, but here's what caught my eye:

No. Totally not. What madness makes you think so?

Well, I am sure consumption is kinda sports for some crackpot people with obsessive black hole demand, but it's far from the normality I know. Really, it sounds like a medical condition.

Spoiler :

I honestly did not expect you to disagree with this.

We all want to live better than we currently do, rich and poor young and old.

We would all like a fancy house, better food, and the utmost pinnacle of medical care with a great amount of entertainment catered to our interests.

Of course, we understand that those things aren't free, and that they aren't going to appear out of thin air just because we want them.

Me too, actually. This makes me vote for communism Because I can be replaced with a script right now and get booted out of my office. (Don't tell my boss, but in fact I already have replaced myself largely with automation capacities of MS Office, which enables me to chat here for most part of my "working" day).

So, currently my situation is the following: I have a job with my laptop doing my work for me, and I get paid for it. It gives me money to make my living and free time to waist with you. Or spend on self-education web surfing. There isn't much more to do with it, because the bad thing is that I still have to be in the office.

Need to convince them I need to switch to home based... what do you think, should I?

There are plenty of dull and outright frustrating jobs that need to be done regardless of economic system, though the advance of technology and wealth has eliminated the need for many of them while allowing for better ones.

It would be awesome if robots and computers could do all our work for us, freeing us up to focus on more pleasant things like entertainment and making stuff we really like.

That may happen in the future, but we are a very long ways away from it now.

Honestly your situation sounds precarious, but congratulations on the ingenuity.

Though it doesn't seem to jive with your statements that everyone is motivated to work without more personal reward.

The bad thing about it is that it also weeds out people involved in the failed businesses.

Every failed business is a sad story, but the result stands as an indicator that they were either poorly run or that there was not truly enough demand for their product.

It is part of the self correcting nature of the market, where inefficient businesses collapse, their assets are sold off, the capital goods they were using are freed to be used elsewhere, and their employees look for new jobs, possibly with retraining.

Imagine a restaurant that almost nobody liked, not making nearly enough money to cover expenses.

Would it be better if they stayed in operation via a bailout, continually demanding ingredients and whatnot for an empty restaurant, or if they went out of business and a better restaurant took their place?

This is not to say that it is always the business' fault when they fail, as advancing technology or shocks to the market can simply change the viability of different industries.

For example, we would expect less luxury car production in a war scarred nation and less horseshoe makers after automobiles become commonplace.

Great, that's good enough for now. Perfectly matches my concept. Do you have children? Grandchildren? Great-grandchildren? I (or someone like me) will talk next steps with them when their time will come.

If I have children I'll allow them to be exposed to different views, but I wouldn't let an indoctrination scheme go unchallenged.

Me being a libertarian, the directions we want to take government are almost polar opposites.

By the way, that basic income compromise would come with the necessary condition of the abolition of all other forms of welfare.

That's a very nice description of communism, if you ask me.

That would be socialism (you may call it differently, but essentially it will be it).

Great!

As soon as we adopt communism I'd like to see Mars terraformed with a personal mansion built for me as well as a massive number of robots to attend to my every whim at every moment: capable of producing anything I might randomly desire, of course.

Maybe throw in a fleet of starships for me to order around for no reason.

Since post-scarcity is defined as literally everyone having literally anything they desire, surely all could afford such luxuries?

I'll even be generous and take a spot on a newly created planet if all the space on Mars is used up, though that technically wouldn't be post-scarcity.

Breaking the sarcasm, you do not seem to understand what post-scarcity means.
_____________________________

Central planned economies have been a disastrous failure everywhere they have been tried.

It's why most of the world's statists have learned that they need capitalism around to leach off wealth for their programs.

No, I'm advertising free distribution, shortages is what it becomes if you go with the nonsensical sabotage thing you describe as ordering tons of stuff you don't need and can't use anyway, which will make me come up with some limit-the-madness things like "one man, one item of". Then people will yell about their freedoms being stomped, I guess.

If your system is satisfied with providing only needs, it is vastly inferior to capitalism and the wants it fulfills.

And here we see rationing boards introduced into the system, and with it the full bore of central planning.

In capitalism, one's income and savings ration consumption naturally, as individuals make trade-off decisions to maximize their own welfare.

Beyond arbitrary limits set by bureaucrats and dictators, what such system exists in communism?

Why would anyone limit their personal consumption when it comes at no expense to them, particularly if this behavior predictably became the norm?

The beauty of capitalism is that it creates spontaneous order out of mutually beneficial exchanges of people pursuing their own self interest.

Rather than ignore human nature, it uses it.

 

[Daw]

I think state control is socialist rather than communist: under communism, nobody owns or controls any of the means of production. I don't think anyone's arguing that democratic socialism cannot exist - the problem is the 'withering away' of the state, which anarchists do not believe will ever happen.

