[HN Gopher] The socialist calculation debate
___________________________________________________________________
The socialist calculation debate
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-05-01 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
| staunton wrote:
| It's obviously possible in theory to centrally plan an economy in
| such a way that it's more efficient than a free market. In
| practice this is extremely hard and in the few cases where it was
| attempted it required a huge and extremely corrupt bureaucracy
| that didn't work.
|
| However, we should keep in mind that this was tried in an age
| where that bureaucracy had to be operated using paper and
| typewriters. Whether or not you like the idea of a planned
| economy, you shouldn't ignore the possibility that it might
| actually be able to sustain itself once, e.g., mass electronic
| surveillance and AI enter the picture.
| revelio wrote:
| The problem with planned economies is not self-sustainability.
| The USSR proved it could be done.
|
| The problem is that they aren't competitive because their
| planning process is too low bandwidth to incorporate change of
| any kind. They're working blind and the only way to make the
| thing work at all is to simply clone the non-planned economies
| seen elsewhere, which means they always lag behind. Eventually
| the citizens tire of their relative poverty even if it may have
| improved a bit in absolute terms.
| asdff wrote:
| It just needs to be married with a research and development
| program. Today in the U.S., most research is done with public
| grant support. The government puts out a call for proposals
| in a given area, researchers submit their ideas, their peers
| evaluate them and decide which should get funding relative to
| others, and private companies take advantage of these
| findings with more translational work (or the researchers
| themselves form a startup or license a patent). In a sense,
| we have a "communist" system of allocating research money to
| novel ideas already in the U.S., and it works so well that
| other nations try and replicate the grant funding models of
| our NIH, NSF, USDA, DOD, DOE, or other agencies. Of course,
| these systems were very nascent compared to what they are
| today back before the 1990s during the cold war, but today, I
| would think the context today is different than a soviet
| union facing global embargo half a century ago, especially
| with all of this published information being available to
| anyone with an internet connection and not those with
| physical access to well funded university libraries.
| wrycoder wrote:
| And you can bet your bippy that AI planning will be tried. At
| least twice. ("We weren't doing it right the first time.")
|
| Central planning could work, if exact equality of outcome was
| the target, the range of commodities produced was restricted,
| and people were forbidden to trade goods amongst themselves
| (and very strongly punished for doing so.)
|
| But, who wants to live like that?
| staunton wrote:
| Who knows if people will get to try it twice. Such a thing
| might take over the first time and be able to sustain its
| power indefinitely (until human extinction).
|
| I have a lot of hope though that it won't be tried. "It would
| just fail" is a bad argument against trying it because it
| sounds like you get another chance to do something else
| after.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| I was surprised to see no mention of Chile's Project Cybersyn:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
|
| There is an argument to be made (and indeed it seems it has
| already, in this book :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism ) that with
| modern networking, data speeds and computing capacity, a
| centrally-planned economy could work.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > There is an argument to be made (and indeed it seems it has
| already, in this book :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism ) that
| with modern networking, data speeds and computing capacity, a
| centrally-planned economy could work.
|
| With the minor assumption that P=NP
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| "with modern networking, data speeds and computing capacity,"
|
| Sounds like some 5G level hype right there.
| than3 wrote:
| It is rare that something like this gets written with actually
| correct details, and refreshing when it actually lines up with
| history correctly.
|
| It would have been a near perfect piece covering these historic
| issues, if only .... That last paragraph... If only they didn't
| falsely asserts a broad generalization that is easily and
| provably incorrect. Its mistaken in its naivete, and the provided
| information doesn't support it.
|
| Those of limited intelligence, when they can't win an argument on
| rational grounds tend to fall back to malign influence and flawed
| thinking and the conclusion is no different from a straw-man.
|
| As a reader, do yourself a favor, and just skip that last
| conclusion paragraph. Everything else looks mostly correct.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The arguments for a centrally planned economy have been
| empirically disproved numerous times as to make the debate moot.
| But logically it is so clear:
|
| It is impossible to assign value to something in any prescribed
| way, as the value of anything is determined by me. This is why my
| wedding ring has extremely high value to me, and I would need a
| lot of money to part with it, well beyond its value as a
| "generic" gold ring, which is more than its value in atomic gold.
| You can further extend this to literally anything, but even to
| commodities, which are theoretically the easiest to assign
| "value" to as they are fungible.
|
| It is a fool's errand to try and plan an economy, and those who
| think they can, or believe they are currently doing so in any
| meaningful way, are mistaken.
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| I mean, we have not tried it with modern computers... and he
| Soviets never even got close as the technology to see literally
| every non-black market transaction has only existed for a
| decade or so. Not saying I want to live in 1980s style Soviet
| bureaucracy (or weird modern Chinese mixed system) - but that
| doesn't mean we can't do immeasurably better than those
| systems.
|
| I am not sure "8 billion Turing machines" is intrinsically more
| efficient or accurate than "one really fast one."
|
| Also, worth mentioning that you would sell your wedding ring in
| a heartbeat if you needed to pay for food/healthcare/etc.
| Sentimental value is important you're right, but in my
| experience (maybe not yours which is fair) - when the chips are
| down you do what you have to do to survive. The problem is, in
| the current system we value human life less and than market
| equilibrium, and that's silly. We could feed every starving
| person on the planet... several times over... but we don't
| because it's not profitable. That's objectively stupid.
| godelski wrote:
| > I mean, we have not tried it with modern computers
|
| Sure, but considering all the information you'd need to
| compute (I'd argue we're close but probably not there yet),
| is this okay? Are there disadvantages to this data
| collection? Do these downsides outweigh the upsides? I feel
| like these conversations are so difficult because everyone
| comes in with certain assumptions, assumes others have them
| (even if explicitly stated otherwise), or are dismissive of
| any other concerns. We need to be on the same page to have
| real conversations.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I'm not a fan of forms of socialism revolving around centrally
| planned economies; however, it seems to me that we also don't
| have any reason to believe that a market economy can accurately
| assign prices.
|
| The free market argument that the value of something is equal
| to it's price seems to me to be begging the question. It's
| essentially saying "the an object's market price equals it's
| value because I choose to say that an object's value is it's
| market price."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > a market economy can['t] accurately assign prices
|
| Well, that is meaningless unless you define what "accurately"
| means here. This word is carrying a huge amount of weight,
| and isn't capable of that at all. (And when doing that, keep
| in mind that "price" is not "value", and there is no reason
| at all to equate those two.)
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The notion relies upon fundamentally faulty assumptions about
| universal fixedness to pricing, namely that it exists at all.
| It is frankly, insane to operate under it but because of
| Marx's and his disciple's fixation upon labor as a basis of
| economic value they stalwartly refuse to see what is right in
| front of their face. Water by the river is far cheaper than
| water in the Sahara. Hauling the water to the Sahara isn't
| guaranteed profit however because of the lack of people in
| the Sahara in the first place to serve the exchange, however.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I agree that things don't necessarily have fixed values.
| However, that doesn't necessarily mean that price is an
| accurate reflection of that value.
|
| Food has more value to someone who is starving than to
| someone who is well fed; even if the well fed person is
| willing and able to pay more for it.
| hgomersall wrote:
| It's an interesting idea that perhaps peoples' financial
| offers for goods and services should be normalised by
| their financial wealth.
| kneebonian wrote:
| That's pretty much the only real value though is what someone
| is willing to pay for it.
|
| To quote the Prince of Egypt "A lake of gold in the desert
| sand is less than a cool fresh spring, and to one lost sheep
| a shepherd boy is greater than the richest king."
|
| Ultimately the value of something is what someone is willing
| to assign to it, nothing has inherent value as far as
| humanity has been able to determine or agree on, so instead
| the market allows everyone the freedom to value whatever they
| would like at whatever they would like.
|
| But if you have an alternative way of reconciling the water
| diamond paradox I'd be interested in hearing it.
| harimau777 wrote:
| The problem is that the market doesn't actually give people
| the freedom to price things in accordance with the value it
| represents to them because people do not start out with
| equal ability to pay. For example, a rich person may be
| willing to pay a higher price for a second home even though
| it is likely less valuable to them then it would be to
| someone without a home.
| int_19h wrote:
| But that is caused by existing economic inequality, not
| the free market itself. If the rest of your society is
| organized in ways that e.g. prevent massive unlimited
| accumulation of wealth, the disparity between what people
| can afford is much smaller - and then the market can
| easily be more optimal than any centralized scheme.
|
| Indeed, one could argue that _capitalism_ (which
| explicitly allows for unlimited accumulation of capital)
| is detrimental to genuinely free markets for this exact
| reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market%20anti-
| capitalism
| godelski wrote:
| The article even starts with a bad premise, claiming we have a
| laissez-faire system. Don't listen to people that binaryize
| opposing viewpoints: all forms of capitalism are the same.
|
| > arguments for a centrally planned economy
|
| I actually think we're getting close to a point where a planned
| economy could be feasible. The problem with planned economies
| is that the economy is naturally chaotic (small perturbations
| result in large changes in outcomes). So to do this you need a
| pretty close eye and measurements of the economy. But looking
| at this requirement, we have to ask what actually needs to be
| given up. I'd argue that this is the reason that we should
| never have a planned economy. The solution space is complex and
| there are no globally optimal systems, so we need to pick what
| we care about. If you are about reducing harm from potential
| tyrants from abusing the population (or some subset) and/or
| privacy and security from governments (not just your own) then
| this is absolutely not a path we want to go down. Because high
| levels of surveillance maximize tyrant's power and maximize
| potential exploitation by adversarial governments.
|
| And there lies the problem. Things that "look good on paper,
| but don't work in practice" are just things where on paper we
| haven't been nuanced. It is where on paper we've just had a
| myopic viewpoint, steamrolling your opinion, not seeking
| solutions. This is true outside economics and politics, but I
| think since it is a field that everyone feels qualified
| participate in and highly encourages blinders. We can't go
| about solving complex problems this way. We can't solve complex
| problems pretending all problems are easy and have precise
| solutions. Life is messy, and so are solutions.
|
| So let's talk about what we actually care about and what our
| actual objectives are before we even attempt to start
| optimizing. I rarely see any discussion of objectives. It is
| fine to assume that people just want a strong economy and well
| off people, but there are many other variables that we either
| need to concern ourselves with or not, and we can't have these
| conversations without establishing our premises. They aren't
| obvious.
| jk20 wrote:
| [dead]
| antisthenes wrote:
| If you look closely, you'll see that at its core, this is just
| another Luddite argument.
|
| While it's true that a centrally planned economy may not
| ultimately have the same variety of goods, it's important to
| understand that a planned economy is not optimizing for that,
| and that parts of a regular economy (especially parts
| concerning national defense security and energy security) are
| already very highly planned)
|
| > It is a fool's errand to try and plan an economy, and those
| who think they can, or believe they are currently doing so in
| any meaningful way, are mistaken.
|
| So were the people who thought cars couldn't be faster than
| horses or that computers couldn't beat humans at chess or
| generate deceptive but believable text output at a level of a
| 10-year old.
| frgtpsswrdlame wrote:
| Have they been disproved empirically? I'm well aware of many
| theoretical arguments against central planning but I'm not
| aware of empirical work.
| aww_dang wrote:
| In the Mises canon, the possibility of effective central
| planning is debunked from first principles. I wouldn't claim
| that a triangle having three sides is theoretical or
| empirical, but YMMV.
| [deleted]
| asplake wrote:
| As long ago as the 70s and perhaps earlier, the cybernetics
| community - people like Ashby, Conant, Beer - might have
| argued its non-viability (I choose that word deliberately) on
| information-theoretic grounds. The centre has neither the
| communication bandwidth nor the predictive power to control
| things for long.
| mrkeen wrote:
| "Google Finds: Centralized Control, Distributed Data
| Architectures Work Better than Fully Decentralized
| Architectures"
|
| http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/4/7/google-finds-
| centra...
| asplake wrote:
| ...in computer systems. And I wasn't arguing for full
| decentralisation either
| nyolfen wrote:
| well, it was tried at scale one time, and the economy it
| produced lasted several decades, but was sclerotic, dependent
| on resources extracted by compulsion from its imperial
| periphery, and ended up literally unable to feed itself
| malermeister wrote:
| The same could be said, word for word, for capitalism as
| the United States are currently demonstrating.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| That would be wrong though. The capitalist economy in the
| US has lasted literally centuries.
| malermeister wrote:
| Centuries are "several decades".
