Thread: A Key Question About Socialism

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

If the profit incentive is removed from an economy, what can effectively take its place?

This is a moot question at best, I think. The profit incentive is buried very deeply into the human psyche, and pretty much the entire world has fully adapted that incentive into their social systems. I think we would need to transcend into a different kind of being before questions like "what's in it for me?" or "how much more than I put in can I get out of this product?" fade from our collective instinct... it's who we are -- even Bernie Sanders. In other words, greed is foundational to the human condition, and not something that can be removed from all our minds with a couple of laws or clever systems (as Voldmer noted above).

That said, if your question is based on concern that the democrats are going to convert the U.S. economy to a full-on socialist system should they gain power, don't worry about it; the power of capitalism will not be magically erased, especially when most congressional members -- Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- have not abandoned those two questions above, among others. They might manage to tax the rich again, or even bring about universal health care, but they just don't have the will, the energy, and especially the support of their own constituents to bring on a Soviet-era socialist system (which failed miserably, BTW, and partially because their people got no valid answer to "what's in it for me?") Also, they've controlled Congress and the White House many times in the past, and removing profit, much less the incentive to gain it, from the equation has never been realistically considered, much less implemented. And no one, no one, will ever manage to impoverish Jeff Bezos, or erase the American Dream Fantasy that "That could be me." The Trump party might scare people into voting for them by calling all Democrats socialists --and that somehow they have the magical power to get 300 million people to change their mind about making money -- but this, to me, is just another Big Lie.

tl;dr: Nothing needs to replace the profit incentive (capitalism), because it is too deeply buried in the roots of almost all of human society, and, if that's where you were going, the Dems will never/would never try to erase the profit incentive from our systems and our minds, because they really don't want to, and they just don't have the power anyway. The only thing that can take the profit incentive's place is a moment of transcendence shared by all humanity that elevates us above it, but that ain't happening anytime soon, I think.

Originally Posted by Voldmer

In theory people deliver what they can, and they get what they need.

In reality the dictator (or more precisely the bureaucracy established by the ruler/s) dictates to the producers how much to produce of the different types of goods and service, and hands out the chosen amount of money to the consumers. Then the consumers choose what to buy for their money, subject to the availability of goods and services.

This system would work if the ruler/s knew everything that the population knows. But of course they don't, and therefore the system fails in two ways: some goods and services will be in short supply, and there will be long waiting lines to get them (with many going home empty-handed), and some goods and services will be over-abundant, and there will be massive waste as a consequence. We know from the many socialist experiments in Eastern Europe how things work out in the long run.

EDIT: I should add this point: There have been formal attempts at establishing mathematical formulae to calculate the specific amounts to be produced, and the specifik prices to be charged for them. But it was shown already back in the 1920's that this cannot be done correctly. In reality the economies in Eastern Europe looked to the western world to know roughly what to charge for different things and services, and how many of them to produce.

Do you think lack of ambition is a factor in the historic failure of such systems?

Originally Posted by Sageous

This is a moot question at best, I think. The profit incentive is buried very deeply into the human psyche, and pretty much the entire world has fully adapted that incentive into their social systems. I think we would need to transcend into a different kind of being before questions like "what's in it for me?" or "how much more than I put in can I get out of this product?" fade from our collective instinct... it's who we are -- even Bernie Sanders. In other words, greed is foundational to the human condition, and not something that can be removed from all our minds with a couple of laws or clever systems (as Voldmer noted above).

That said, if your question is based on concern that the democrats are going to convert the U.S. economy to a full-on socialist system should they gain power, don't worry about it; the power of capitalism will not be magically erased, especially when most congressional members -- Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- have not abandoned those two questions above, among others. They might manage to tax the rich again, or even bring about universal health care, but they just don't have the will, the energy, and especially the support of their own constituents to bring on a Soviet-era socialist system (which failed miserably, BTW, and partially because their people got no valid answer to "what's in it for me?") Also, they've controlled Congress and the White House many times in the past, and removing profit, much less the incentive to gain it, from the equation has never been realistically considered, much less implemented. And no one, no one, will ever manage to impoverish Jeff Bezos, or erase the American Dream Fantasy that "That could be me." The Trump party might scare people into voting for them by calling all Democrats socialists --and that somehow they have the magical power to get 300 million people to change their mind about making money -- but this, to me, is just another Big Lie.

tl;dr: Nothing needs to replace the profit incentive (capitalism), because it is too deeply buried in the roots of almost all of human society, and, if that's where you were going, the Dems will never/would never try to erase the profit incentive from our systems and our minds, because they really don't want to, and they just don't have the power anyway. The only thing that can take the profit incentive's place is a moment of transcendence shared by all humanity that elevates us above it, but that ain't happening anytime soon, I think.

I agree with a lot of that. However, I do believe that the Democrat leadership would love to bring about full socialism. It is a gateway to totalitarian government, and extreme government power is their obsession. Also, even getting close to full socialism would give the government so much power over the people that it would be able to easily go the rest of the way. Politicians are going to be as powerful as the people let them be until the government gets so powerful that the people cannot stop it.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

Do you think lack of ambition is a factor in the historic failure of such systems

The vast majority of the population have no hope of satisfy high-flying ambitions, so they will not have any. And this will play a part - mostly because such a system simply fails to utilize the inherent abilitites in the people to any substantial degree.

But whereas this wasting of human ressources will speed up the deterioration of the economy, the fundamentally destructive aspect of socialism is that it is fundamentally impossible to uphold a complex economy without matching demand and supply across the whole gamut of goods and services, and this necessitates a (at least somewhat) free market, which is strictly against socialist principles. In the absence of knowledge of free market prices, there is no meaningful way to know how much to produce of anything, and therefore an economy based on true socialist principles must necessarily implode.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

... I do believe that the Democrat leadership would love to bring about full socialism. It is a gateway to totalitarian government, and extreme government power is their obsession. Also, even getting close to full socialism would give the government so much power over the people that it would be able to easily go the rest of the way. Politicians are going to be as powerful as the people let them be until the government gets so powerful that the people cannot stop it.

So, I trashed today's dream session by thinking about this answer throughout, and my thoughtful response that would explain that Americans are much different than, say, Russians or Chinese, because the Russians and Chinese people have welcomed totalitarian rule for centuries (millennia for the Chinese), while the U.S. population represents 4 centuries of people escaping that stuff, searching for freedom. So there is no way they would allow 100% socialism to happen here... and then I remembered something my wife often tells me, which amounts to "Take off the F---ing rose-colored glasses, will you?" at fairly high volume, and decided with that that, just as another term of a President Trump might bring in a democracy-ending authoritarian government that I would have never imagined Americans allowing, if the far left comes up with a system of change that quietly moves us toward socialism and a totalitarian state, our citizens might surprise me there as well.

I was just going to give your post a "like" and call it a day, but I thought it might be nice to awkwardly point out that sometimes these conversations do come to some sort of agreement...sometimes!