Yeah.... you see, as a biologist, I am an evolutionist more than any other -ists I can also be.

I envision the transfer to communism as an evolutionary process, lengthy as any of such processes, amassing unseen changes which remain neutral until triggered to make a difference when the environmental conditions get right. And it is a grayscale rather than black and white.

Like, we can look back at our history and say, "Yep, Roman Empire was about slavery and the USA was about capitalism." The fact that people engaged in business in Roman Empire and slavery was abolished just recently (well, by historical standards) in the USA. Social features get tried and rejected by some societies, get adopted by others, get inherited by next, before they get written off as obsolete by their successors.

Taborites tried something and failed. Attempt recorded. Paris commune tried communism and failed. Attempt recorded. USSR tried socialism and failed. Attempt recorded. Cuba tried socialism and still sort of running. Good. Venezuela tried socialism and still sort of running. Good. Capitalist countries like Canada, UK, Finland and some others adopt social incentives. Great.

Process goes on. In every failed or running attempt there is some good experience to try to attempt next time or some bad experience to try to avoid in future. It's normal, that's how people learn.

As to the "withering away of the state", state is largely about management. Management, I guess, will stay. Its form may change (maybe beyond recognition), but it will be there. I don't believe things can go unmanaged... well, they can, but that leads to chaos, which is a disaster, and when it's over with, then there's management again. Would you, or I, or anyone call it a state? I don't know.

I once read a sci-fi story where the world was managed by the Academy of Science (which included social science as well, anything associated with any kind of knowledge). I liked the idea. But is it a state?

 

[Galgus]

@Daw

I think you would be far more sympathetic towards capitalism with a better understanding of spontaneous order, and how everything does not need to be managed to function.

I'd recommend the essay I, Pencil.

 

[Borachio]

Hmm. I've encountered the Pencil story before (just lately in P.J. O'Rourke and his "Let's eat the rich", btw). It's pretty much Adam Smith stuff, I think. But mainly to do with the division of labour rather than anything capitalistic.

I mean, capitalism is a pretty recent invention. While trade, and specialization, is older than history.

 

[Flying Pig]

I don't think socialism necessarily implies that everything is centrally planned. You can imagine a socialist system in which everything is owned by the state but no targets or quotas are set, and there is no level of management above the company level: it would work exactly the same as a market economy, except that the profits go to the state rather than to shareholders. We might need our Red posters to tell me if that 'counts'.

 

[REDY]

I think this is called state capitalism.

 

[Galgus]

Hmm. I've encountered the Pencil story before (just lately in P.J. O'Rourke and his "Let's eat the rich", btw). It's pretty much Adam Smith stuff, I think. But mainly to do with the division of labour rather than anything capitalistic.

I mean, capitalism is a pretty recent invention. While trade, and specialization, is older than history.

It is about spontaneous order mainly.

I thought it could lead him to seeing capitalism in a better light due to his belief that everything must be managed.

I'd argue that capitalism, as people owning things and making things to make other things, is ancient and predates the word.

 

[BvBPL]

These are pieces that I am strongly in agreement with. However, Marx is still right in the eventual inevitability of socialism (-> communism, apparently), either way.

As to the Protestant work ethics, I am actually unsure if it is at all contradictory to socialism or communism. At least nothing I know about it directly leads to any contradiction. But I admit I may lack knowledge or understanding there.

Sorry for the delay.

Founded within the core notion of capitalism is that wealth is good and worth pursuing. Without the adoption of that tenant, people would not pursue enterprise or the negotiation of their wages. That hardly seems worth stating but for the fact that it wealth wasn’t always seen as the virtue it is today. In the Middle Ages, fealty to one’s lord and God was more important than the pursuit of wealth. At some point, the dominate value system changed such that the pursuit of wealth became a worthy goal.

Weber traces this change in Northern Europe to the Calvinists that came out of the Reformation. Calvinists believed that one’s future salvation in Heaven was demonstrated by material success in this world. Ergo, those who were more worldly successful must also be more spiritually successful. In this doctrine, wealth jumps from being something of little value to something tied to spiritual value and therefore more important to people then it was previously. Of course the manner in which people become more successful in the economic world is through hard work, entrepreneurship, and frugality. As such, Calvinists who wanted to demonstrate their spirituality entered into the commercial sphere and practiced those values. Calvinism was also an intensely individually-focused religion; it was your salvation for which you worked, not the salvation of others. All of this gave rise to capitalism in Northern Europe. It was pretty successful. Eventually the spiritual underpinnings of Calvinism fell away, leaving the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. So the Protestant Work Ethic is Weber's theory of how capitalism become the dominate value of Europe because of Calvinism.