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Sure, but when people say decades they generally mean an
| amount less than multiple centuries, or they would have
| said centuries...
| malermeister wrote:
| True, but it's not _wrong_ as claimed above.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| It is if you consider the meaning that was being
| communicated and not the technical dictionary definition
| of words.
| aww_dang wrote:
| The US isn't laissez-faire. Most proponents of free-
| markets would point to the current crises and relate them
| to the central bankers. Interest rates have been
| centrally planned rather than floating on the market.
| Banking regulations drive banks to hold treasuries. When
| new treasuries are issued at a higher rate of interest,
| the rate of discount for lower (near zero interest)
| t-bills increases, putting bank balance sheets out of
| whack.
| malermeister wrote:
| This is literally what a socialist would say about the
| Soviet Union. Not true socialism etc etc
| godelski wrote:
| Things aren't binary though. No one is saying the US
| isn't "real capitalism", they are just specifying what
| type of capitalism it is. But that's a very different
| than saying there's no true Scotsman. There's a reason
| one is a fallacy and the other isn't.
| aww_dang wrote:
| As flawed as the US economy is, at least there is still
| something resembling a market price for basics like a
| loaf of bread. Yes, you can claim that the USSR wasn't
| the socialist ideal, however moving further from that
| claimed ideal results in a more productive economy. To
| the extent that the west is increasingly centrally
| planned, it has become relatively less productive.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| > at scale one time
|
| Bait? Bait.
| [deleted]
| striking wrote:
| What about Walmart? Are corporations not their own little
| centrally planned economies?
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38914131-the-people-s-re...
| wrycoder wrote:
| What about Sears? What about Polariod? Packard?
|
| At the top of the growth sigmoid, corporations always make
| the wrong planning choices, to avoid self-cannibalization of
| existing products and to protect existing internal power
| structures.
|
| The same thing happens with centrally planned economies.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| What about Kmart? Are corporations not their own little
| centrally planned economies?
|
| Or take the something like 90% of restaurants that fail
| within the first year. Are they not..?
|
| You got to talk about the bath water if you want to talk
| about the baby
| striking wrote:
| Capitalist countries fail too. We just had a banking crisis
| resolved by centralized action. I'm not sure what this
| means aside from the fact that any poorly managed system
| fails.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Walmart is literally a market. No one is forcing you to buy
| things at walmart or work at walmart. No one is telling you
| which goods you will get and in what quantity. Substituting
| in the face of scarcity is encouraged on the micro scale. The
| power of markets is allowing individual consumers to change
| their consumption habits in the face of scarcity/abundance.
| cced wrote:
| Absolute rubbish take.
|
| > No one is forcing you to buy things at Walmart
|
| When Walmart comes into a small town and uses it's
| economies of scale to force smaller stores to shut down
| because they have the ability to operate at a loss, is this
| choice?
|
| Walmart has a board of executives that decide on the
| direction of the company, it's a corporation the performs
| central planning in order to maximize profits.
| aww_dang wrote:
| You are exactly right. They seek to maximize profits.
| Profits can only exist within a coherent system of
| prices.
|
| How can a central planner effectively determine prices
| across an entire economy? Price fixing has historically
| been disastrous, from Diocletian to the USSR. This is
| literally the definition of the calculation problem.
|
| Contrast this to politicians and bureaucrats who may have
| additional political incentives towards kickbacks,
| corruption or other, non-market inefficient practices.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Yes, the townspeople are choosing to shop at the market
| that has the best prices/best selection/whatever else
| walmart has that makes it preferable to other stores.
| Walmart's executives set their prices based on the cost
| to get products. Prices constantly change in reaction to
| supply and demand.
|
| You seem to have figured out though that markets don't
| work without competition. Luckily the grocery market, at
| least in most places, is robustly competitive. And the
| government should step in when that is not the case.
| runarberg wrote:
| Wallmart workers famously cannot even afford to pay
| Wallmart prices for their foods. How are townspeople
| (many of which are Wallmart workers) supposed to pay
| higher prices for their food when they can't even afford
| the lowest price?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| It's a market. If you don't like your job look for a
| better one. I mean I agree that our system isn't perfect,
| or even that good, but no system is. Planned economies
| consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of
| people starving to death.
|
| If the labor market is a monopsony, as it commonly is in
| small towns, the government should step in.
| runarberg wrote:
| > Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens
| of millions of people starving to death.
|
| They do not. Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite
| being under a severe embargo for several decades.
|
| Famines also happen under capitalism. There are multitude
| of famines in east Africa to choose from, death count is
| well over tens of millions. Outside of Africa, the Bengal
| famine happened under British rule, death count 1-4
| million people. While socialism was gaining traction
| inside British isles at the time, their colonies kept
| being ruled by harsh free market advocates.
|
| However blaming capitalism for the Bengal famine is
| unfair, where imperialism, colonialism, and racism is a
| much better explanation, similarly, blaming communism for
| the Great Chinese Famine in Mao's China is unfair, when
| fascism is a much better explanation.
|
| Famines aren't the only man-made disaster out there. It
| is hard to blame anything but global capitalism for
| disaster such as the Bhopal disaster, where one of the
| largest cities in India was poisoned in a effort to
| maximize profits for shareholders. Thousands died.
|
| Together the disaster of capitalism cause several orders
| more deadly than the disaster commonly attributed to
| communism.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Cuba is facing a famine right now. Communism was the
| cause of authoritarianism in china and the ussr. It's not
| possible to have a command economy run by humans without
| eventually having the leader be an authoritarian.
|
| Capitalism did not cause people to be greedy, they were
| already greedy. Capitalism just embraces our nature and
| aligns incentives while communism pretends people can be
| changed to not follow incentives.
| positron6000 wrote:
| > Cuba is facing a famine right now
|
| Because the US has embargoed Cuba for decades to cause
| hunger and desperation:
|
| > If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of
| a positive decision which would call forth a line of
| action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as
| possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and
| supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to
| bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of
| government. - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocumen
| ts/frus1958-60v06...
|
| Citation needed on all your other claims.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The parent to the post you responded to literally said
|
| > Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under
| a severe embargo for several decades.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Cuba is not embargoed by Canada, the EU, and so on, so
| the USA not providing food is certainly not a valid
| argument.
|
| https://www.eeas.europa.eu/cuba/european-union-and-
| cuba_en?s....
| runarberg wrote:
| The USA embargo in Cuba is not causing a famine because
| there is no famine. So you're vitamin A deficiency did
| not cause your black eye, because you have enough vitamin
| B and C, and also you don't have a black eye.
|
| Also the embargo de jure excludes food and medicine
| (although de facto it is hard to export those to Cuba),
| but also subsidiaries of USA companies are also not
| allowed to trade with Cuba, so Canadian and EU companies
| which do business in the USA (which is almost everybody)
| are risking a lot by trading with Cuba, so in effect the
| embargo is somewhat extended by large parts of EU and
| Canada.
| runarberg wrote:
| I don't know where you get your news from, but no. There
| is currently no famine happening in Cuba. There is a fuel
| shortage (like there is in many other countries). But
| there is still enough food for everybody, and (unlike in
| many other neighboring countries) the food is distributed
| such that hunger is relatively rare, and mass hunger--let
| alone a famine--is unheard of. The cost of living is
| still significantly lower than the median income, despite
| the energy crisis and despite the embargo.
|
| I honestly don't know where you've heard this. I searched
| the news for a famine in Cuba, and nothing came up, not
| even unreliable sources. Where did you hear this?
| petsfed wrote:
| > blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao's
| China is unfair, when fascism is a much better
| explanation
|
| Not to nitpick, but was Mao's China _fascist_ , strictly
| speaking? I ask because the big 3 fascist regimes of the
| 20th century (Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and
| Franco's Spain) were all stridently anti-communist, anti-
| collectivist, and anti-Marxist. You can see a lot of the
| other elements of many definitions of fascism in Mao's
| regime, but that anti-communist part is really hard to
| square. One definition I appreciated is that fascism is
| vocally and stridently anti-equality, and by that
| standard, Mao's regime is clearly not a fascist one, even
| as it just as strongly authoritarian as any self-
| described fascist regime.
|
| I'm actually not prepared to say that communism or
| capitalism is more deadly, because I think the reality is
| that the people making decisions got to that place
| because of skill in political infighting, not superior
| judgement on the topic at hand.
|
| That is, the reason planned economies do fail is not
| because planned economies _must_ fail, per se. Rather
| economies are, of necessity, massively complicated things
| and its very difficult to account for every variable
| adequately whilst planning, to say nothing of the
| difficulty of conniving the appropriate carrots and
| sticks for every participant at every level, to convince
| all participants to follow the plan.
| danaris wrote:
| What fascism and most countries that have called
| themselves "communist" have in common is
| _authoritarianism_.
|
| 95% of what most Americans criticize as "the evils of
| communism" are, in fact, the evils of authoritarian
| systems; it just happens that the big authoritarian
| system that was in opposition to America for decades
| _called_ itself communist. Much like North Korea calls
| itself "democratic".
|
| And while fascism is, indeed, anti-equality, the
| inequality it seeks to foster is almost always between a
| cultural in-group and Everyone Else. Furthermore, fascism
| does not always seek to _murder_ the Other; it also seeks
| to forcibly assimilate them.
|
| Guess what Mao did in China: systematically eradicated
| massive swathes of Chinese culture--or rather, _cultures_
| , because there were many differences between what it
| meant to be, say, Han Chinese vs Mongolian or Tibetan.
| The Uyghur genocide that is ongoing today is just an
| extension of that--and yes, it fits quite well with
| fascist ideals.
| positron6000 wrote:
| > It's a market. If you don't like your job look for a
| better one.
|
| Sure! I live in a small rural town with a poor public
| education system and no professional opportunities
| outside of manual labor. I had to leave high school to
| work to support my family. The most I can make is minimum
| wage, which means that I cannot afford basic necessities.
| What "better" jobs am I able to choose from? Or do I have
| to wait for "the government" to step in so my family
| doesn't starve?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > What "better" jobs am I able to choose from?
|
| Ones that are in a different city, of course.
| positron6000 wrote:
| Great! Where am I going to get money to move from a small
| town to a city with a higher cost of living, and how will
| I - a high-school dropout - acquire the skills necessary
| to get one of these better jobs? How long will it take?
| Where will I live? How will my family survive without my
| income?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| You know the vast majority of history is nothing but
| death and despair right? You can't expect other people to
| solve your problems for you. At some point you have to
| accept that waiting for life to come to you will result
| in poverty, that is true of the 99.99999999% of people in
| every society ever. I get that it's not fun to confront
| the harshness of reality, but your comments really do
| make it seem like you're expecting people who don't take
| initiative to just have things handed to them(to be clear
| I have no problem just handing people basic necessities
| such as food and healthcare, but good jobs are a
| privilege, not a right).
|
| Acting like being in small town America is an economic
| tragedy is a gigantic insult to the millions of people
| who sacrificed everything to migrate to the developed
| world, and those people are largely extremely good at
| lifting themselves out of poverty when they arrive. Why
| are locals less economically mobile?
|
| There has never been a more prosperous time to be alive
| than right now in western countries, we need to continue
| to work to make life better for everyone society, but
| there is no magic solution other than hard work.
| runarberg wrote:
| This is a bit rude don't you think?
|
| There are many tings in here that should be addressed,
| including simple respect for other people, and
| recognition of varying economic status, and the reality
| of impoverishment.
|
| However I want to address the migration question. As an
| immigrant my self I take offense that you suggest that
| people migrate to "the developed world" (ugh!) in search
| of prosperity. This is a great simplification, and kind
| of a regurgitation of a popular belief which isn't true.
