You’ve just spent five pages telling us that this system will only work when nobody wants an increased allotment of goods. And now you tell us that you intend to encourage people to take up banana farming by giving them an increased allotment of goods.
Seriously. You just spent 5 pages telling us that whatever people want, whether it be a Lamborghini or a hooker they can get it at will form the common pool. You have also stipulated that most people won’t want those things.
So how is giving people an increased allotment of goods going to encourage then. Why would they even accept an increased allotment of goods that, by axiom, they don’t want?
Indistinguishable, while you raise a very good point here I think it’s just going to derail the main point I was making.
I didn’t mean that there was no physical capacity to give people an increased reward in this system. I meant that there is no psychological capacity. That’s one of the axioms of this system.
We’ve just been treated to five pages of Olentzero telling us that his system will only work, can only work, when nobody wants an increased allotment of goods. The whole thing hinges on a complete absence of scarcity and desire. He even pointed out that the presence of unavailable yet desirable things anywhere else on the same planet will bring the system crashing down.
So, in a system that can only exist when people have little desire and have immediate access to everything they do desire from the common pool, how can giving people an increased allotment of goods possibly encourage then?
I’d really like to see his response to to that. But I’ll have to ask you to post it.
I’m with Blake; this directly contradicts pretty much everything you have said in this thread thus far. In a single sentence, you have tacitly acknowledged that all goods will not be abundant (else why would more be a good thing?), and conceded that people in your socialist society can only be motivated to do things they would otherwise find unpalatable by the prospect of receiving more than their compatriots. At a stroke we’re back to an incentive structure predicated on the differential value of goods, and their distribution according to the value of labour. What sort of socialism is this?
The goods aren’t exchanged directly between producers, for one thing, and since mass production of goods requires collective effort it would be quite difficult for an individual worker in that environment to say “I made this; this is mine to do with as I please.” The vast majority of goods produced would belong to society as a whole, for society as a whole to determine what is to be done with them. Furthermore, there are systems of mass storage and distribution already in place that are far more efficient than individual exchange. Supermarkets, for example. Those can be used just as efficiently under socialism - if not more so, since the goal is simple distribution rather than profit - as they are under capitalism.
Labor isn’t an intermediary.
Name me one good or service or tradeable item that didn’t require labor to create or perform. Labor is what makes our world. It is the ability to labor and the ability to consciously direct that labor that makes us human.
You can’t have abundance without having more! What does this question even mean? I suspect there may be some confusion in your mind between “more goods in general to go around” and “more goods in one’s personal possession”. But there’s nothing in the statement “You could be entitled to a larger draw from the general store of social production if you do this job” that says a permanent general surplus of goods is impossible.
You’ll note that I also suggested the possibility of improving technology and/or efficiency to reduce the workforce requirement. It’s also possible to restructure the way things are done so that the job is no longer necessary and nobody needs to do it. For example, an energy program fully based on renewable resources would render coal-mining obsolete. There might be a solution to the disposal of human excrement that would make sewers (and therefore sewer workers) unnecessary. There used to be men employed by various cities to go around sweeping horseshit off the streets so people wouldn’t walk in it. Where are they now? Rendered obsolete by the combustion engine. Those unpalatable jobs are by no means permanent; human inventiveness, given free rein, can surely come up with ways to make them unnecessary.
Wrong. The labor time necessary to make the goods doesn’t change whatsoever. Where would the differential value come from?
Firstly, as we both seem to understand, these bonuses would go towards the work that is hard, possibly dangerous, but above all necessary. So the extra cut would go to, for example, people who would be needed to work at cleaning up an old nuclear waste site, not for the political leaders or factory managers (who would earn their goods at the same exchange rate of labor as the rest of society). Secondly, there would be people who would earn a bigger cut of goods for non-job-related reasons, like a larger family, or disability (less labor performed but still a full entitlement to goods). Thirdly, this uneven distribution would only apply until the surplus of produced goods becomes permanent, at which point people could take as much as they wanted to if they so chose, but presumably having grown up in a society where it made no sense to take more than you needed, they wouldn’t do so.
Because the kind of folks who push this kind of socialism are the same folks who will go on for pages and pages about the horrors of religion, and how it is fantasy-based and horrible and on and on, And then will blithely minimize, ignore, excuse, or deny the deaths of tens of millions more people than religion has ever killed when it is in pursuit of their particular fantasy.
Socialism will work great - just as soon as we fundamentally change human nature, resolve a few inherent contradictions, and revoke the second law of thermodynamics.
What? If goods are, as you have repeatedly stipulated, so abundantly available that no-one’s wants will go unmet, then giving them more of anything is useless to them, because they already have all they need. We’ve solved the problem of banana shortages; everyone has all the bananas they could possibly want. How do you encourage me to work with the promise of bananas, then, or any other abundant good?
Again, no, I am quite clear on the distinction: the confusion is yours. You are positing a post-scarcity society, one in which the insufficience of goods is no longer a problem; society, and thus its citizens, are fully provided for. This necessarily requires that people have everything they want, unless you want to redefine the meaning of scarcity. Therefore I, as an individual in this society, already know that all my possible needs have been met; there is nothing that I can’t get if the whim takes me.