As to my previous post, capitalism is a philosophy that focuses upon the individual, not the community. Communitarianism, for the West, is old hat, supplanted by individualism thanks to the adoption of capitalism as a core virtue. Marx’s theory of the development of a socialist state relies upon communitarian thinking with class consciousness. Marx theorized that the economic disparities of capitalism would swing around such that it would force people back into the communitarian mindset of socialism. This didn’t happen to the scale predicted by Marx and it is a demonstration of a predictive failure in his socialist theory.

 

[Galgus]

Individualism does not oppose caring about others, in fact I would say it encourages real relationships over a vague tribalism.

Humans have always wanted wealth, no matter what excuse was used to tell people to stay in their place.

Serfs didn't exactly have a choice to leave their lord's land and make their fortune.

 

[BvBPL]

I think you're mixing up arguments here.

What I was suggesting is the absence of support for the thesis from contemporary scholars because of a lack of face validity. If you do think, contrary to my suggestion, that such support exists, then the burden ought to be on you to show that, since epistemologically it's not feasible to prove the absence of something.

What 'proof' I can offer is my own experience in the field, in which I have not found a single credible contemporary scholarship that uses Weber's thesis to explain social phenomena, other than perhaps as a passing mention. However, I cannot precisely cite my experience, since I am not a published scholar on this subject nor am I in the habit of keeping libraries and records of all that I have learned. I thought my explained opinion would be a reasonable enough offering in a discussion forum where people discuss things purely out of interest, as opposed to an academic conference or scholarly exchange. If it's the latter sort of experience you seek, as I said, you might be better served by going to the library.

A second type of proof I can offer is scholarly critiques of Weber's thesis to show its lack of face validity. However, some such critiques are found easily enough with a quick Google search, and I don't feel its productive to give you some links you can easily find in a few seconds yourself. Again, perhaps you would take it as a personal failing of mine, but I don't keep more extensive records of scholarship that criticises Weber's thesis. So if you want something more rigorous than I can and am prepared to offer in this medium, you might be better served by going to the library.

Have I made it clear enough why I don't think I am obliged to respond generously to your "citation needed" response?

So you assert a positive hypothesis, that contemporary scholars no longer consider Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic thesis, and then claim that the burden falls upon me to disprove your hypothesis because your hypothesis is impossible to prove, and because it is easy to find articles that are critical of Weber’s thesis. Absurd.

Anyway, you’re wrong, at least according to Rosenthal, London, Levy, Lobel, & Herrera-Alcazar who published “The Relation Between the Protestant Work Ethic and Undergraduate Women’s Perceived Identity Compatibility in Nontraditional Majors,” in the December 2011 edition of Analyses of Social Issues & Public Policy. Therein the authors take Weber’s thesis for granted and use it as a model to explore women in STEM education.

Of course Rosental et al. aren’t really examining Weber’s thesis as much as using it as a theoretical model for their own work. More compelling would be a direct examination of the thesis in contemporary business life. Something like, oh say, Weaver and Fry’s “Weber Was Right: Death, Taxes, Working Capital, and the Excessive Propensity for Accumulation,” published in the September 2012 issue of Sociological Forum. Weaver and Fry tested Weber’s thesis’s element of frugality against contemporary patterns of investment and growth and find it worthwhile.

Heck, scholars are still coming up with new ways to test Weber’s thesis, as in the concept outlined by Sanderson, Abrutyn, & Proctor in “Testing the Protestant Ethic Thesis with Quantitative Historical Data: A Research Note,” published in Social Forces, March, 2011. Doesn’t seem like a dead concept to me, given all the use of Weber’s thesis.

Of course the vagaries of your eel-like thesis may slip away even from these articles. Really, what one would want to see would be a literature review of contemporary sociological publications. Such a review would really be the proof to support your thesis, proof that you claim is impossible. Something like, oh say, Zafirovski’s “The protestant work ethic and the spirit of democracy: what is the democratic effect of Calvinism?” published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2014. Zafirovski took the work of scholars who argued differing opinions on the value of Calvinism in the establishment of democracy. The fifty-odd pro-Weberian scholars he cites certainly suggest that there remain many adherents to the concept of the Protestant Work Ethic.

Of course, all that research was relatively easily done using search engines. Maybe next you proffer a ridiculous notion you should try and do some quick Google searches ahead of time rather than passing those off on other people.

 

[Natan35]

I'm going to say something which I think would set me up against a wall in front of a firing squad in 1937, but...
It only ever happened due to revolutions so far. I don't think it's the only possible way though.

Imagine an iceberg. That would be the society with the richest on the top and the poorest in the bottom (whatever that means).

The temperature of the water the iceberg floats in increases, reflecting the technological level growth boosting overall productive capabilities, and makes the iceberg melt, which may create a disbalance. If nothing is done about it, at some point the disbalance makes the iceberg roll. That would be revolution.

