It’s often said that socialism would work so long as everyone would agree to work for the common good. So long as we’re all communitarians and have a shared interest in the betterment of society, everything will be fine.
The typical arguments against socialism are based on the fact that human nature isn’t like that, and that it’s utopian to think you can get everyone to go along.
But here’s the thing - even if everyone did care, and everyone honestly wanted the collective to be a wondrous shared egalitarian experience, it STILL wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work because this brand of socialism lacks the mechanisms that are required to coordinate disparate populations and large groups of people, to ensure that resources will be available when needed, and to manage the complexity of billions of people all trying to work together.
In a capitalist system, this is done through prices. Prices are information. If a storm blows down a factory in Bangalore, the price of whatever it makes goes up. This is a signal to people to stop using as much of the product, and to start making more of the product elsewhere. The price system is the communications bus that our large decentralized supercomputer of humanity needs so that all producers and consumers can receive the information necessary to determine how to efficiently order their consumption and production.
And the thing is, even if you tried to replace this with an actual supercomputer and got everyone to feed their desires and abilities into it, you STILL couldn’t make it work, because the information doesn’t exist at all until people are forced to make choices. You can’t possibly know whether or not you should buy a new hammer until you understand the cost of a hammer relative to the cost of all the other things you need. You can’t rationally decide whether or not you should make hammers until you are forced to choose between hammer production or some other prodution by evaluating the relative prices of the components of production compared to the price you can receive selling the hammer.
This is why socialist systems ALWAYS break down. The Soviet Union didn’t become despotic because there was something uniquely evil about Russians - it became despotic because in the absence of prices, the only thing left is physical coercion and fear. The Soviets actually tried to manage production to the best of their ability - they had a massive bureaucracy staffed with economists and accountants - huge computer models. Millions of entries in bookkeeping systems, attempting to track the flow of goods and services and the demand for them. They honestly did their best. And it was an utter failure.
Socialists of this type seem to think that scarcity only exists because capitalism creates it. This is utterly wrong. Capitalism doesn’t create scarcity - it manages it. There will always be scarcity. We can’t hope to make all the goods and services we really desire. It’s impossible. Handwaving away the problem of scarce resources by pointing at some nebulous flaw in capitalism is the worst kind of shoddy thinking. A few hours of hard thought about the nature of production, the fact that we usually have close to full employment, and that the majority of people are gainfully employed should tell you that scarcity is the result of a little more than friction in the cogs of capitalism.
I have a feeling that socialists of this stripe have no understanding of the real complexity of a modern economy. They think of goods and services in only the most simplistic terms. They see people making products without considering the products needed to make the products needed to make the products. Sure, you might get people to make nice pottery voluntarily. But who’s going to mine the copper needed to make the wire needed to make the winding on the motor in the pottery wheel? Who’s going to know how much copper to mine? In a world of finite copper, who’s going to know whether it’s best put to use in pottery wheels or to make copper-lined pans? Who decides? What happens when someone decides they want to use a massive amount of copper to build their giant copper sculpture, creating a shortage of copper for the magnets of MRI machines?
I’ve been asking questions like thisof various socialists/communists/anarchists for decades. I’ve NEVER been given a good answer. I asked a bunch of questions like this of our current new socialist, and he ignored all of them.
My conclusion is that this brand of socialism is either a religion, in which such questions need not/dare not be asked, or it’s a brand of mass delusion like creationism or flat-earthism. Some people just want to believe so badly in this pastoral, communal vision of mankind that they will devote their lives to it without ever asking the hard questions about how it could possibly work.