| Most people--including my self--migrate because of
| family, second is jobs and education, these are people
| that already have a job or have been admitted to school
| and come on a special worker or school visas. Majority of
| immigrants don't sacrifice everything, just proximity to
| family and friends, and most use their existing wealth to
| make the migration as easy as possible. In fact
| demonstrating financial viability is a precondition for
| permanent residency, meaning by far majority immigrants
| who can't afford to migrate, or don't have a job or a
| scholarship awaiting them, are forbidden by law from
| staying.
|
| Immigrants who sacrifice everything off course exists,
| and refugees in particular take great risks while
| migrating, but they are a minority, and there is not
| exactly prosperity awaiting them, rather, a hope for a
| safer place to live. Many refugees have decades of
| poverty awaiting them in their host country, the more
| social services they get, the easier it is for them to
| actually escape poverty.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Rural economies being fucked isn't capitalism's fault. If
| you don't create valuable things you won't get valuable
| things, that's true in all economic systems. If you want
| valuable things you should probably move somewhere where
| they are being created and get a job there. Forcing rural
| people to move to urban areas and work in factories is a
| classic communism move because it turns out people are
| more productive when near each other. Capitalism just
| gives people the choice of doing that or staying where
| they are and being poorer.
|
| Allowing poverty to exist really has nothing to do with
| capitalism the economic system and everything to do with
| the political climate in society. Capitalism is just free
| markets and property rights, it doesn't say anything
| about government redistribution. Getting rid of markets
| would not help poor people at all.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You seem to conveniently ignore the externalities that
| most people who have investigated them agree are a major
| component in a corporation like Walmart existing at all.
|
| I would agree with most of what you've written _if_ the
| price of goods at Walmart actually represented their true
| cost. But instead, Walmart relies on externalities (the
| most obvious one is their reliance on their staff being
| able to collect various forms of public assistance, but
| there are plenty more) in order to maintain their prices.
| runarberg wrote:
| Just for the record, the article in which thread spun
| from is about the socialist question. It is asking
| whether there is a reason to your mentality. That is, is
| it worth it to regulate economies and set up social
| services such that people don't _have to_ live at the
| whims of free market capitalism.
|
| Unsurprisingly for an alumni of the Chicago school the
| author believes this is still an open question, however
| this article is kind of well written and everything up to
| the conclusion--that is the historical breakdown of this
| question--seems to indicate that socialism is good
| actually, and Laissez-faire capitalism is bad.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| This data is somewhat misrepresented. To be eligible for
| SNAP benefits, you have to also work (unless you get an
| exemption, like for caretaking). So the government is
| trying to get people off SNAP for pushing them to work,
| then shaming the employer for hiring people on SNAP.
| Walmart is a common low skill entry level job, so not a
| surprise that a lot of SNAP beneficiaries end up there.
|
| The top employers that have SNAP beneficiaries also
| include the USPS, Amazon, Home Depot, Publix, Uber,
| McDonalds, Krogers...
| Philorandroid wrote:
| It might be "centrally planned" in the most technical sense,
| but it's a bit of a stretch to compare a government's
| leverage over a market by threat of force to a private entity
| planning what to do with the property it owns. How is it
| meaningfully distinct from an individual (or a family) doing
| financial planning around their assets?
| jl6 wrote:
| A tempting analogy, but I think there are too many crucial
| differences to put corporations forward as a model for
| central planning.
|
| For a start, corporations are very small compared to states.
| Even Walmart, the world's biggest employer, is less than 1%
| the size of the US by headcount.
|
| More problematic is that corporations plan to maximize
| profit. That's it. It's a comparatively trivial optimization
| goal compared to the multitude of ways of valuing things that
| exist in wider society - and yet, corporations still
| frequently fail to be profitable. OP's example about the
| wedding ring is a case in point. Walmart's Finance department
| would value that for its raw weight in gold only.
|
| But even more worrying, corporations have a magic tool for
| maintaining order and efficiency: firing people. States can't
| do that, or at least, not states that you'd want to live in.
| Corporations are rigidly hierarchical. Corporations are not
| democracies. Imagine human rights as implemented by the HR
| department. Scaling up corporate processes to manage a whole
| country would result in a terrifying dystopia.
| kneebonian wrote:
| > firing people. States can't do that,
|
| The Gulags: Let me introduce myself.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But even more worrying, corporations have a magic tool
| for maintaining order and efficiency: firing people. States
| can't do that,
|
| Deportation and capital punishment are real things, so I
| think your wrong.
| hgomersall wrote:
| They're not real things in a civilised society.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think you just need to go up the corporate-financial
| ladder a step. Clearly the major shareholder conglomerates
| - Vanguard, Fidelity, State Street, Vanguard etc. can act
| in a manner very similar to a Soviet Central Committee to
| direct resources in a centrally planned manner. The current
| consolidation of banking into a small group of large
| corporate institutions (JPMorganChase, BankAmerica,
| Citgroup, WellsFargo) with direct ties to the Federal
| Reserve is another obvious example of how the US economy is
| more of a centrally planned model than not, and of course,
| the military-industrial corporate system, where the
| government is basically the sole buyer and distributor of
| contracts, is another one.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Maybe they could. _But they don 't_. They invest in
| companies, but they don't tell the companies how to run
| themselves.
| cced wrote:
| OP's example of his wedding ring is absolutely not case in
| point; the value of his ring is it's weight in gold.
|
| Whatever _sentimental value_ he may hold for his ring has
| no bearing on any rational actors choice to buy the ring.
|
| Apple, Microsoft, Walmart and, gee, I don't know, any of
| the other F500 corporations don't make it there because
| "they fail to value their products and services".
|
| They pay real people, real wages, to produce real things,
| that are sold further down the supply chain. These aren't
| imaginary objects and figures.
| cced wrote:
| If anyone is interested in learning more about how Walmart uses
| central planning today, here's a Youtube video [1] of it (30
| mins)
|
| I would love for OP to explain why central planning seems to
| work so well for private businesses but has no such hopes of
| achieving any success for the public.
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/xuBrGaVhjcI
| aww_dang wrote:
| https://mises.org/library/planned-economy-and-economic-
| plann...
| zzbzq wrote:
| Only by straw-manning the idea. What you've written there
| doesn't disprove anything. We've seen in real life that a large
| corporation can plan a proportion of an economy. What you have
| to prove, in order to repudiate central planning, is prove that
| there exists some maximum proportion of an economy that can be
| planned. And even then, a simple workaround would be to
| artificially recreate such maximums within the central
| structure. I think you're just not very imaginative.
| bretticus wrote:
| > We've seen in real life that a large corporation can plan a
| proportion of an economy.
|
| No we haven't. Look at the list of Fortune 500 companies
| today vs 50 years ago. The landscape is completely different.
| IBM was the most innovative company in America and now it's
| seen as a dinosaur. Corporations die each year. It's
| cutthroat; your business is more likely to fail than succeed.
| The idea that Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell could do a
| better job planning the economy is laughable
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Corporations fail a lot in their plans. On top, not certain
| that the planning aspect is what gives rise to corporations
| in the first place (vs., e.g, transaction costs between
| independent actors if there where no corporation).
| karaterobot wrote:
| > We've seen in real life that a large corporation can plan a
| proportion of an economy. What you have to prove, in order to
| repudiate central planning, is prove that there exists some
| maximum proportion of an economy that can be planned.
|
| If the examples of large corporations planning a proportion
| of an economy count as an argument for why central planning
| could work, then _surely_ the examples of actual, centrally-
| planned economies failing should count as arguments for why
| they don 't. I mean, don't toss out the actual examples for
| the metaphorical ones.
| stelonix wrote:
| You mean examples why they _didn 't_. Just because Starship
| exploded at launch it does not prove all Starships are
| going to explode. Likewise, if you have a handful of trials
| of planned economy it does not imply the whole concept is
| infeasible. Stating otherwise is fallacious.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Ah yes, on the 205th try we'll finally nail this
| impossibly complex and moving target.
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| The problem with that argument is you have to argue that
| the USSR failed because of central planning, when the
| reality is their centrally planned economy succeeded in
| industrializing a majority-peasant agricultural country,
| defeating the nazis in world war 2, and launching a man
| into space.
|
| I'm not blind to the many flaws of the soviet union, but
| it's a bit absurd to point to it as a failure of central
| planning.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The difference is that the corporation can die. Not so
| government programs.
| pc86 wrote:
| Government programs are cancelled all the time.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| A corporation can execute the creation of consumer or
| producer goods for sale to the market, earning a profit
| greater than the sum of the inputs. Corporations execute on
| that specific mission with a goal of maximizing profit. A
| side-effect of this (in a truly free market) is to ensure the
| customer, who should be able to freely to purchase from any
| producer, is maximally satisfied. It also follows that a
| corporation will try and reduce their costs on all possible
| axes - from inputs, to labor, to production time, to tax
| mitigation, etc.
|
| If you try to extend "producing goods" to "every good
| possible for all people", it cannot possibly work, because a
| corporation cannot even satisfy the needs of consumers within
| their narrow band of production (or else competitors wouldn't
| exist, and further enhancements of products would be
| unnecessary).
| mxkopy wrote:
| I don't understand how these things are connected. The
| market being free doesn't have anything to do with whether
| or not the customer is satisfied - take telecom in the U.S.
| for example. Competition is sparse _and_ nobody is
| satisfied.
|
| What you're describing is a buyer's market, which is only
| one case out of many.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 1. we do not charter corporations so that they may chase
| profits, we charter them because we believe that without
| limited liability, certain things that we as a society (or
| as a monarch) want done will not happen. If that was not
| the case, we would not have corporations at all, simply
| partnerships between various sized groups of individuals
| who decided to risk their personal fortune (in all senses)
| on some venture that could not be accomplished alone.
|
| 2. in situations of monopoly or close to it, corporations
| do in fact indulge in central planning for an entire
| economy. You may choose to put your faith in the idea that
| their chasing profits mean that their decisions will be the
| ones we would make as a society, but there's no inherent
| reason for this to be true. There are often multiple
| pathways to the same profit, with different side effects
| and different levels of organizational commitment; as a
| society we might prefer a corporation to pick one route,
| but it picks the other.
| cced wrote:
| > greater than the sum of the inputs
|
| Oh please, they get to rob workers of necessities of life
| and capitalize on their pity wages. Take a look at Walmart
| employees on food stamps and talk about producing value
| equal to more than the sum of the parts; the government is
| subsidizing their food.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| That is a _political decision_ that the USA made, and one
| could that also be changed through the _political
| process_ - by subsidizing all manner of social benefits
| (healthcare, housing, food, and so on) the US government
| enables private businesses to hire employees at a lower
| wage without social upheaval. I would argue this is
| inferior to providing _no social benefits whatsoever_ in
| order that corporations would have to bear more of the
| cost, rather than indirectly through taxes.
| olalonde wrote:
| That's redefining what "centrally planned" means.
| Corporations are subject to competitive pressures: they
| rapidly lose their ability to "plan" when they stop
| "planning" well. There's no comparable mechanism when it
| comes to top-down government planning.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > It is impossible to assign value to something in any
| prescribed way, as the value of anything is determined by me.
|
| It's like Insulin. It may only be worth $5/vial to drug
| companies, but it's worth $100/vial to consumers who don't want
| to die.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| That's a really good point in the argument that markets for
| demand-inelastic goods are amoral at best and unethical at
| worst. We have choices to make when it comes to which
| economic systems best solve certain problems.
|
| Organ donation is a good example we're we've said, "we cannot
| let a market solve this problem." Are there issues, with it?
| Sure, but only the extreme among us argue that organ markets
| would be an improvement. Every market is open to this
| critique to various degrees.