It is an unpleasant thing to the iceberg: it may crack and some parts of it may fall off, and for sure its top will not be the top any more.

If you are the guy on the top or close to the of the iceberg, and you don't want to get into the cold water, you may think that it might be a good idea to lighten the top by shoveling some of the mass off it, because it will prevent the iceberg from flipping. That would be a government taking up social incentives like welfare payments, unemployment benefits, public schools and hospitals financed with tax dollars, etc. These are bits of socialism although they might be called different names, but essentially that's what they are.

The point is that whatever you do, whether you manage to avoid a single rotation of the iceberg or it flips many times over, eventually it will melt. Completely. That would be communism. And it is inevitable.

But: theoretically, it is possible to arrive there safely. Practically, the bottom guys are too impatient and the top guys are too greedy, and they all are too stubborn to keep their icebergs from flipping over.

This is why it has only ever happened due to revolutions so far.



Same here. Not necessarily. People can vote for it, why not? And if they do, it will be democratic. So, theoretically, it can be. Has never been so far though, again.

Well, in Russia, it resulted in the government taking over all private shops. My great grandfather used to sell wine, and then came the revolution and the commies took his shop. In that sense, its anti democratic. Communism made the state richer at the expense of the people by nationalizing everything, pretty much. Then the commies started redistributing anything according to everyone's needs, but that resulted in high level of corruption. This leads me to the ultimate conclusion that communism is pointkess. The government hasn't been able to invest in the infrastructure required to distribute resorces properly while also supplying everyone's needs. Plus, you can't give anything to the people while retaining a central government.

 

[aelf]

So you assert a positive hypothesis, that contemporary scholars no longer consider Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic thesis, and then claim that the burden falls upon me to disprove your hypothesis because your hypothesis is impossible to prove, and because it is easy to find articles that are critical of Weber’s thesis. Absurd.

Anyway, you’re wrong, at least according to Rosenthal, London, Levy, Lobel, & Herrera-Alcazar who published “The Relation Between the Protestant Work Ethic and Undergraduate Women’s Perceived Identity Compatibility in Nontraditional Majors,” in the December 2011 edition of Analyses of Social Issues & Public Policy. Therein the authors take Weber’s thesis for granted and use it as a model to explore women in STEM education.

Of course Rosental et al. aren’t really examining Weber’s thesis as much as using it as a theoretical model for their own work. More compelling would be a direct examination of the thesis in contemporary business life. Something like, oh say, Weaver and Fry’s “Weber Was Right: Death, Taxes, Working Capital, and the Excessive Propensity for Accumulation,” published in the September 2012 issue of Sociological Forum. Weaver and Fry tested Weber’s thesis’s element of frugality against contemporary patterns of investment and growth and find it worthwhile.

Heck, scholars are still coming up with new ways to test Weber’s thesis, as in the concept outlined by Sanderson, Abrutyn, & Proctor in “Testing the Protestant Ethic Thesis with Quantitative Historical Data: A Research Note,” published in Social Forces, March, 2011. Doesn’t seem like a dead concept to me, given all the use of Weber’s thesis.

Of course the vagaries of your eel-like thesis may slip away even from these articles. Really, what one would want to see would be a literature review of contemporary sociological publications. Such a review would really be the proof to support your thesis, proof that you claim is impossible. Something like, oh say, Zafirovski’s “The protestant work ethic and the spirit of democracy: what is the democratic effect of Calvinism?” published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2014. Zafirovski took the work of scholars who argued differing opinions on the value of Calvinism in the establishment of democracy. The fifty-odd pro-Weberian scholars he cites certainly suggest that there remain many adherents to the concept of the Protestant Work Ethic.

Of course, all that research was relatively easily done using search engines. Maybe next you proffer a ridiculous notion you should try and do some quick Google searches ahead of time rather than passing those off on other people.

Don't get ahead of yourself. You brought up Weber's thesis, and when I doubted it's validity, you asked me for my sources instead of providing yours. Naturally, I didn't feel I was obligated to do so when you were the one who brought up the thesis in the first place. And I said that if you wanted to see some criticism of Weber's thesis, you could do a quick google search on that easily enough (I did to test it out).

Never have I acknowledged the responsibility of providing evidence for the validity of the thesis you brought up, so please don't charge me with failing to do a google search for the benefit of your point. Now, that is absurd.

So you found some modern-day enthusiasts of Weber's thesis. Great, I guess I should have known there would be some even though I've never encountered them in my studies of the related fields. But before we proceed, are you actually trying to give evidence for the validity of Weber's thesis, or are you playing a gotcha game here by just naming some papers where some scholars may have produced evidence for its validity? Let's not forget that it's Weber's thesis that I was addressing, and as I said, my mention of the lack of contemporary interest in it is meant to illustrate its rather outdated nature, and not as a standalone point as you keep trying to suggest.

