Shadow Minister, yesterday you said:

"Secondly where all the methods of production are owned by the state, and decisions are made by political appointees not entrepreneurs the results are usually bad ones, and the products are the crappy rubbish that those in the soviet union were forced to buy."

There will need to be a lot of transparency in the appointment of people to responsible positions and in the assessment of performance. Bottom up supervision will be part of this.

Economic units would be quite entrepreneurial. They would not simply be told what to produce and how to do it. They would bid for projects. There would be a range of funding agencies they could approach with investment proposals. Small teams could form start ups and approach these agencies.

Individuals would not be seeking personal profit although costs and revenue would still play a part in economic decisions.

To Byork.

I made no judgment on the pace of socialist economic progress, I just wanted to figure out where you are coming from.

In regards to Detroit, it was doing very well out of free market economics until the Socialists in the form of the unions and Democrats started getting into power. Your claim that the poor oppressed workers were suffering under the iron fist of the greedy bosses is laughable. Seven weeks annual leave? "Job banks" where unemployed workers sat around doing nothing and getting paid for it? That is hardly capitalism, is it?

Have I ever wondered why there is unemployment in capitalist societies? Are you serious? Look mate, I came from a Housing Commission area where probably half the people were professional social welfare recipients. My own teenage mates threw in their jobs when Whitlam came to power so that they could sit on the dole and go surfing every day. They laughed at me because I still went to work. You must have come from some leafy middle class suburb if you think that most of the unemployed are the oppressed.

I worked with government owned Elcom and saw with my own eyes the rampant featherbedding, over manning, drunkenness, general bad attitudes, special privileges, entire rooms full of sleeping "workers", and gross over payment of the government "workers". I knew then why socialism failed everywhere.

One reason why we have high unemployment in Australia is because we keep importing it. 95% of Afghans are unemployed after five years residence and it is even worse for Iranians who are 98% unemployed after five years.

What western societies now have is the welfare state which is hardly an idea supported by self reliant capitalists. But we might have kept up the welfare state if the lefties had been honest enough to admit that many of their constituents were social parasites, and if they had been smart enough to figure out that you could not keep importing crime prone and welfare dependent minorities forever without destroying your economy

Dear Mr McMullen.

Fifty years ago, the world was divided between two competing economic systems, socialism and the free market. China and Russia were the two main advocates of socialism and where are they now? Both of them have given up and gone free market. Both of them could no longer pretend that their socialist economic system was in any way superior or more efficient than the free market. It was extremely painful for both of them to admit that they were wrong for so long. But they could no longer find excuses to explain away to their own people, the glaring differences between the prosperous free market societies and their own miserably poor economies.

I find it incredible that people like yourself are still trying to claim that socialism beats the free market. It must be something religious, like the Flat Earth Society or Creationism. How is it that you reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears and continue to advocate the "merits" of a clearly failed system? How many times did it need to fail before the penny drops?

I have explained how socialism destroyed Detroit and all you can come up with is some blatherings about "class struggle" that you did not elaborate on. Could I remind you that another thing the socialists promised which they failed to deliver was a "class free society"? What resulted was something more like a triangular feudal system where most of the people were on the bottom and only a very few fat cats were at the top. Neither Socialismn or the free market can make everybody equally rich, but socialism sure as hell can make everybody equally poor.

LEGGO

Feel free to check my recent OLO posts for relevant comments on the history of socialism.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/user.asp?id=44958

And if you want to refer to things that happen in a capitalist society as "socialist" I cannot stop you.

Regarding your comments to byork, it is good to see we have a similar attitude to the dole LOL. Under socialism there would be no dole. Everyone will be working or in re-training. There will be a bit of short term frictional and structural unemployment. That's it. Problem solved.

I imagine all those Afghans and Iranians on the dole are having a ball, not. I am sure most of them would prefer a job. I think most dole recipients are in a position that could not be described as enviable. Ditto for those who have been moved from the dole onto the disability pension

David McMullen
"With stuff like healthcare and education, I think the important thing is that everyone can afford the best."

You're not comparing apples with apples. The limitation on people "affording the best" is caused by the scarcity of resources. This is the original economic problem, that gives rise to all economic action and all economic theory.

All you're doing is assuming that, by vesting control of production in government, you're magically making the scarcity of means go away. But if that assumption is available, we could equally apply it to capitalism. To compare apples with apples, all we would have to do is use the tactic that you did with socialism, and declare that the problem "would" be solved by capitalism. It's idiotic. It's asinine. It's infantile. You need to graduate out of intellectual kindergarten. You obviously have not understood the first thing about economics. All you're doing is squalling for scarce resources to be stolen at gunpoint from other people, and devoted to satisfying your wants.

Plus, given that the scheme you propose is not to be voluntary, you have not justified the use of threatening to electrocute or shoot people to force them to submit and obey. You're talking moral gibberish as well as intellectual.

To David McMullen.

I don't intend to wade back through your previous posts to other contributors trying to figure out how you managed to think that socialist economic failure is somehow success, and how the successful free market economies are failures. I would prefer to concentrate on what your responses are to my posts, and I would prefer you to give some thought to replying to what I have written.

You have not given me much to work with this time. You have completly ignored my request to explain why Russia and China threw off socialist economics, probably because you know that it is because the Russians and the Chinese knew socialism did not work, and that is painfully embarrassing to you.

In regards to Detroit, your premise appears to be, that since the USA is a free market economy, then if Detroit fails economically, then it is the fault of the free market.

Such a position is absolutely wrong. Where the governments of free market economies ignore the basic principles of the free market in order to obtain electoral advantage by buying the votes of self interested demographic groups through blatant pork barrelling, the result is usually economic catastrophe. And socialism is not just an economic theory, it is a social theory which advocates (among other things) a welfare state. It is the welfare state which is rotting out the free market economies from within, exacerbated by the socialist commitment of ending world poverty by the simple expedient of having every person in the third world immigrate to the first world.

It is no surprise that those countries which have moved way from the free market economies the most, and embraced socialist humanitarianism ideology with it's attendant twin vices of high third world immigration rates coupled with a welfare state, that are in the most trouble. If you harbour heretical beliefs contrary to your orthodox socialist comrades on such things as the welfare state, then you would be best advised to keep your mouth shut, or you might end up with an ice pick in your head.