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.