If you're still interested in Weber's thesis as the topic of discussion, could I trouble you then to dive deeper and actually tell me what evidence you've found in these papers? I note that one of the papers deals with "Weber’s thesis’s element of frugality", which begs the question of what's so specifically Protestant about frugality. Like I have also mentioned, if you take the Protestantism out of the thesis, then how is that about the Protestant Ethic anymore and not about, say, frugality? And who would be surprised at all if there is a relationship between frugality and economic success?

And, by the way, a quick google search of The Protestant Ethic truly did not yield supporting contemporary sources.

 

[Daw]

Hi, sorry I had to leave in the middle of discussion: man's gotta do what man's gotta do, talk to his family, then get kids to bed, then have some sleep, then do some work, then I'm back here, typing replies in. So hi.

Let's proceed. Not to go with either a single oversized post or many in a row, which both would feel wrong and hard to read, I'll go with spoilers you can open all together, or one by one, or none (why would anyone bother, right? )

So:

@Galgus' big one:

Spoiler :

Unimportant stuff spoilered more, to save the room, again.

I honestly did not expect you to disagree with this.

We all want to live better than we currently do, rich and poor young and old.

We would all like a fancy house, better food, and the utmost pinnacle of medical care with a great amount of entertainment catered to our interests.

Of course, we understand that those things aren't free, and that they aren't going to appear out of thin air just because we want them.

Well, when it's a "no", it's a "no"

There are things we need, and the things we want, and I distinguish them. Enough it enough. What's under it is a need, what's over it is a want. Needs go first (and there goes medical care btw), wants can wait.

My apartment is big enough, my food is good and various enough, my car is good enough (and so is my wife's). There are smaller and bigger apartments, nicer or poorer served and better or worse cooked food, faster or slower and bigger or smaller cars, but I'm fine with what I have. It's enough. I don't actually even want more.

The problem is that I have to maintain what I have. For that reason I cannot switch from what I am doing (what I am no longer motivated for) to what I want to do (which I am self-motivated for).

Thus, my want is unsatisfied. It can wait, of course. But it doesn't make me happier, and even less happy as I don't see where the wait ends.

There are plenty of dull and outright frustrating jobs that need to be done regardless of economic system, though the advance of technology and wealth has eliminated the need for many of them while allowing for better ones.

Yup. Automatic lines do assembly with welding, bolting and nut screwing, sort test vials based on caps colors, laser beams run dimensional QC, cranes lift weights, search engines look through indexes, trains in Copenhagen move people around with no driver, and Volvo makes cars that stay in the lane and keep their distance while their drivers text messages or read newspapers. There are even automatic pizza-makers. Driverless Google car is in the pipeline.

The problem is that while under communism the people replaced by machines get freedom to develop themselves into whatever direction they like, under [unfettered] capitalism they get booted from their jobs into the street and find themselves in trouble: they have no job and no pay and no way to afford whatever they want or even need.

It would be awesome if robots and computers could do all our work for us, freeing us up to focus on more pleasant things like entertainment and making stuff we really like.

I am not sure it will really be awesome unless our capitalism evolves into at least socialism by then. If it doesn't, it would be quite ugly instead of being awesome.

Spoiler :

That may happen in the future, but we are a very long ways away from it now.

I am not sure about how much time we have still left, but it won't hurt to think about what we're going to do about it when it happens.

Honestly your situation sounds precarious, but congratulations on the ingenuity.

Thanks. There are some details I omitted, so it's not as precarious as it seems... well, it is, but for a totally different set of reasons. NVM.

Though it doesn't seem to jive with your statements that everyone is motivated to work without more personal reward.

But it does.

The point is that no matter how much more monetary reward I get for what I'm doing, it won't make me more motivated. Because I am not self-interested in the process. The bigger wage will just enable me to accumulate a "golden parachute", tell my boss how to replace me (and him, too) with a script, and bail out sooner to get busy with what I want to be busy with.

So it's not about personal reward at all, it's about forced labor with fear of unemployment forcing me to stay where I am as efficiently as would a cannonball chained to my ankle.

Spoiler :

Imagine a restaurant that almost nobody liked, not making nearly enough money to cover expenses.

I love restaurants being an example here, really. I was thinking of them here in Moscow just the other day. The thought was: why don't they ever hire cooks to work there?

I mean, I work in a business center with a few hundreds of people working for dozens of companies, all with quite enough purchasing power to have their lunches in an eatery in the second floor. Through the last 7 years the eatery switched at least 3 names (meaning different companies to run it), every time its interior was rebuilt, furniture replaced, they even also had a musician to play to people while they're eating one time... the food remains inedible. And the place remains half-empty at best. And finally they go broke and move out, and another one comes, and the merry-go-round repeats itself... So why don't they ever hire cooks to work there? It's beyond me...