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| I can highly recommend "Towards a new Socialism" by Cockshott on
| this topic. It gets into the details of economic planning from a
| practical side, and even discusses the computational complexity
| of different algorithms
| lamontcg wrote:
| I call myself a socialist but I wasn't born 100 years ago so I've
| accepted that absolute centrally planned economies are poor and
| money and markets will never be abolished.
|
| But what I want is more democratically forms of corporations,
| government policies that produce less income inequality and
| regulations over business which prevents monopolies and market
| distortions, along with much stronger unions (ideally a situation
| where we keep the government, corporations and unions all more or
| less at odds with each other in order to maximize actual
| individual liberty--defined to exclude the current contradictory
| definition of liberty as "wielding as much capital power as you
| possibly can over other people").
|
| What we have right now is a situation where corporations run the
| government and are in the process of consolidating every more
| tightly into monopolistic cabals. That is also the end goal of
| unregulated free market capitalism, it isn't the optimum
| allocation of capital, it is the optimum exploitation of labor
| for profits.
|
| Yeah, the magic wand solution of government-run economies and
| doing away with money and markets doesn't work. Outside of some
| sophomorically edgy and loud tankies on twitter and reddit nobody
| really wants to do that, and it wouldn't get anywhere if they
| tried.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I feel pretty much the same way; is there a better name for
| this besides democratic socialism?
|
| > Yeah, the magic wand solution of government-run economies and
| doing away with money and markets doesn't work. Outside of some
| sophomorically edgy and loud tankies on twitter and reddit
| nobody really wants to do that, and it wouldn't get anywhere if
| they tried.
|
| While I agree the "socialists" who want full-blown (central,
| government run with no free market elements and no money)
| socialism are the minority, it's frustrating that good
| conversation around socialism is hard to find because
| detractors specifically attack this extreme side of the
| dichotomy.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I'm a moderate/independent and probably a capitalist due to
| the pragmatism. However, I tell people that I would be a
| radical socialist if it worked.
|
| I might be okay with inefficiencies if we really could get
| rid of class, or that we could keep our excess value of
| labor. That puts me on the extreme side.
|
| The less extreme side just seems inefficient and creates a
| class of government workers/politicians who control resources
| are the new upper class.
|
| It really sounds like you want capitalism with some sort of
| redistribution or better taxation. I most recently found
| Green Capitalism as a word I could likely get behind, but it
| still suffers from the issue of resources going through
| government workers/politicians.
| lamontcg wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism might work.
| [deleted]
| int_19h wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
| RC_ITR wrote:
| The big propaganda win has always been "it's either no holds
| barred free market capitalism or its central planning."
|
| Of those two, free markets lead to _better_ outcomes, but
| rarely _optimal_ outcomes. There are middle grounds.
|
| What's worse is that America's markets are _already_ extremely
| skewed (tax deductible mortgage interest for example), but free
| market proponents ignore that, since it's the baseline.
| dingusdew wrote:
| [dead]
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Tax deductible mortgage interest is a favorite whipping boy,
| but consider the alternative - It would be more effective for
| corporations to buy properties and rent them out, because
| corporations could still charge the mortgage payments as
| operating loss. I would gladly incorporate a C-Corp and rent
| my house at market rate to myself.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I would prefer that too.
|
| The more people are exposed to the true cost of housing,
| the more likely they are to care about it.
|
| I also don't think it's an intrinsic good that people own
| their homes. Looks what it has done in places like CA where
| nothing gets built anymore.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Interest expenses are deductible from all businesses taxes.
| (Wouldn't make sense if they weren't, as a money losing
| company could still be forced to pay income tax.) So If I
| build an apartment building and rent out the units, my
| interest expenses are deducted, and nobody is arguing with
| that. So if I buy a house and live in it, why shouldn't I be
| able to deduct the same?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Ok, and credit card interest?
| seiferteric wrote:
| Exactly, I find it funny that people will call themselves
| socialist, capitalist, communist... these are 19th century
| ideas or earlier. The reality is none of these ideologies are
| complete solutions, they are simply tools that can be used in
| certain cases. Yes it seems that capitalism/free markets
| works best most of the time (even China knows this) but there
| are many cases where it does not and something else has to
| happen (healthcare, housing etc.)
| lamontcg wrote:
| Well give me a term that other people understand that I can
| use instead of socialist.
|
| I do tend to agree with most socialist diagnosis of the
| problems of capitalism, I just don't tend to agree on the
| cure for the disease (or if there even is a cure, and not
| just limiting the damage).
|
| The fact that the terms don't really exist are a good
| indication of how well the propaganda is working I guess.
|
| > Yes it seems that capitalism/free markets works best most
| of the time (even China knows this) but there are many
| cases where it does not and something else has to happen
| (healthcare, housing etc.)
|
| And I don't necessarily agree with this. I think
| money+markets will need to exist. I don't agree that the
| current top-down hierarchical nature of corporations is the
| best. CEOs are all tinpot dictators and we've universally
| decided that this is just okay and commands flow down from
| the top and people don't question that. I've found that to
| be a pretty shitty model, just on the basis of not having
| enough feedback loops from the bottom to the top which
| leads to badly performing economic machines. And as
| corporations consolidate and grow to become the size of
| governments the CEOs are becoming real political dictators
| and a ruling class.
| seiferteric wrote:
| I don't know about new terms, but I prefer pragmatism
| over the other 'isms out there, as long as they respect
| individuals rights and dignity. A far as CEO's as
| dictators, I don't think we see eye to eye, because this
| can be a GOOD thing in a lot of cases. Rule by committee
| instead of a single minded focus of someone with a vision
| is a recipe for mediocrity... up until a certain scale
| anyway. This is where I think things tend to break down.
| It's like Newton's laws, they work fine up until things
| get too big, or fast, then you have to correct for them
| with something else. As long as companies aren't so big
| and powerful as to disrupt the function of government, or
| negatively affect the populous without recourse, then I
| think it is fine, but after that ya, you need regulation
| at least.
| umrcumrcu wrote:
| Explain to me exactly how socialist healthcare and housing
| would work better than capitalist alternatives.
| seiferteric wrote:
| You have misread what I said, it is not either capitalist
| or socialist. Policies can incorporate both, using
| subsidies, tax policies, law/regulations etc to
| incentivize desired outcomes
| halostatue wrote:
| I can't speak toward the latter, but the existence of
| high quality healthcare in pretty much every single
| western country that has better _average_ outcomes than
| the US indicates that capitalist healthcare is an utter
| failure.
|
| Yes, the US is great if you have that _one-in-a-million
| weird disease_ and /or sizeable funds to call upon in
| some way, but for the average Jane, there's nothing that
| recommends the US healthcare system as better than, say,
| Sierra Leone's. As far as I can tell, most of the world
| does better.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It might be true that they have better "average"
| outcomes. Were I some sort of mathematical abstract that
| existed only in the imaginations of statisticians this
| might actually be a winning argument.
|
| If the average can be improved simply by giving slightly
| more to the 20% who are chronically unhealthy, while
| letting things get worse for the 80% (I assume I'm in
| this bucket), then you're asking for me to be worse off
| so that a smaller number of people who are half-dead
| anyway can have a few more weeks of slightly less misery.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Good thing there's nothing stopping you from paying more
| money to get better healthcare. That doesn't eliminate
| the good done from having some baseline healthcare
| provided to everyone.
| [deleted]
| nivenkos wrote:
| Income inequality is good, and fighting markets is like trying
| to stop the tide.
|
| It's accumulated wealth that is the problem (and leads to the
| corruption of free markets and democracy).
|
| Policies should be focused on that - taxing wealth rather than
| work, and encouraging profitable investments rather than
| sitting on assets.
|
| Whereas now the so-called "left-wing" policies are awful - rent
| control is popular in Europe despite being an unfair disaster
| in Sweden. There are high taxes on income and high VAT, whilst
| inheritance, land and wealth taxes have been abolished, greatly
| hurting social mobility while benefiting established, inherited
| wealth.
|
| Same with a lot of focus on patching up symptoms - like not
| prosecuting low-value shoplifting, allowing squatting on
| "empty" properties, etc. rather than trying to improve market
| conditions, education and training and the housing market, etc.
| to ensure that everyone could get a much better salary to begin
| with.
| prottog wrote:
| > encouraging profitable investments rather than sitting on
| assets
|
| A difficult distinction to make, since profitable investments
| are also assets that one would presumably like to sit on for
| a while.
| klabb3 wrote:
| The majority of "investments", as in loans granted by
| banks, are people with fixed assets buying more fixed
| assets, such as real estate. The innovators, mom & pops,
| farmers etc who take a loan for a venture are the minority.
| Makes sense for the capital holder. Why take risks when
| cornering markets is much safer?
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Income inequality is good,
|
| Yeah I don't agree with that.
|
| > It's accumulated wealth that is the problem
|
| I do agree that wealth inequality is the bigger problem, and
| I should have used that term instead.
| r00fus wrote:
| > Income inequality is good
|
| I agreed with the rest of your comment but this is...
| strange. You might agree if it's rephrased as "extreme income
| inequality" is bad?
|
| "Harrison Bergeron" was a straw man argument posing as a
| short story - don't let the similar strawman of "no income
| inequality" overshadow the more present and real threat to
| society of growing extreme income inequality. Some twitter
| posts accurately phrase this as the "too expensive to live"
| problem for some.
| danaris wrote:
| > Income inequality is good
|
| [Citation needed]
|
| To be clear, I'm not implying that it would be good to have
| absolutely everyone make exactly the same amount. I'm saying
| that income inequality at high levels is bad, demonstrably
| so, and inevitably _leads to_ concentrations of wealth.
|
| I'm also not sure why you think that high VAT and lack of
| inheritance and wealth taxes are "left-wing" policies. Those
| are all regressive, and exactly the kinds of things that the
| right wing is pushing for here in the US. At most, I would
| think that such policies would be compromises between a left
| wing that wants progressive income taxes alongside
| inheritance and wealth taxes, and a right wing that wants VAT
| and basically nothing else.
| [deleted]
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| We need wealth limits for companies (which should be more
| like co-ops), proportional to the size of the company, with
| everything pasta threshold going back into UBI or something.
| Same for individual wealth accumulation.
|
| People could do more projects/start more companies to earn
| more, but no one should be accumulating millions by doing
| almost nothing as is the case now.
| umrcumrcu wrote:
| What wealth limit are you proposing and why wouldn't
| companies leave for another country?
| mxkopy wrote:
| > why wouldn't companies leave for another country
|
| Haven't they already?
|
| Besides, that might be a good thing, if corporate
| overreach continues to grow unchecked.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > why wouldn't companies leave for another country?
|
| Solved by limiting the profit that can be transferred out
| to foreign companies/parent companies.
|
| If a market is too big, as long as money can still be
| made even with a cap, a company won't leave - or if they
| do a competitor will spring up to take its place.
| prottog wrote:
| > no one should be accumulating millions by doing almost
| nothing as is the case now
|
| Outside of people who inherit this kind of wealth, who
| exactly is accumulating millions just sitting on their
| asses?