You now, however, seem to have interposed a distribution system in between me and these abundant goods; I may not get everything I want, as I have to earn it in some manner. What is this but enforced scarcity? What is the reward if not payment for services rendered? How is this the socialism you describe? It sounds like we’re rapidly descending into the sort of bureaucratic command economy you dismiss as not true socialism. And yet we’ve got here just by analysing your very own stipulated characteristics of socialism. This can’t be, surely.
You must either abandon your contention that socialism will end scarcity, or come up with another method of encouraging people to do things they don’t want to. You can’t pay them with things whose very value you claim to have abolished.
We’ve come back to the thing that has confused me more than anything about the socialists’ argument. Simple question: how can you have incentives in a post-scarcity society? Those two terms seem totally incompatible to me. The very idea of an incentive is that you will be rewarded with something you wouldn’t ordinarily have access to. If everyone has access to everything, where’s the incentive?
Not to mention that once you DO have incentives, there’s going to be competition, which seems to be the exact thing that would threaten to break down the socialist society. So, how do you create incentives without creating greed and competition?
Ah, now I see where you’re coming from. You’re looking at the end goal of socialism (the permanent surplus of goods) and putting it in the conditions of the process it’ll take to get there.
At the end goal, with the permanent surplus of goods, we’ll be at a point where there’s so much to go around that people won’t need to work, and it won’t make a bit of difference if you choose to or not because the technology available should be advanced enough to require minimal effort. (That same technology, however, would also make the required work pleasant and interesting so people would actually want to work.)
Getting there, however, requires a lot more work from a lot more people. The surplus of goods may be sizable, but it won’t be permanent (which means it could run out if not enough is put back in). This is where the distribution of goods would be unequal, since there will be jobs that are hard, possibly dangerous, but still necessary for further social development (or just cleaning up the mess from capitalism).
A rough metaphor would be mastering a skill, like playing a violin. To get to the level of a master such as, say, Paganini or Itzhak Perlman, you need a lot of practice, a lot of study - a lot of effort. Once you’re at a high level of mastery, however, you won’t need anywhere near as much effort to maintain that mastery as you needed to get there. Additionally, you know damn well that you need to keep practicing to maintain the mastery - you can’t just sit back and ignore it because you’ll fall out of practice and lose the ability. But when you’re up there you want to keep practicing because you’re doing something both that’s important to you and that you enjoy.
I for one look forward to the cultural revolution and the great leap forward that will happen as as, the clearly better informed majority, take, by force, things from others and stamp out religion across this world. And we do this for the same reason china did, so that our grand children can once again be given the opportunity to oppress the proletariat.
by this I mean, what you propose cannot be done without force. Theft and murder by majority rule is still theft and murder.
Edited to add: Capitalism at its root is cooperation. I have something you want you have something I want, we exchange. Socialism must be forced on some people.
I got my eye on some prime beachfront property. There was no labor used in creating it and yet it is desirable to me. On the other hand I have seen things which were very labor-intensive and for which I have no desire. The idea that the amount of labor put into something determines its value (=desirability) is just nuts. It is the other way around. The desirability of something is what determines how much it is worth putting labor and other value into it.
I am not going to spend any time arguing with ideas which have clearly been shown to be bunk by economists and by history. I am just relieved to know the chances of those ideas gaining any actual power in any developed country are close to zero. It is sad to think these ideas which have been discredited by economists and by history have not totally been wiped out and some ignorant people are still preaching them.
To those who say a centrally planned socialist economy would work IF everybody was angelically selfless and thought about the common good above all I have to say you are wrong. What makes socialism fail is NOT primarily human greed or selfishness (although that too) but the lack of information needed to plan the economy. That is why in command economies when you have wood you are short of nails and viceversa.
The price mechanism in a free market acts as a means of transmission of information about supply and demand (availability and need) and without that transmission of information the economy is hopelessly inefficient. It has nothing to do with the goodness of human nature.
How many pairs of shoes need to be shipped into New York city every day? And of what type? There is no better way to solve this than with the price mechanism in a free market. Each individual weighs his desire for new shoes against the price asked by the seller which is the measure of the seller’s desire to not part with the shoes. This allows the maximum amount of freedom and satisfaction to all parties as they voluntarily trade on their own subjective needs and desires.
Without the price mechanism there is no way to measure what people really want of how much they want it and the government is forced to allocate shoes and Mao suits to everybody alike. It does not matter if you really use your shoes more than the neighbor or if you really like to have different pairs of shoes. The government cannot measure that and is forced to allocate equally to everybody. (Soon corruption appears.)
The next point is that in such a system there ARE going to be people who are not happy and the only way to keep them in line is by represive means. As Hayek says in The Road to Serfdom, which everybody should read, the only way to maintain such a society is by repressive means. That is also what history shows. Look at any communist country.