It is part of the self correcting nature of the market, where inefficient businesses collapse, their assets are sold off, the capital goods they were using are freed to be used elsewhere, and their employees look for new jobs, possibly with retraining.

It is also a part of self-wronging nature of the market.

The customer has to make decision on what good to pick. This it how it goes:

Under capitalism: cheap crap or expensive fine? Fine is fine but I can only afford crap... Okay, one crap, here you go. Next! (At least this is exactly how it works with medical equipment I'm working with )

Under communism: crap or fine? Fine, of course, why would I pick crap? Okay, one fine, here you go. Next!

Before you argue that it has never ever been like that, I'd like to say that there has never ever been a communism. There were versions of socialism which still used money and pricing, and there also were other reasons for fail.

Would it be better if they stayed in operation via a bailout, continually demanding ingredients and whatnot for an empty restaurant, or if they went out of business and a better restaurant took their place?

I think I got where our misunderstanding roots. What do you think central planner plans? What is it based upon?

Spoiler :

If I have children I'll allow them to be exposed to different views, but I wouldn't let an indoctrination scheme go unchallenged.

Me being a libertarian, the directions we want to take government are almost polar opposites.

Good for the first one, unnecessarily for the second. Communism is A LOT about liberties as I hope to show you.

By the way, that basic income compromise would come with the necessary condition of the abolition of all other forms of welfare.

I have no problem with that as long as the basic income matches the living cost at least.

Spoiler :

Great!

As soon as we adopt communism I'd like to see Mars terraformed with a personal mansion built for me as well as a massive number of robots to attend to my every whim at every moment: capable of producing anything I might randomly desire, of course.

Maybe throw in a fleet of starships for me to order around for no reason.

Since post-scarcity is defined as literally everyone having literally anything they desire, surely all could afford such luxuries?

I'll even be generous and take a spot on a newly created planet if all the space on Mars is used up, though that technically wouldn't be post-scarcity.

Absolutely. No problem with that, as soon as it's technically feasible.

BTW, I don't have any property at all in Germany. Though when I go there I pick from a fleet of airplanes to fly, a city of hotels to live in, and a fleet of cars to drive. I'm not on Mars yet, but am I in post-scarcity already? At least a bit?

Besides, if it all was paid for not by my company but by my government, I'd also think I'm in communism.

Breaking the sarcasm, you do not seem to understand what post-scarcity means.

Most likely I don't. But based on the spoilered sarcastic stuff above I suspect that capitalist post-scarcity and communist post-scarcity are indistinguishable. Correct?

Central planned economies have been a disastrous failure everywhere they have been tried.

It's why most of the world's statists have learned that they need capitalism around to leach off wealth for their programs.

That's why Otto Lilienthal's broken neck should have been taken for a reason to abolish aviation and never return to it. Men aren't meant to fly, you know. I also guess some car prototypes were viewed by some as a reason for road vehicles being an inherently bad idea.

If your system is satisfied with providing only needs, it is vastly inferior to capitalism and the wants it fulfills.

It isn't. It's just that needs go first. Wants go next. Get back into the line.

And here we see rationing boards introduced into the system, and with it the full bore of central planning.

In capitalism, one's income and savings ration consumption naturally, as individuals make trade-off decisions to maximize their own welfare.

Really? No, I think I'd go with rationing boards for a while instead.

Beyond arbitrary limits set by bureaucrats and dictators, what such system exists in communism?

One of priorities.

Why would anyone limit their personal consumption when it comes at no expense to them, particularly if this behavior predictably became the norm?

Sufficiency. Consciousness. If neither works, then artificial limits.

@Flying Pig

Spoiler :

I don't think socialism necessarily implies that everything is centrally planned. You can imagine a socialist system in which everything is owned by the state but no targets or quotas are set, and there is no level of management above the company level: it would work exactly the same as a market economy, except that the profits go to the state rather than to shareholders. We might need our Red posters to tell me if that 'counts'.

I like what you say here and think that it counts.

In fact, the shareholders of a nationalized company are the citizens. The government is their financial manager / agent, whose job is to invest their incomes.

@Galgus on spontaneous order and pencils:

Spoiler :

The beauty of capitalism is that it creates spontaneous order out of mutually beneficial exchanges of people pursuing their own self interest.

It is about spontaneous order mainly.

I thought it could lead him to seeing capitalism in a better light due to his belief that everything must be managed.

I'd argue that capitalism, as people owning things and making things to make other things, is ancient and predates the word.

Spontaneous order is crap, tbh. Well, it's as good as it is, actually, but it has quite a lot of weak points, and when a deliberate design can be applied instead, it should.

