Loudmouth –

Like every economic philosophy, socialism is a collection of features that we can pick and choose. Stop treating it as a package deal!

Hi Aidan,

Not a package deal ? Then how would you propose applying it piece-meal ?

Yes, it was designed as a package, since it's part of a political movement to overthrow one economic system - one package - and replace it totally with another. i.e. pretty much total war. Not much room for 'piecemeal', it's all or nothing.

And we now know, over the bodies of how many millions, that it amounted to nothing.

Don't waste your life worrying over it, Aidan. Move on.

Joe

The question of net benefit is indeed very complex.

Very few would argue against the gross benefit of capitalist competition.

But how can we quantify the damages of competition against that benefit?

Earlier I mentioned a list of undesirable side-effects: stress, anxiety, hatred, advertising, environmental-degradation, short-lived products and lack of stability requiring constant time-wasting adaptation.

In addition, competition takes time and mental resources from everyone. Understandably, when everyone strives for better and more ingenious solutions, rather than just a few bureaucrats, then the chances of improving goods and services is higher - no wonder there, where everyone contributes their unpaid overtime. Also, everyone who wants to maintain their life-savings safe from inflation and other mishaps, needs to become a professor of economics, learning about markets and investments, such skills that were not needed otherwise. All this takes away people's time which could otherwise be spent on more important pursuits.

On the other hand, there is the unacceptable cost of government telling us what we may or may not do and have. In a socialist regime, you can for example save the time wasted in supermarkets choosing the best-priced toilet-paper and looking for "specials", because there is only one type! If your needs are standard, then you will be happier, but if you have special needs (say due to some skin condition), then you will be in painful trouble.

It seems to me however, that the socialist impositions on ordinary people are worse when it comes to retail products than when applied to infrastructure. Even then, we cannot get a different electricity-voltage, the NBN was threatening (before the change in government) to take away our copper phone-lines and we cannot get unfluorinated water.

Can we quantify any of these costs?

The only ethical solution I see, is to have voluntary public institutions instead of a government. This way, everyone can decide for themselves which is personally worse for them - the shortages of central planning or the exhausting and sickening aggressiveness of competition.

JKJ –

I've identified many of your logical errors, but so far I don't seem to be able to explain them to you in a way that's simple enough for you to understand. Indeed you seem to be trying hard not to understand.

What exactly is your definition of "rationally economise"?

"The public sector can’t do what the private sector does because it can’t identify how to combine the factors of production using profit and loss based on private ownership. "
Profit and loss are based on trade, not ownership.

Public ownership is not synonymous with central planning, and I think that fact invalidates a lot of your arguments.

'“Unfortunately there's no one answer”'
"Therefore we have no way of knowing that full socialism might not be a wonderful success – we just have to keep on trying it? "
I was about to type 'there's no way that conclusion can be logically derived from my statement' when I realised that (depending on your definition of "full socialism") there may be. If the results of thousands of rational decisions (and thousands more public opinion decisions) can be thought of as "full socialism" then it's theoretically possible. Though of course it's so unlikely that it's not really worth considering.

“'taxation'…. 'benefits all'
So why not make it 100%?"
Because the benefits are not proportionate to the tax rate. A 100% tax rate is obviously a bad thing because it would destroy all financial incentive. And with incentive in such short supply, it would become the limiting factor.

You've failed to comprehend that lack of incentive is not the only limiting factor. Indeed in a modern economy, it's not even the main limiting factor. Lack of opportunity holds us back more, and it is well worth sacrificing a little incentive to gain a lot of opportunity.

Loudmouth –
It may have escaped your attention, but no political movement has a monopoly on socialism. And even Karl Marx thought the process would be one of evolution not revolution.

Applying it piecemeal is easy: pick the good bits and apply them one at a time. Chuck the bad bits.

Whatever your view is on redistribution of wealth, there's no reason why it should correspond to any particular position on markets, nor be more or less authoritarian.

This idea is not new. Gough Whitlam was far more libertarian than his Liberal and National predecessors, and arguable also more pro market (as he cut tariffs by 25%).

If you'd bothered to read my previous posts on this thread instead of instinctively directing a mindless anti left rant at me, you'd have seen I STARTED by condemning the actions of the few who had unfairly discredited the Left in the eyes of many.
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Yuyutsu, most of the problems arise not from competition itself by from people being in a situation where they can't afford to lose. People may work harder when they can't afford to lose, but they work smarter when they can. One of the main drivers of innovation in Silicon Valley was that if a business fails, it's no big deal – it's easy enough to get well paid work elsewhere in the area.

Let’s start from common ground:
• full socialism is not desirable
• partial socialism, government economic intervention in any given case, is not necessarily more desirable
• therefore it needs justification
• the justification for a particular economic intervention cannot depend on merely assuming it’s better, more efficient, or more sustainable, because that’s what’s in issue
• we’re looking for a rational, i.e. logically valid, justification
• (spare us your ad hominem)

Where we differ is whether
• rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism, and therefore
• full socialism is not just undesirable in practice but impossible even in theory
• the same inherent defects that make full socialism impossible, inhere in partial socialism, which is similarly incapable of rational economic calculation for the same reasons except in so far as it relies on market operations that it displaces and corrupts
• partial socialism therefore cannot and does not ever represent greater economic efficiency compared to what would obtain under a voluntary dispensation
• socialism of any political kind does not ever confer net benefits on society. Being based on a coercive monopoly’s expropriation of productive property, it has no way of knowing whether its allocation of resources is efficient in terms of the judgments of the consumers of its services whose wants it is intending to satisfy.
• partial socialism is, like full socialism, only an exploitative process, by which coercive monopolists enrich themselves and their political favourites at the expense of the productive class whose work and risk produces everything they consume. It promotes relative impoverishment and corrupt exploitative political privilege.
• To be successful in achieving our aims, we must adjust our actions to certain non-negotiable limitations imposed by nature, physics, reality, logic.
This is the part the socialists keep not getting. The problem isn’t “ideology”, it’s reality. We can’t just make up any economic reality, or economic system, we want.

Since the general issue is in economics, some Economics 101:

Human action happens in conditions of scarcity. Time is limited. Many resources are limited. This is not caused by “capitalism”, it’s caused by nature.

(cont.)