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| People who earn via investing for starters.
|
| And then you have people earning millions, that at least
| when compared to the numerous workers being underpaid and
| actually doing the hard work that generates profit,
| basically do so little work they may as well be sitting
| on their asses.
| umrcumrcu wrote:
| You would effectively ban investment then? No one could
| earn any money from index funds?
| mxkopy wrote:
| black/white fallacy
| umrcumrcu wrote:
| Someone has a million in index funds and earns more than
| a Walmart worker by "sitting on their ass". Are you
| proposing a ban to that?
| mxkopy wrote:
| limit != ban
|
| Capital gains taxes don't prevent an investor from making
| money.
| r00fus wrote:
| Your argument is a strawman - but yes, ideally this would
| come via additional taxation or regulation of investment
| (which we do now, but not well enough).
| r00fus wrote:
| I can't find the source, but I heard most of the newest
| crop of billionaires made all their money of
| financialized wealth (ie, not producing anything of
| value, just arbitraging something - probably mostly real-
| estate).
|
| They're not exactly doing nothing but they're not
| producing anything of real value. This is a growing
| problem in the US.
| just-ok wrote:
| a $10M portfolio with 10% annual gains (tweak the numbers
| as you'd like, it's still fairly reasonable for the
| "wealthy", I think)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > where corporations run the government
|
| Are you sure about that? In this state, at least, a politician
| cannot get elected without union endorsement.
| t-3 wrote:
| Why do you think seem to think unions are independent from
| corporations? The regulations on unions and corporate capture
| of union executives make them little more than external HR
| departments. The strike suppression and sheer number of
| sellout contracts pushed through in the past few years under
| the "most pro-union president" should make it abundantly
| clear that unions in the US are a total joke.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > should make it abundantly clear that unions in the US are
| a total joke.
|
| The teachers' union rules the states, for example. It's
| illegal for teachers to strike, but they strike anyway with
| impunity, and the elected officials they endorsed always
| cave.
|
| The unfunded pension system for public union employees is
| entirely due to their capture of the governments.
|
| https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
| analysis/articles/...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| The largest union, by a huge margin (over 1.2m larger than
| #2) is the NEA (teacher's union), and three of the top six
| unions are public unions. It would be reasonable to say at
| least those operate independently from corporations.
| fallingknife wrote:
| But they seem not to operate particularly independently
| from governments, which is kind of the problem.
| reso wrote:
| It's unfortunate that "socialism" came to mean "central
| planning" in the 20th century. It didn't mean that before the
| Bolsheviks and Marxist-Leninism out-competed (and then
| destroyed) the other socialist movements in the 1920s and 30s.
|
| By first principles socialism == worker control of the means of
| production, or the idea that the people who do labour should
| have a major stake in the decision making surrounding it.
|
| This general idea of worker control is entirely compatible with
| markets and with price-discovery as a coordination mechanism
| between firms and localities. There's even partial examples of
| this in many "capitalist" economies today. Volkswagen is
| required to have union reps on their board of directors. That's
| socialism!
| asdff wrote:
| There is socialism in the U.S. too. If you work for the
| government in some capacity you are participating in the
| socialist side of our nation in practice. IMO the US military
| especially is a model of what a fully socialist US would look
| like, if it were allowed to scale to all sectors. WWII with
| the socialist centrally planned economy was an interesting
| case study for the U.S.; it showed how this manner of
| socialism can reorient an otherwise depressed labor economy
| into the dominant world power in a few short years.
| wrycoder wrote:
| It works well, when all the other world economies have been
| devastated by war.
|
| The US government/military control in WWII was essentially
| totalitarian, with rationing and price controls.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| How is that any different than "central planning"?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The military relies on goods and services supplied by
| private companies, selected through competitions based on
| performance and cost. This is a lot more capitalist than
| socialist. Even during WWII, wartime production still went
| through private companies, not central planning. Just
| because the government is the exclusive customer of a
| product (e.g. tanks, bombers) doesn't make an economy
| socialist when these products are still being built by
| private enterprises.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| This is also true in the private sector. While large firms
| compete with each other, the internal organization of
| corporations is a lot closer to a centrally planned
| economy. You request what you need from the central
| authority and you get allocated resources on the basis of
| calculations and needs. You don't usually (in most firms
| that are halfway decent places to work) compete with other
| departments but work towards a common goal (improved
| earnings).
|
| This is/was a subject of debate amongst economists
| actually, at least the very pro free-market ones: If market
| economies are better than centrally planned ones, why
| aren't firms with internal markets crushing the other,
| internally "socialist" ones?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
|
| The orthodox answer is that market systems have higher
| transaction costs so for things you have to do very often
| (paying a salary) it's burdensome to use a market and
| easier to have long, somewhat undefined contracts.
| yourmatenate wrote:
| Whether a centrally planned economy can work or not may be an
| interesting question, but it is irrelevant to whether Socialism
| works or not (or even whether it is right or moral or not).
| Socialism does not require a centrally planned economy. It
| doesn't even require a centralised state. Socialism is about how
| workers organise their workplace (owning, managing and sharing
| the produce and profit of their labour).
|
| Having said that several avowed socialist states have attempted
| to centrally plan the economy, and their success or failure is a
| matter of highly disputed opinion - depending on what their aims,
| achievements, and outside opposition (and possible sabotage)
| were.
|
| Some Socialists say it is possible: See "Towards a New Socialism"
| (1993). Some say that Capitalist corporation like Amazon or
| Walmart are already effectively achieving this ("The People's
| Republic of Walmart" (2019)
|
| Others suggest models such as "negotiated coordination",
| "participatory economics", or "market socialism" will be able to
| accurately account for need, volume, value etc. But there are
| incredibly powerful interests that oppose any alternatives, and
| most of us are stuck playing their game by their rules.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >(owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their
| labour).
|
| The issue is that leaders and factions always emerge. Even if
| everyone could 'keep their excess labor', you get groups of
| people that position themselves to get higher value jobs or
| easier jobs.
|
| As much as people claim this is not inevitable, I've yet to see
| this happen IRL or in history.
| int_19h wrote:
| Leaders and factions are not a problem in a system that does
| not allow them to easily hoard power. Which _authoritarian_
| socialism isn 't, of course, but that's not the only kind.
|
| If you're wondering why we don't see the other kind much -
| well, the socialist movements that won back in early 20th
| century were generally the most ruthless ones, whereas the
| more democratically minded movements (e.g. Luxembourgism or
| various anarchist groups) were crushed. So you had a kind of
| artificial selection for brutality to begin with - but then
| countries controlled by those winners would also subsidize
| similar movements elsewhere, and of course they demanded
| ideological conformance in return. This is largely why stuff
| like Marxism-Leninism and Maoism is still so pervasive on the
| left.
| yourmatenate wrote:
| This is veering into a different topic, but I'd encourage you
| to read "The Dawn Of Everything" (2021) & "The Art of Not
| Being Governed" (2009) for long term examples of non-
| hierarchal societies.
|
| It may be inevitable that people may rise up to seek power
| over others, but the question is what is the best way to
| respond to this? Do we leave them to rule over others without
| restrictions, or do we limit the damage they can do? Do we
| reward this impulse of control of the few over the many to
| their general detriment, or do we treat it as a mental health
| issue (like sociopathy or hoarding)?
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >for long term examples of non-hierarchal societies.
|
| Just mention them. There is no need for citing a book that
| will take me a few months to read before I respond.
|
| I have a feeling I know about the ones you are about to
| mention. They had leaders or factions that controlled the
| resources(not classless) or they only lasted for a few
| months or years before getting conquered.
| chmod600 wrote:
| "Socialism is about how workers organise their workplace
| (owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their
| labour)."
|
| That is a nice simplification, but it makes it sound like
| something that can just emerge gracefully within a market
| economy. There are employee-owned companies, for instance, and
| if that's all that's needed for socialism to work, then it
| would spread and show us all the benefits of socialism.
|
| But the benefits are either not there or not amazing enough to
| spread. I'm left feeling like you left out the controversial
| parts, and I suspect that when you get into the details,
| there's lots of room for complicated power dynamics and
| ownership rules, perhaps much worse than non-socialist
| alternatives.
| revelio wrote:
| This is conflating cause and effect.
|
| Socialism is just a word, you can define it however you like.
| In theory it can be some sort of vague co-op of co-ops. _In
| practice_ it always leads to a centrally planned economy. There
| 's a good reason for that. The ultimate root cause that
| generates socialist ideals is not the plight of the workers or
| anything so surface-level, it's the intuition that
| intellectuals should run society. Thomas Sowell has done a lot
| of excellent work elucidating this and explaining why it
| happens.
|
| To try and summarize, socialism appeals to people who like the
| sound of the abstract ideas of intellectuals. If an
| intellectual posits a clever-sounding reorganization of society
| justified by high minded ideals, then this feels right to the
| socialist mind. The sort of people who most aggressively
| promote socialism are the sort of people who think society is
| ultimately pretty simple - after all, the way to cure all
| social ills is so simple it can be summed up in a single book
| or set of pamphlets. It can be understood and reorganized by a
| single mind. Marx was famously averse to detail about how
| communist societies would actually work in practice, as were
| all other socialists, but this didn't bother them because it
| didn't seem like you needed a lot of detail. Hence the
| "calculation debate" the article discusses, which kicked off
| only after communists gained power.
|
| If you intuit that society is simple and the best minds can
| understand and reorganize it for the greater good, then a
| planned economy is the obvious next step. Why would you _not_
| plan it? The only possible justification would be if the
| planning process was too hard, but that would imply that
| society was too complex for any one mind or even a committee of
| minds to fully understand, and if you believed that, you wouldn
| 't be a communist to begin with.
|
| So socialism or communism invariably always leads to top-down
| authoritarianism in practice. Revealed preferences > stated
| preferences.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| this needs to be at the top. the typical american conflates
| socialism with a centrally planned economy, thanks to the red
| scare of the 20th century and capitalism's grip on the public's
| imagination.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Promises of "socialism" always seem to require granting huge
| amounts of power to the government, which leads to
| inefficiency, abuse, and worse.
|
| In theory, perhaps socialism doesn't require huge amounts of
| government power; or perhaps huge amounts of government power
| doesn't always lead to horrible outcomes. But that's just a
| theory and has little evidence to back it up at the scale of
| millions of people.
|
| Bernie Sanders said "These days, the American dream is more
| apt to be realized in South America, in places such as
| Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually
| more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger.
| Who's the banana republic now?"[1] in 2011, less than a
| decade before collapse. If he can't tell the difference
| between a socialist utopia and a recipe for disaster, how is
| a layperson supposed to know?
|
| Just like a tech startup: don't call your users stupid and
| keep pushing your theoretically-good product. Listen and try
| to understand why it's not working for them.
|
| [1]
| https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/sanders-
| di...
| gilmore606 wrote:
| > where incomes are actually more equal today than they are
| in the land of Horatio Alger
|
| If incomes were equal, how could a Horatio Alger story
| possibly happen at all? Do people even think about what
| they say?
| stereolambda wrote:
| Well, wait till we try to square what Americans commonly mean
| by 'liberalism' and 'conservatism' with continental political
| theory and classic theorists connected to these words. In
| these cases America is, interestingly, removed to the left.
|
| The man who "hijacked" the word socialism would probably be
| Marx himself, as he declared his theory to be the
| _(scientific) socialism_ , as opposed to various (he said)
| "utopian" and "naive" thinkers who hadn't subscribed to views
| like historical inevitability of communism, or dictatorship
| of the proletariat. Then in the Eastern Bloc the local
| political systems were called "real socialism", i.e. the one
| put into actual functioning, on the road to future communism.
| So association of socialism with command economy is well
| established and not really one-sided ideologically, I think.
|
| The terms to use if you want to distance yourself from that
| heritage would be 'social democracy' (if you mean the ideas
| that were partly implemented in capitalist Europe) or 'worker
| democracy', if you want something more akin to what the GP
| described. These ideas are easy to sympathize with on many
| levels, and what passes for "socialism" in the US is often
| just the not-really-disputed social contract on the other
| side of the pond.
|
| Ultimately these ideologies advocate for reducing economics,
| to varying extents, to just democratic politics. Which is
| kind of boring: not necessarily meaning this as a bad thing.
| The calculation problem and related issues of organizing true
| command economy are more interesting as an abstract problems
| of engineering, organization etc., regardless of actually
| wanting this politically to happen. (Being formed in part by
| the Eastern experience, I am very much wary myself.)
| reso wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that the calculation debate is mostly a
| misnomer. The information of individuals' preferences simply does
| not exist to do calculation on, outside of the context of
| exchange. I also think that exchange itself exposes only a
| fraction of individuals' possible preferences, which are fleeting
| and unpredictable, so even market exchange probably does a poor
| job of this overall.
| johngalt wrote:
| The problem with planned economies is mismatched incentives, not
| computational capabilities.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I don't see why we even argue about it. The calculation
| discussion is a begged question, where it accepts that these
| other ideas are desirable were it not for these implementation
| details. Reality is, they are a pretext for subordinating and
| oppressing people by denying their human individuality, and once
| you have the means to do that, does it really matter if they
| starve so long as you still hold the reins? Even if you are
| defending "capitalism," you have already accepted a definition
| invented by people whose object was to subvert and destroy your
| civilization so as to rule over the ashes.