Spontaneous order comes through the perilous path of trial and error. Before chaos balances itself into some stable position we will call order, it will go through a chain of metamorphoses (all ugly, lopsided and for that unstable and for that scrapped). The final shape we will call order is unnecessarily perfect, too. That's how lead pencils develop into mechanical pencils, and those develop into digital pens, and we don't know yet what those will develop into.

Also, spontaneous order is what the whole Biology is about. Any species or an individual organism, or an organ is an example of spontaneous order. And many of those are designer's nightmares: what idiot builds stuff like that?! E.g., given its size, a human eye could have been an engineering masterpiece with incredible resolution and mindblowing zoom and no blind spots, but instead it's what the spontaneous order made it to be. Throw of a dice, that's what.

OTOH, spontaneous order is exactly what I believe will finally lead to communism, one way or another: it's just a more stable structure than capitalism. Water doesn't flow uphill, it tends to make a pool of itself. You can throw it, pull it, push it, pump it, but when you get tired it will become a pool anyway. So it's just a better use of time and resources to design the pool to be eye-pleasing. Capitalism is a fountain, it can be eye-pleasing as well, but it constantly needs power to work. Its locomotives are greed that pulls from ahead and fear that pushes from behind.

@BvBPL on Protestant Work Ethics:

Spoiler :

Sorry for the delay.

No problem, I took my time too.

Founded within the core notion of capitalism is that wealth is good and worth pursuing.

Interestingly, it is in the core of the communism as well. It's the well-being of the society you are part of, and through that your own well-being. So, the way is different while the goal is the same.

Calvinists believed that one’s future salvation in Heaven was demonstrated by material success in this world.

My oh my... what a dangerous heresy... Haven't they read a Bible or what? Ah, nevermind.

It (Calvinism) was pretty successful.

But John Calvin died in 1564, so Calvinism took quite a few centuries to do the trick with people's minds, right?

Marx theorized that the economic disparities of capitalism would swing around such that it would force people back into the communitarian mindset of socialism. This didn’t happen to the scale predicted by Marx and it is a demonstration of a predictive failure in his socialist theory.

Marx died in 1883, why is he counted for a looser already? I guess there wasn't quite enough fruits of capitalism around 1696, too... Let's meet in 400 years and talk if Marx was right after all and how much or not at all, shall we?

@Natan on Russian ancestry

Spoiler :

Well, in Russia, it resulted in the government taking over all private shops. My great grandfather used to sell wine, and then came the revolution and the commies took his shop.

Yep, that sort of stuff happened.
My great-great-grandfather (my father's father's father's father - right?) had a textile business and it was nationalized (he got kicked out by armed sailors).
My other old man had a grocery shop in Moscow. He decided to hand it over voluntarily (before anyone had a chance to make him) which earned him a position of director there.

OTOH, my great-grandmother was a girl at the time, and her dad was a farmer (not a very successful one though, apparently). After his wife and 4 of the 5 children died (diagnosed with "got ill and passed away"), he took the remaining daughter and headed to the city where he worked at a factory and the girl went to school to get her free education. Her son became a philosophy professor...

I can tell many things about my ancestors, and it will be lengthy. To make it short, things worked out DIFFERENTLY for different people. And most of the stories would be stories with a happy end.

Besides, I owe my life to the Revolution, actually: if not for it, my ancestors (being people from probably all possible social classes) would have had no chance to intermix the way they did to finally have me as the result.

In that sense, its anti democratic.

What, revolution? No, of course not. Revolution never is.

But then, if we start calling things anti democratic because they lead to some one man suffering or getting unhappy, then there is absolutely nothing democratic at all. Right?

Communism made the state richer at the expense of the people by nationalizing everything, pretty much. Then the commies started redistributing anything according to everyone's needs, but that resulted in high level of corruption.

True. They didn't have good tools to do that. Just imagine that amount of paperwork processed manually! It's a miracle they managed to achieve something at all.

This leads me to the ultimate conclusion that communism is pointless.

Too early for such a conclusion.

The government hasn't been able to invest in the infrastructure required to distribute resorces properly while also supplying everyone's needs.

I guess fighting WWII on the most developed part of you territory kinda gets in the way... So does cold war with the arms race against a couple of continents of untouched industry... Such things just don't allow you to concentrate on investing in the infrastructure and other social things... After all your resources and manpower aren't infinite.

Plus, you can't give anything to the people while retaining a central government.

Wait. Central government is something every country has. No?

Phew, now I think I know what writing a book is like...

 

[onejayhawk]

Has anyone ever tried to draw up a capitalist system which includes the government as a consumer and governmental favors as a commodity?

J

 

[Galgus]

@Daw

You can continue to lie to yourself about it, but wanting a better life is an intrinsic part of human nature.

