I’m talking about a system where the businesses are owned by the government and the people all recieve the same wages, But the new thing is a seperation of powers at the top. There would be a major leader and other groups (much like our leading power) to give the system checks and balances. Also possibly having the people vote the leaders. Having all of the business government owned and having the people recieve equal wages would still make it a communist based system.
I’d like to find the weak spots, if you could help me cut it apart and put it back together.
The Mussolini model was to keep the businesses privately owned, and simply regulate every facet of their existence while simultaneously manipulating the labour unions. If his system had continued as it began, there would have been some elements of the separation of powers.
Anyways, a factor in the success of your system would be just what the leaders could and couldn’t do, i.e. the Constitutional limitations on the policies they could choose to implement. The problem with any system in which people vote for leaders is that leaders compete for the favor of voting blocks, ethnicities, and various other interests. Any system in which business is either owned or controlled directly by government requires a great degree of flexibility in economic planning to account for changing world markets. Consequently, the people in power would probably require alot of latitude to make their own decisions. Having those people empowered by popular vote would lead to manipulation, corruption, and influence-peddling. Those things tend to occur in any government, but are all the worse when government has immense powers, as it would under any system in which it controls the means of production.
There is probably no way of selecting leaders and other government officials in a communist-variant state that will avoid these problems.
Well…the issue isn’t really the way the leaders are selected. A communist (as opposed to marxist) system could be totally democratic. Take the US constitution, replace everything where private property is mentionned by “all property belong collectively to the citizens of the USA” or something to that effect and you get a democratic communist country, with an elected president, elected representants, etc…
No, the problem is as usual the lack of incentives (to work harder, innovate, etc…) if everybody receives the same wages. And also the difficulty for a central government to organize a totally planified economy would be at the same time efficient. Perhaps extremely powerful computers, in the future, could overcome the second issue. Perhaps some way to give incentives to inventors, efficient workers and admnistrators could help with the first issue (in a communist society, it isn’t necessary that everybody receive the same wages, by the way. As long as the means of production, like factories, farms, etc… are collectively owned, it’s still a communist society).