|
| If we are going to accept that this (objectively, murderous)
| ideology is topical for serious discussion, registering our
| disgust with it and the its advocates should be included in the
| discourse. If only more people understood that the way they feel
| about conservative and even reactionary beliefs, many others feel
| about totalitarianism, its polite euphemisms, and its apologists.
| than3 wrote:
| Moto, I have to point out that line of reasoning is seriously
| flawed.
|
| The assumptions you make at the beginning are just that,
| assumptions with no rational backing.
|
| Communication is necessary to have any kind of intelligent
| discussion, and taking part in a discussion doesn't accept
| anything by mere participation. Saying so doesn't make it so,
| and that argumentation structure tends towards inflexible
| dogmatic thought and polarizing psychological spirals.
|
| At its core, in order to think you must risk being offensive,
| and in order to learn something you must risk being offended.
| Anything that interferes with that will often lead you to
| irrational thought and false conclusions.
|
| Additionally, being able to discuss subjects which you do not
| agree with, while maintaining communication in a rational way
| is a very good indicator of intelligence, and anyone can do
| this if they want to.
|
| Ideological indoctrination comes in all forms, and most
| importantly most of us don't have a choice about that since its
| inherent wherever we grew up.
|
| If you can debate the merits and downsides, in an influential
| way that turns someone to your view point isn't that a win?
|
| Aside from this, I agree with your sentiment, but you would
| have a much stronger argument if you don't give others such
| easy targets to discredit you.
|
| If they can't win on rational grounds, they don't have any legs
| to stand on. Irrationality is after all not superior in any way
| to rational thought, and self-interest and necessity are the
| mother of all invention.
|
| History has not been kind to socialism, and its been directly
| responsible for more death than any other form of economy in
| recent history.
| primer42 wrote:
| Economics claims to be a science, complete with mathematical laws
| to back up claims. In reality, a huge number of economic papers
| are cherry picking data to fit their claims.
|
| Check out https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-
| or-how... to learn how the 2010 paper that governments around the
| world have used to justify austerity measures omitted data from
| Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark. Once those
| countries are included, the result completely flips.
|
| Woops guess all the major powers had an oppsie for the last
| decade.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _Economics claims to be a science_
|
| Not really. A social science maybe. Most economics schools sit
| in the liberal arts departments of universities. Plenty of
| economists have egos big enough to talk like their work is
| science, but I'd challenge you to provide a modern example of
| an economist defending economics as an actual science.
| csours wrote:
| It's interesting to me that we debate economic ideas from the
| mercantile age.
|
| Economics is a meta-game, the game has changed significantly over
| the last 200 years.
|
| But we are taught economics in a historical context, not in a
| future context, so we talk about ideas from generations ago.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| There is no serious debate anymore, USSR imploded from
| impossibility of central planning, even despite attempts to
| computerize the process. Even if every single factory manager was
| honest and knowledgeable and even if every single worker put in
| 100% effort for no extra reward, modern economy is not centrally
| computable and contains factors not knowable apriori, such is
| whether consumers will like a certain style of shoes once they
| are already made and on the store shelves. These things need to
| be discovered bit by bit through local knowledge and private
| assumption of risks, which in turn is only possible through
| incentive of private enjoyment of rewards.
|
| However, I am also tired of both sides claiming that labor
| unions, or social safety net, or some amount of government
| regulation are socialism and therefore either "see you like it,
| lets have some more" or "if government provides a health
| insurance scheme, it's Gulags right away". These things are
| governments or voluntary organizations of workers leveraging
| productivity of free market to accomplish some additional tasks
| deemed to remain unaddressed by market forces. Mind you, I am not
| a fan of lots of government, especially on central level. There
| are separate arguments about incentives for providers of aid to
| remain efficient and for recipients to be grateful and
| responsible. But let's have intelligent conversations about each
| thing rather than "Medicare is communism and border control is
| fascism".
|
| There are also objective negative externalities like "if I didn't
| buy smoke from your factory, you have no right to blow it over my
| house", where regulation actually advances voluntary free market.
| Some movements like Georgism have interesting proposals to use
| mitigation of externalities to fund whatever government is needed
| while making market more efficient.
| mempko wrote:
| And yet the largest, most successful organizations in the world
| are centrally planned. The 'markets' don't explain China
| despite what many those in the west try to believe.
| umrcumrcu wrote:
| The organizations were not centrally planned by government
| officials.
| umeshunni wrote:
| > whether consumers will like a certain style of shoes once
| they are already made and on the store shelves
|
| The key is to reduce the kind of shoes available. Everyone
| shall wear the state issued formal shoes and when they need to
| engage in the required daily sporting activity, shall wear the
| state issued canvas shoes.
| spamlettuce wrote:
| Ahhh yes reduce everyone into indistinguishable blobs of
| society
| prottog wrote:
| > movements like Georgism have interesting proposals to use
| mitigation of externalities to fund whatever government is
| needed
|
| I, too, would very much like to see this play out in practice.
| But I don't think it'll ever actually happen in real life,
| because it would likely dramatically reduce the size of
| government (which politicians are loathe to do) and
| economically hurt wealthy landowners the most.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Texas is arguably the most Georgist state, and it seems to be
| going quite well for them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > if government provides a health insurance scheme, it's Gulags
| right away
|
| The price of health care in the US rose at the same rate as
| inflation, up until 1968. Then, the price increases tilted
| upwards, and have not slowed down since. What happened in 1968?
| Government health insurance.
| ajross wrote:
| Also antibiotics, immune control drugs, transplant
| technology, hearing aids, prosthetics, computer-assisted
| tomography, MRI scans, cancer treatments that actually work,
| mental health drugs and treatments likewise, ...
|
| This is just wildly wrong. What you're looking at is the
| "advent of modern medicine". Prior to the middle of the 20th
| century, doctors were more or less limited to stitching
| people up after injury. Since then, we can treat... almost
| everything, honestly. But that's expensive, in particular in
| regimes like the US that want to provide all that stuff to
| everyone in the private markets that have the ability to pay
| for it.
|
| It's got absolutely nothing to do with how the payments are
| handled. That's just silly.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Spending on healthcare rose faster in the US than pretty
| much anywhere else, at the same time American life
| expectancy growth slowed down compared to peer nations.
|
| I dunno what went wrong but something did.
| ajross wrote:
| Spending everywhere rose much faster than inflation,
| though it's true more in the US. And life expectancy in
| the US rose _very_ rapidly through the 60 's and 70's,
| the period under discussion. It wasn't until the late
| 80's that we started to fall off the curve.[1]
|
| Your final sentence is just the same point upthread: you
| want a simple coincidence[2] to make your argument.
|
| [1] There is a ton of analysis and argument to do there
| too, but suffice it to say that "because medicare" is
| just as terrible an explanation.
|
| [2] It's not even a coincidence! Desire for government-
| guaranteed health care came about _precisely because of
| and simultaneous to_ the availability of late-life care
| that actually worked. No one wanted medicare in the 20 's
| because there wasn't anything to pay for even if you had
| it. But they damn sure wanted their walkers and hip
| replacements in the 60's.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| No, I literally do not know what went wrong or when. I'm
| not trying to make a point about government-provided
| anything. Although government-provided healthcare began
| quite a bit earlier than that, as early as the 1880s in
| Germany, but definitely in the 1940s when the UK NHS
| started.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > This is just wildly wrong.
|
| Funny how it coincides with the very year the government
| started providing health insurance. Funny how the same
| thing happened when the government started providing
| education subsidies.
|
| Funny how the inflation did not happen with medical
| procedures not covered by the government, such as Lasik eye
| surgery.
|
| A longish, but good read about this:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-
| ame...
|
| P.S. Antibiotics came out in WW2, not 1968.
| ajross wrote:
| Are you seriously arguing correlation equals causality?
| You don't think maybe you have the cause backwards?
| People desired guaranteed health care in 1968 because in
| 1968 there was expensive health care worth desiring?
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Where are you getting this information? I'm unable to verify
| it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| google "historical US healthcare costs"
| mhh__ wrote:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIMEDSL
|
| Not sure if I see it.
|
| If it's a _total_ expenditure graph, then surely it 's
| obvious that expanding coverage would cost money?
| runarberg wrote:
| Alright:
|
| First is a graph that shows healthcare costs increase
| steadily slightly above inflate rate over time from 1970
|
| https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-
| spe...
|
| Seconds are a bunch of numbers in a CSV indicating that
| there is nothing special about 1968, healthcare costs
| rose just like any other years. 1965 is in fact a pivotal
| years, costs rose more then previous years when medicare
| and medicate were rolled out (more on that later). But
| also noting that between 1960 and 1965 prices still rose
| above inflation, just not as much as in the late 1960s,
| while still much more than in the 1990s.
|
| https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-
| Systems/Sta...
|
| Third is an article explaining the trends (using same
| number as in nr. 2) in terms of historic events.
|
| > Between 1961 and 1965, health care spending increased
| by an average of 8.9% a year. That's because health
| insurance expanded. As it covered more people, the demand
| for health care services rose. By 1965, households paid
| out-of-pocket for 44% of all medical expenses. Health
| insurance paid for 24%.
|
| > From 1966 to 1973, health care spending rose by an
| average of 11.9% a year. Medicare and Medicaid covered
| more people and allowed them to use more health care
| services. Medicaid allowed senior citizens to move into
| expensive nursing home facilities.
|
| https://www.thebalancemoney.com/causes-of-rising-
| healthcare-...
|
| So when you say stuff like: _"The price of health care in
| the US rose at the same rate as inflation, up until
| 1968."_ first check if your data and your dates are
| correct, but also consider nuances. Like, what does it
| mean thate prices go up (explained in source nr. 2) Does
| it mean that individually your average out of pocket
| costs are higher, does larger funds go from government to
| the health care industry? Are hospital operations more
| expensive? etc. But also note that if nobody gets health
| care, health care costs are 0 USD, while treating more
| people will make costs go up as more people are getting
| more technologically challenging and expensive treatments
| (explained in source nr. 3).
|
| Taking costs going up when more people get healthcare to
| automatically mean that socialism is bad, that is kind of
| a simplistic take to say the least.
| danaris wrote:
| Are you sure it was 1968? And not, say, 1973? The year Nixon
| signed the HMO Act into law, and brought about a _massive_
| expansion of for-profit health insurance?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| The HMO act created in response to rising health care
| costs, Whether it helped or hurt, the problem was already
| existent.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It also coincided with lower birth rates, and a greater
| percentage of elderly population. People seem to forget that
| retirees account for the significant majority of healthcare
| costs, but a relatively small percentage of healthcare
| revenue. Increase the share of elderly, and you get higher
| effective healthcare costs.
| [deleted]
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| My general opinion on the economic situation in my country (UK)
| is that capitalism just doesn't work under parameters in which
| there's no competition.
|
| If individuals back themselves into a corner in which they "have"
| to live in place XYZ and "have" to do career XYZ and so on and so
| forth, but are relying on others to make this work (e.g. they
| don't have wealth), then they're going to get nailed because they
| are working from a really bad negotiating position.
|
| I don't see how socialism and unionizing etc fixes this because
| the prime mover has to be that people actually want to change the
| situation and put effort in to do so.
|
| There needs to be a valve. Like, if I don't get paid enough as X,
| I go and work as Y. If rent gets too high in A, I go and live in
| B.
| Animats wrote:
| The article has a rather retro take on this, which is usual. But
| not useful.
|
| If you view capitalism as a feedback control system, it's a
| system where there are many feedbacks with different lags. Such
| systems oscillate. They don't converge on some optimal point.
| That's well known.
|
| US capitalism has so many monopolies and oligopolies that it
| doesn't act much like a free market any more. Three big banks,
| two big drugstore chains, three cellular providers... None of
| those look like a competitive market. The European Union did a
| study that concluded that price competition doesn't appear until
| there are at least four players of roughly comparable size. If
| you want a free market, you have to keep the players from
| becoming too big.