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Not really, because I dispute that you can ever reach the endpoint you claim. I suppose as a result I am rather interested in the process, because I feel it will be infinitely long, but never mind that now. Rather, what we’re trying to demonstrate is that your endpoint is logically unattainable. We will always have a finite supply of one thing: labour. Of course, anyone can see that we’ll always have a finite supply of all sorts of other things, too (copper, natural gas, helium, the list is (ha!) endless), but you’ve waved away these problems as being inevitably overcome by technology. So, fine; we’ll deal with labour. There is no conceivable endpoint, to my mind, in which you won’t have the problem we just posed to you, in which there is more demand for a certain type of labour than there is supply.
You have described a society in which wants have been eliminated. And yet we have placed before you a scarcity scenario that you can’t address without reintroducing and exploiting people’s wants. It seems, therefore, that your endpoint is inherently unreachable. The only way around this is by eliminating the need for labour. So perhaps as well as our infinite supplies of raw materials, we’ll assume that we’ve got a self-maintaining fleet of tireless robot workers who will do everything we don’t want to. But aren’t we blessing ourselves with rather too many fanciful technologies here? Aren’t we putting pre-requisites on the global socialist utopia that would guarantee universal happiness under pretty much any system of government? What’s the use of a system that has utopia as a pre-requisite?
Having disputed the endpoint, I’ll have a go at the journey too:
But who decides who does the shitty jobs? Who decides who does the really fun jobs? Who allocates the goods? Who really controls the means of production? It can’t be all of us, voting; it’s simply unworkable. Where does the information for all of these decisions come from? When pressed for a mechanism by which these things would be decided, you have tended to just say, “oh, well that’s up for the socialists of the future.” This strikes me as complete cop-out. More than that, it sounds like a recipe for centralisation of power in opaque bureaucracies, as allocation of resources and labour are decided not by how much they are valued by the populace, but by guesswork (or worse, graft and corruption). I know you deny that socialism has ever been tried, but it’s surely no coincidence that every time an approximation of it has been, it’s spiralled into totalitarianism and misery. If you think the journey to socialism is going to be substantially different to the arrival, then it behooves you to explain what the interim will be like, and how it will avoid the pitfalls all previous attempts experienced. It’s all very well to declare all problems solved, but you have to explain how.
I can concede this much: socialism will be as workable a system of governance as any other (which is to say, totally irrelevant) once every single other problem facing humanity has been resolved. But as far as I can see it provides absolutely none of the solutions that this will require, and indeed seems destined to actively impede our progress towards the sort of panacea it demands.
That, in a nutshell, illustrates why there can never be a such thing as a post-scarcity world. Some things just ARE scarce, and some of those scarce things are pretty darn nice. When you figure out a way to allow some people the beachfront, while explaining to those who don’t get it why they don’t really want it, then maybe you’ll have something
No. We’re looking at the fact that you can never have a functioning socialism because of its inherent flaws.
Suppose you have a socialism. At any time, and arguably all the time, people’s demands can and will shift and change. People will get tired of strawberries and want more bananas. More people will get born, and they’ll want TVs to be made for them. A spate of disease will hit and medicine will suddenly become a lot more popular.
Any time this happens, you will either get a surplus, or a shortage, based on existing supply. A surplus is no problem; if we’re making twice as many TVs we can use we can store the surplus in an ever-growing pile in our infinitely-sized storehouse, so there’s no need to adjust the labor force. But what about a shortage? Suddenly you’ll need more TV manufacturers than you have. How do you decide who switches to making TVs? How do you decide which things are no longer as necessary, so you can steal workers from that? And, how do you convince the workers to switch from their current comfortable job to the one you specify?
And don’t say you’re offering incentives via greater rewards of goods - that’s capitalism. You might as well just print dollars and be done with it.
A different but related issue: you have ten people, and need nine people to pick bananas and one person to shovel shit. Who has to shovel the shit? How to you pick, and how do you get them to do it? If it’s by majority vote - BAM! All minorities are now slaves!
Nah, in the ideal socialist paradise everybody can live in a mansion by the beach, in fact, they can all have the best and most desirable mansion with the best view. Other people will build it and maintain it for free. Everybody will also be married to the most beautiful woman and no one will have to settle for someone who is not the best in everything. There will be no arguments about where to go for dinner tonight because socialist people are angelical and understanding and perfect in every way. There will never be any disagreements regarding the value of anything because everybody will be extremely polite and say “no, really, you take it”.
Cool. When she socialists take over, I’m not going to give them my labor, and I’ll just live off the dole, taking and taking and taking and never contributing to society in the slightest.
I mean, if my labor isn’t valuable, that’s not a problem, right?
Of all the serious arguments against socialism, the human nature one is the least defensible. There is a wealth of information from psychology and sociology showing that humans are naturally cooperative, peaceful, and altruistic. I quoted extensively from one researcher in Post #125.
People are are naturally cooperative, peaceful, and altruistic - to a point. Every person has a point when they assess the personal costs to be too much and then they cease to be cooperative, peaceful, and altruistic, and become competitive, warlike, and selfish.
When you ask me to go to work, you’ve crossed that line. You need to give me a better reason than altruism. And when you ask me to do more at work than surf the dope, you’ve crossed the line again. I need more reason to get off my duff and do a good job. Not everyone likes their work, you know.
The human nature argument against socialism is GREAT. If it wasn’t, people would all work for wages that were the least amount they could survive on.