Again, your system is inferior if it provides only needs, while capitalism fulfills countless wants.

Would it make sense to hold off all spending in the entertainment until everyone has the utmost medical care?

A sane, practical person would say "no".
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The history of capitalism has been that those displaced by obsolete jobs found work elsewhere.

It is why the industrial revolution led to industries we would not have even imagined beforehand.

Though government has erected many barriers to entry for those looking for work, or to start their own business.
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My point on your job-where-you-don't-work is that you have no self-interested motivation in working, finding new work, or telling the boss you could do other things.
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What is cheap is typically, to everyone's surprise, cheaper to make.

I'd love to eat out at fine dining restaurants every other day, but that would be insane for everyone to take up with our current economy - unless they were willing to give up far more than I am for it.

In the mean time I don't mind eating some meals cheap with surprisingly good frozen foods.

There most certainly has been communism in the central planning aspect - did you even examine communist Russia or China?
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Communism is about what the all-powerful state allows you to do in any form it has manifested in.

Barn and hay for human cattle.
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Sounds like an extravagant expenditure by your government, but no, you are not post-scarcity.

If you were, there would never be a need for you to ration your expenditures: or go to work, honestly.

Post-scarcity is an, unless something huge changes, impossible ideal invoked in some sci-fi where everyone can have everything they want.
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A better analogy would be that we shouldn't run a car off a cliff just because it has been done before.

Totalitarian schemes have led inevitably to a trampling of liberty, horrid poverty, mass starvations, and generally a huge amount of unnecessary human suffering.
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Again, it is small minded to think that anything we "need" must come before any wants.

I refer you back to the entertainment-healthcare comment.

....And do you really think Child Labor would be a meaningful factor in first world countries at our current levels of wealth?

In poor countries it can be better than starving, begging, or child prostitution, but they are at a much lower level of development than the first world.
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Artificial limits then, rationing and poverty for the masses.
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Spontaneous order is amazing, and it has created the wealth we enjoy today and lifted untold numbers of people from poverty.

It is small minded to see the wonders it has brought and immediately assume a system designed by a handful of "elites" would be better: especially after the consistent failures of such systems.
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That trial and error is simply people risking their own money on what they think is profitable, with both successes and failures.

Unless every investment decision is absolutely sound and no market changes disrupt it, which is nigh impossible in a complex economy, the failure part is necessary to divert capital to more useful projects.
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Communism is more "stable" than capitalism in the sense that a prisoner in a cell has a more "stable" life than a free man in a house.

Greatly restricted liberties, far lower quality of life, and less happiness to be found: but at least the prisoner has no job to lose.

It is the height of arrogance to think that you or any other would-be central planner could be design a system to satisfy people's desires better than the market.

With your tiny bits of information competing with uncountable bits of information from every actor in the economy.

And if you don't actually care about people's desires in running their lives, which your "you shouldn't want that" comments seem to indicate, you are a depraved and truly megalomaniacal person.

 

[Daw]

Spontaneous order is amazing, and it has created the wealth we enjoy today and lifted untold numbers of people from poverty.

It has also created the poverty the other half of the world is up to their necks in.

Besides, if "street preaching" stuff is set aside, I don't really think Spontaneous Order and Intelligent Design concepts are mutually exclusive when we talk about socioeconomic structure. Do you?

 

[Galgus]

It has also created the poverty the other half of the world is up to their necks in.

Besides, if "street preaching" stuff is set aside, I don't really think Spontaneous Order and Intelligent Design concepts are mutually exclusive when we talk about socioeconomic structure. Do you?

No, that is simply wrong.

Poverty is the natural state of things until wealth is created, and it is spontaneous order that has created our wealth.

Compare Hong Kong's advancement relative to the region with India's under central planning.

Spontaneous order in the free market sense cannot function when little men with bloated egos ban the market system.

 

[Daw]

There's no such thing as a free market, fortunately. Either little men with bloated egos ban the market system, or slave trade is ok.

Though there are parts of the world where free entrepreneurs don't see any problem with that at all.

But in the parts of world we don't think to be mankind's embarrassment things ARE regulated. So it's not a question of "if", it's a question of "how".

 

[Daw]

You know how God created everything out of nothing? He divided by zero, twice. Here's what: we know that X/X=1, so 0/0=1 as well. That's how God got something out of nothing. We know that nothing can be roomed by something infinite number of times. So 1/0=∞. Bingo, God got everything. Then He realized it was a mistake. So now we know we shouldn't do it. Never ever.

People aren't gods. They have to start with something, somewhere.

Real life example: hundreds of thousands of refugees come to Europe having only the pants they wear. Is it right for them to start with what they have or is it right for them to be given something to start with? After all, they are just men, and it's just their pants they risk with. Not big a deal, right?