|
| On the other hand, central planning within large companies is
| stronger than ever. WalMart and Amazon are very centrally
| controlled. This works much better than Gosplan ever did. The
| data is better and the lag is less. Gosplan had a monthly
| reporting cycle and an annual plan cycle. WalMart had a daily
| reporting cycle and a weekly plan cycle, and that was years ago.
|
| China uses an opposite extreme - five-year plans. At one time
| they were mostly political statements. That hasn't been true in
| years. The 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020) was pretty much
| accomplished.[1] The 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) is coming
| along reasonably well. Specific goals include 5G deployment to
| 56% of the population, and conversion to IPv6. Yes, IPv6 made it
| to the top level national strategy document. How those get turned
| into lower level tasks I don't know.
|
| [1]
| https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/The%2013th...
|
| [2] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/t0284_14th_Fi...
| revelio wrote:
| Arguably the big trend in recent decades has been the non
| centrally planned corporation. Google and Facebook are the
| poster boys for this approach in which managers see themselves
| primarily as enablers for the workers, in which those workers
| have a great deal of individual autonomy and there's relatively
| little central planning except in "wartime". Many other
| companies have adopted this style to a lesser degree.
|
| You can argue it has downsides, Google's brand dilution for
| example, but these are very rich and successful companies by
| any metric.
|
| The core problem with central planning is handling change. If
| the requirements placed on an institution never change, then
| central planning eventually takes over because the plan is so
| stable that it _can_ be managed centrally, and that may even
| have economies of scale. Businesses like Walmart are basically
| giant factories. Supermarkets are not a business that
| experiences great or rapid change. Tech firms in contrast
| experience and create change at a much faster rate, so central
| planning is more harmful there.
|
| Economies as a whole are in near constant change. That's why
| centrally planned economies lose. They're always optimizing for
| yesterday's goals, like how many tonnes of steel can be
| produced per day, but can't react to changes like maybe now
| computers matter more than steel.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > Three big banks, two big drugstore chains, three cellular
| providers
|
| Costs associated with banking, drugstore purchases, and cell
| service make up an tiny proportion of total spending. Compare
| that to housing, education, and healthcare, which are the main
| drivers of inflation despite having many more than four players
| of comparable size.
|
| People say healthcare and housing is expensive because you need
| it to live. You need food to live too, but food is so cheap as
| to be basically free in the US. (Food as in rice and beans, not
| Uber Eats.)
|
| I'm not saying central planning is bad necessarily, but can it
| be a coincidence that healthcare, housing, and education are so
| expensive and also hugely "centrally planned"?
|
| The government determines how many apartments get to be in your
| city (and they usually decide on a laughably small number).
|
| The government decides who gets to practice medicine (and they
| make sure that the number is not very high [0]). They even
| decide to not let doctors in countries like India do radiology
| work in the US, just to boost American radiologist's pay.
|
| As for education, most people go to public colleges where the
| government literally decides the prices! Not only that, but
| they generously offer "need-based scholarships" to people,
| after determining their willingness to pay by getting their
| family income.
|
| So maybe central planning is the move, but it would be more
| compelling if the biggest expenses of American life didn't all
| seem to be caused by at-best incompetent central planning.
|
| [0]: https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/04/13/were-short-on-
| healt...
| csb6 wrote:
| > can it be a coincidence that healthcare, housing, and
| education are so expensive and also hugely "centrally
| planned"?
|
| How are you defining central planning? It seems like you mean
| "extensive government intervention and involvement", which I
| don't think is an accurate definition.
|
| Using that definition, then food is also a "centrally
| planned" industry, since governments heavily subsidize dairy
| producers and farmers, leading to cheaper food products.
| Governments also are deeply involved in regulating and
| intervening in the banking and telecommunications industries,
| which you seem to imply are not "centrally planned" and so
| are more affordable.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| I feel like socialism has become _really_ popular with the
| younger generation in the last 10 years, to the point where it 's
| now very common to just see capitalism blamed for all sorts of
| things for which it likely has little to do with.
|
| I don't see socialism ever really being feasible or taking off,
| because capitalism does have so many advantages, and I feel like
| the pure socialism many advocate for is at odds with human
| nature.
|
| The goal I think should be to try to negate the disadvantages as
| much as possible through regulation, and this is what places like
| the Nordic countries, Australia and NZ seem to be doing pretty
| successfully - not there isn't still mass room for improvement.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| The thing is that what people call "socialism" in the US is
| just what most people in Europe would call vaguely center-left
| "social democracy".
|
| There's so many places in the US where the private markets are
| mis-organized and mis-regulated (healthcare, drugs,
| transportation and housing being the most obvious four) that's
| it's pretty obvious to find why younger folks are tending left.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Don't forget education -- a generation of students have
| graduated with crushing debt. Is it not hard to imagine why
| they often support European-style center-left social
| democracy.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Certainly disturbing given that socialism is the most murderous
| ideology of the past century.
| malermeister wrote:
| [flagged]
| baggy_trough wrote:
| You must be joking.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Actually quite common thing to say among tankies. Their
| only defence to all the horrible things communists did is
| "Nazi was against communism". Yes they did. Doesn't mean
| communism is any less horrible.
| epakai wrote:
| What part of socialist ideology stipulates the horrible
| things?
|
| It was somewhat inherent in Nazi ideology that there was
| a superior group and inferior groups. Even this would
| have resulted in a atrocity, but moreso was their will to
| export their ideology by empire building.
|
| I don't see the same sort of failures stemming from
| socialism. Expansionism certainly leads to strife, but
| the ideology itself doesn't enforce an us and them.
| Except insofar as there are adherents and opponents of
| the ideology itself.
| kneebonian wrote:
| See holomdor, the great leap forward, the five year plan,
| the gulags, the Uighyr genocide, the Khmer Rogue.
| ejb999 wrote:
| [flagged]
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| I think that the communists might want a word with you: https
| ://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communis...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Socialists are worrying but a noisy minority who never shut up
| pretending to be far bigger than they are within their bubbles.
| You can tell this by their complete lack of electoral success.
| Instead they operate based entirely upon sophistry of some sort
| or another trying to manufacture a mandate when the numbers
| just aren't there. It is essentially pure copium mistaken for a
| tactic. Combine that with the addiction to being the resulting
| reoccurring self-sabotage like purity spirals and fractal
| ideological divisions for the sake of their own sense of
| identity and I don't see them going anywhere.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to what people mean by
| 'socialism'. Some people would call the regulation you mention
| 'socialist' (this isn't really correct, but it has become a
| common usage, so...)
|
| I don't think that many people are actually arguing for
| abandoning market economies (some are, but it's a minority
| view); the major disagreement is the amount of regulation and
| social transfer that should be applied to a market economy.
| kneebonian wrote:
| My sister recently posted a series of problems she has with
| "capitalism" on Instagram. They basically all boiled down to "I
| don't want to have to work" I didn't have the heart to point
| out that "He who does not work shall not eat." Was said by Karl
| Marx. I feel that part of the youths obsession with socialism
| and blaming capitalism is that they have never experienced
| scarcity to any real degree and because of that do not
| understand that there are limited resources, and their issue is
| fundamentally with that concept that they want to blame on
| capitalism.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I didn't have the heart to point out that "He who does not
| work shall not eat." Was said by Karl Marx.
|
| The Communist writer known for adopting that passage of II
| Thessalonians as "the first principle of socialism" is Lenin
| (in _The State and Revolution_ [1917]), not Marx.
|
| Non-Leninist Marxists tend to not have a very high opinion of
| Lenin, in general.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Are you saying your sister is the straw man in this debate?
| antisthenes wrote:
| > I feel that part of the youths obsession with socialism and
| blaming capitalism is that they have never experienced
| scarcity to any real degree and because of that do not
| understand that there are limited resources, and their issue
| is fundamentally with that concept that they want to blame on
| capitalism.
|
| A very large portion of Gen Z and some Millennials as well
| legitimately believe we live in a post-scarcity society where
| work is optional. I'm not sure if this is a result of an
| extremely privileged upbringing or an education system
| failure, but they hold these beliefs pretty firmly.
|
| Not sure they can actually empirically justify them to any
| degree but there it is.
| danaris wrote:
| We do not yet live in a society where we can get by with no
| one working.
|
| We _do_ live in a society where we could absolutely house,
| feed, and clothe every person in the Western world without
| requiring them to pay for these things, and still be hugely
| net-positive on productivity.
|
| Fortunately, we now have _ample_ evidence that if you
| provide for people 's needs, unless there is some very
| pressing reason not to (eg, sick, disabled, caring for
| children full-time, massively burnt out by our current
| stressful work environment), _people still want to work_.
| So we should absolutely be doing the above. It would
| benefit the whole society, and only hurt those who will no
| longer be able to control others by holding the threat of
| death by starvation and exposure over them.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Marx kind of borrowed that from the Bible.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Yup. Marx borrowed a lot. Very little of Marx's ideas on
| their own are original. Really what he did was stitch
| together work from multiple sources. Lots of his
| contradictions of capitalism come from Adam Smith in some
| form. Marx is also, if I remember correctly, influence by
| early christian communes. As I said, most of his ideas
| taken individually are not original to him, it is only when
| it is all combined, it is original.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Lots of people borrowed that from the Bible, but AFAICT
| Marx isn't one of them (Lenin is, but even as much as
| Leninists like to pretend Leninism is Marxism, even they
| don't pretend Marx and Lenin are literally the same
| person.)
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Correct, I was responding to OP but it was Lenin.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Socialism appeals to youth because it emphasizes fairness which
| is something we stress as important to young people. The
| problem is that it doesn't work at scale so they have to
| realize that as they grow. People who pick up on it too soon
| are selfish and greedy. People who pick up on it too late are
| just not very bright. Some people appear to be the latter, but
| just know that the longer they can keep others from picking up
| on it the more they can fleece them.
| qsort wrote:
| It isn't any more or any less popular than it has always been.
| The same goes for stuff like racists, paleo-conservatives,
| people who read Ayn Rand, overt nazis and other amusing
| creatures.
|
| Our media diet has changed substantially, and now any random
| idiot with a wildly improbable theory can share it with the
| world with no effort.
|
| Populist stuff that seems to make sense on the surface always
| has the upper hand in an unmoderated debate.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| If you break the pricing system you break the communication that
| makes possible to efficiently A) get resources allocated B) do it
| the least unfair way as humanly possible.
|
| Debating for a centralized economy is as useful as debating that
| a centralized internet will provide defense of freedom of
| expression.
|
| Only wannabe totalitarians would do that.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > An "administrative economy" in which "money is no longer a
| driving force," designed to "promote central control of all
| efforts and materials...in the interests of the people," was on
| the horizon. In this socialized economy, central planners would
| engage in "calculation in kind," or the practice of directly
| judging the value of resources or the desirability of large-scale
| planning without using any standard unit of accounting.
|
| This sounds interesting, but everything I've ever read suggested
| that this is a bleak landscape that no sane person should want to
| live in. If I decide I want to dabble in oil painting, I need
| only stop by Michael's or Hobby Lobby on my way home from work
| and buy those.
|
| If I lived in the socialist paradise, assuming that any were
| manufactured at all, would I be put on a 3 yr waiting list, only
| to get three tubes of ugly colors, or would I instead find out
| that it is rationed out only to those who have (somehow)
| demonstrated talent in the past?
|
| When filmmakers in the Soviet Union were unable to get the
| resources they needed, it wasn't always just that the communists
| wanted to carefully control something they saw as propaganda.
| Sometimes those resources just weren't manufactured. Or allocated
| sanely.
|
| The examples of "total warfare mobilization proves that it is
| possible" are bizarre, given how awful conditions were for
| soldiers and civilians alike at those times. Planned economies
| only seem capable of making just barely enough of the most
| essential necessities for the groups considered the most
| important to those in charge.
|
| It is difficult to believe that such a system will even perform
| well enough to make sure one person or another doesn't go without
| such simple necessities as water, energy, food, and cloth. Let
| alone the sort of minor luxuries we're all accustomed to.
|
| I don't like my odds that I'll get any of the things I want under
| such a government. No thanks.
| ciupicri wrote:
| > You don't have permission to access /roundtable/socialist-
| calculation-debate on this server.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > the idea that economic exchange constitutes a system that
| autonomously can achieve equilibrium without government
| intervention."
|
| Please ignore the man enforcing property rights and contract law
| with a gun behind the curtain. He doesn't count, unless he tries
| to tax someone. Then he's the bad guy all of a sudden.
| [deleted]
| chmod600 wrote:
| On HN, we should think about socialism as a startup. Prove it
| with a small number of loyal customers, listen and learn from
| them, and then show how it scales to a lot of customers.
|
| It seems to be stuck at the "scale it up" stage. Attempts to
| scale it up are generally non-voluntary, and have bad outcomes.
| Even keeping a small group of loyal customers is challenging.
| Jonnston wrote:
| There's an excellent fictionalized book about this topic called
| Red Plenty. I just read it recently and found it thoroughly
| enjoyable. It's a very humanizing account of a potentially dull
| and abstract idea.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| I second the recommendation. It's a great book, and draws much
| more closely on historical fact than I was aware of when first
| reading it.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The problem with a centrally planned economy is less one of
| computational feasibility than that the input data it needs is
| unavailable. It's weird that no one seems to be mentioning the
| base case of prices or production levels: consumer preferences.
| Consumers somewhat famously lie (to themselves and others) about
| what they want. The truth is revealed in what tradeoffs they
| make, whether in terms of money, time, mental effort, specific
| resources, etc. What we're willing to sacrifice.
|
| So the minimum you need for a money-free central economy is to
| allow/force consumers to make _tradeoffs in-kind_ between the
| products they want (far enough ahead of time for production
| pipelines to adjust!), in terms of the entire pipeline of
| resources each involves. This is, among other things, likely to
| be a UX disaster. Having a single unit, whether you call it money
| or not, is so much easier.
|
| Which is maybe just a long way of saying: a central economy is
| still going to invent money, as a communication aid if nothing
| else.
| chmod600 wrote:
| You assume that preferences are economically important. I'm not
| saying I disagree, but in theory you could have a central
| planning department that effectively says "we have calculated
| what you need for maximum productivity; here you go, like it or
| not".
|
| That, of course, doesn't take advantage of the sensory and
| compute power of individual humans. You might not need to ship
| a new hammer from the nearest warehouse if a nearby hunk of
| metal will suffice. Or if a machine is broken, you might not
| need a technician to drive from the nearest city if your niece
| happens to know how to fix it.
|
| Also, for central planning to work, it becomes obvious quickly
| that people need to do exactly what they're told. Ignoring the
| preferences of people and demanding they do as they are told
| looks a lot like slavery. Perhaps a comfortable and efficient
| slavery, but slavery none the less.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This approach, which is an apparent centerpiece of the debate,
| has a major flaw:
|
| > "Assuming that individuals rationally assessed the marginal
| utility (or simply the benefit gained) of their decisions, the
| economy could be modeled as a system of functional equations.
| Using mathematical formulas, these equations could be solved to
| address imbalances in supply and demand and steer the economy
| toward equilibrium. In a way, neoclassical ideas suffused
| socialist rationales for economic planning with a kind of
| mathematical and scientific authority."
|
| Look around. Are individuals rational in their decision making?
| Are the crypto boom and bust cycles rational? Was the housing
| market rational? Was the dot-com boom rational? Take away that
| and there's no longer any foundation for the 'mathematical and
| scientific authority' - and then, neoclassical economics becomes
| as nonsensical as Lysenko's 'blank slate' model of plant breeding
| in the Soviet Union was.
|
| In practice socialist ideas and capitalist ideas have value in
| different contexts. A good balance can be found in John Kenneth
| Galbraith's work, such as:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Capitalism
|
| There are a couple of basic concepts, such as the fact that
| markets fail miserably to provide optimal outcomes when there is
| no real competition ('natural monopoly' situations such as roads,
| water supplies, electricity grids, fiber optic trunks, etc.), and
| that business interests as well as labor unions conspire to
| control prices and wages. If the business interests or the labor
| unions get the upper hand, you tend towards authoritarian control
| of the facist or communist form, respectively. The optimal
| solution is thus a balance of power between competing interests.
|
| Over four decades of neoliberal economic policy in the USA has
| upset that balance and made old-school state socialism much more
| popular with the general public than it was previously, as
| Galbraith warned about:
|
| > "...private decisions could and presumably would lead to the
| unhampered exploitation of the public, or of workers, farmers and
| others who are intrinsically weak as individuals. Such decisions
| would be a proper object of state interference or would soon so
| become."
| xvedejas wrote:
| The issue isn't even how rational people are. Even if our lack
| of rationality was no problem, it would still be impossible to
| get someone to reveal their true preferences without a system
| where they have to sacrifice value to obtain something. This
| idea that calculation is the problem with the economy is
| strange to me, as if there's some algorithm we know to maximize
| good, that just needs some inputs that people will provide by
| survey or something, and the only issue is that we can't scale
| up our computers enough to run the algorithm. What is this
| algorithm? The truth is that preferences are only revealed when
| individuals are forced to make difficult and uncomfortable
| decisions about what's important to them. People simply don't
| prioritize their needs until they have to. And the nature of
| humanity is that we are also prone to lying if overstating our
| preferences has a selfish benefit. Unless socialists seriously
| consider this, any algorithm is likely garbage-in, garbage-out.
| transfire wrote:
| Ironically over regulation is causing much of the inequality, not
| the other way around.
| runarberg wrote:
| The real irony here is the fact that the author of this article
| comes from the infamous Chicago school, which as the birthplace
| of the neo-liberal ideology which would posit precisely this
| kind of statement, yet the author does not seem to agree with
| you here, instead seems to think this is still an open
| question.
|
| I however disagree, I think socialism has more than proven its
| merit, particularly if you--as the author of this article does
| --look at the history of the USA, beginning with the Gilded Age
| where laissez-faire capitalism caused an unprecedented
| inequality and poor labor conditions, only stopped by the great
| depression and the new deal which followed with its regulations
| as well as social programs. Now in the wake of Reaganomics
| (championed by a previous generation of the Chicago school) we
| seem to be flirting with a similar level of laissez-faire
| capitalism, deregulations and gutting of the social programs,
| we seem to be heading straight back to the inequality of the
| Gilded Age.
| autokad wrote:
| the "Gilded Age" was termed after the fact by the same
| liberal socialists. bringing inequality isn't a bad thing.
| inequality emerges by necessity from a distribution where
| people have choice, but that's too long to discus here. what
| really maters is did the quality of life of everyone go up.
| For example: The cost of oil was brought down by over 80%,
| enabling people for the first time to read at night. You are
| in a comfortable position to benefit from everything that
| 'the gilded age' brought, but don't have to face the down
| sides of not having it by being here.
| runarberg wrote:
| It can be argued that the benefits of lower oil prices were
| insignificant next to the benefits of electricity
| infrastructure which the New Deal brought to the masses. To
| afford that oil, and to afford that lamp, you still had to
| labor day and night, even if you were only 12 years old, in
| such poor working conditions that dying at your job was a
| serious risk. To enjoy the light from the electricity of
| the many dams the work project of the New Deal brought, you
| just had to pay your taxes.
|
| The Laissez-faire capitalism of the gilded age came
| crashing down in a spectacular depressions, the benefits,
| which only some could afford, were short lived when
| suddenly there weren't any jobs. The New Deal gave people
| back their jobs so we could again afford the luxuries of
| past inventions.
|
| You see. I too can spin a narrative where socialism brings
| all the good stuff and capitalism none.
| autokad wrote:
| The new deal was a huge failure. only the outbreak of WW2
| ended the great depression, to which socialist policies
| were only prolonging the pain of the great depression.
| Bad working conditions is not == capitalism. Soviet
| working conditions were not the workers paradise. Working
| conditions in China is still not the workers paradise.
| Working conditions in North Korea are not the workers
| paradise. Need me to go on? I can do this all day.
|
| and by the way, the oil for reading at night was only one
| of many many great benefits. Ford bought cars to the
| working class for example.
| sharemywin wrote:
| here's an article that says we already passed it.
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/super-richs-wealth-concentration-
| surp...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Is this inherent to the concept of regulation or is it a
| consequence of removing many of the guardrails that prevent
| wealthy interests from influencing legislation?
| aww_dang wrote:
| Regulatory authority is a central point of failure.
| Regulators are only human and as such are fallible and
| corruptible by definition. There are no effective guard rails
| which can change this. You cannot regulate away human nature.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Inequality has been a feature of human civilization since long
| before the modern regulatory state.
| postpawl wrote:
| What regulation specifically? From my own experience, Texas
| power grid deregulation definitely hasn't made my electric bill
| go down.
| davidw wrote:
| I'm not a libertarian, and believe pretty strongly that while
| it's probably not a good idea to have a "planned economy",
| you can and should redistribute some from the "winners" to
| those who the market leaves behind.
|
| That said, zoning regulations in particular are a net
| negative, were mostly born out of racism in the US, and their
| purported objectives can be achieved better through other
| mechanisms - actually regulating externalities like noise and
| smell.
|
| https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > you can and should redistribute some from the "winners"
| to those who the market leaves behind.
|
| Personally I'm in favor of wealth and income limits, with
| anything past a threshold being redistributed or to fund
| UBI.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| When you pass new regulation (requirements), you generate new
| costs associated with providing $service_or_product. When
| costs go up, they are passed on to consumers. Now that your
| $service_or_product is regulated by 17 regulations that cost
| an average of $x each, your product now costs $base_price +
| ($x * 17) dollars. People with low income are less likely to
| be able to afford it.
| vicktour wrote:
| The best part about this is removing regulations wont
| change any prices. They will just keep the profits and
| continue to raise prices.
|
| 1) Company Complains about regulations 2) Gov Removes
| Regulations 3) Companies do dumb stuff 4) Gov Applies
| Regulations 5) People forget about dumb stuff 6) Return to
| step 1.
|
| Case In Point: SVB
| sharemywin wrote:
| Not too mention that companies consolidate to cartels(I'm
| looking at you industry trade groups) which have
| significant pricing power so the cost usually don't end
| up with the consumer.
| sharemywin wrote:
| But a lot of times those regulations are enforcing things
| like health and safety or other types of cost shifting.
| where either the there is large differential in the
| expertise on one side of a transaction or a third party is
| the one paying the costs of the transaction.
|
| EPA - polluting for instance.
|
| In 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland
| just a few miles north of Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
|
| When rivers start catching of fire the companies doing the
| polluting aren't really going to stop doing it and since
| most consumers live pay check to check they will generally
| chose the cheapest option available. even if they end up
| paying 10X the cost down the line.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is extremely context sensitive. Antitrust regulation
| doesn't require a "compliance" department unless you're
| already huge and doing things that might be considered
| anti-competitive. Likewise financial regulations like
| Glass-Steagal[1] prevent certain types of organizations (in
| this case hybrid commercial-investment banks) from existing
| - I don't see how this could result in compliance costs.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-
| Steagall_legislation
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Is there a better way to implement regulation then? Perhaps
| i'm unaware of what regulation means in this context, but a
| lot _(not all!)_ of regulation serves a purpose, or did
| originally. Ie safety regulation for requiring how your
| home wiring is done; that builders can 't skimp and use
| thin wiring or etc. Food safety regulation for how long
| food is allowed out of cooling, temperature requirements
| for cooling, etc.
|
| These obviously serve a goal, but if you're saying that
| they also cause inequality, what is the better solution? Do
| we remove all safety rails? Or are some seen as essential,
| so the debate isn't pro or anti regulation but merely which
| ones are worth the cost? etc
| autokad wrote:
| What exactly does your experience include? because Texas is
| ranked 9/50 in terms of most affordable electricity at
| 11.36c/kw. Admittedly cost of electricity is not the
| strongest of arguments because there is a lot that goes into
| the cost - such as weather and natural resources available.
| But its a really week argument to use Texas electricity costs
| when they are among the most affordable in the nation.
|
| edit: source = electricchoice.com
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-01 23:02 UTC)