This only holds true as long as society chooses to continue paying for the costs of this self-inflicted harm. It’s a bit disingenuous to blame capitalism for an aspect of socialism.
Wouldn’t this just skew production towards the more labor intensive products, resulting in production of goods/services that nobody wanted/needed, but someone wanted to get paid more to produce?
There isn’t really such a thing as money in a participatory economy, at least not like in a capitalist one. I guess in this example, the workers council responsible for fixing that faucet would be charged the full opportunity costs of the labour they used, including the first incompetant employee. They wouldn’t directly pay the employee in question though, the employee would accrue consumption rights. Workers councils are subject to approval of other workers councils, so if they had a lot of incompetant employees their social benefit to cost ratio would be low or even negative and they could effectively be put out of business.
True, but you cannot really charge or buy at any price you like in a market economy either. You generally have to bid or offer at the prevailing market price, or you either make an economic loss or don’t transact at all. A participatory economy would have indicative prices which are the equivalent of a market price, ie they are adjusted according to what worker and consumer councils order/offer to supply at various prices. So there is the adjustment of prices to balance demand and supply in a partipatory economy, but it works very differently to a capitalist economy.
A large enough dose of any medicine will kill you. That does not mean medicines should not be used. My point stands: MW laws do work as intended, and the unintended consequences have been blown way out of proportion by conservatives.
I don’t know about that – none of the various socialist and communist states of the 20th Century found a way to do without money or some functional equivalent of money. Even wartime rationing systems required ration coupons.
Except that this was not your point. Your point was that coercion is not in and of itself a bad thing. I would, of course, turn your own logic against you. While some medicine might be good for you, too much is harmful.
You may be able to get away with MW laws at some levels. They may, in fact achieve desireable goals. However, this is by no means proof that coercion is a useful economic tool in general. It is even farther away from demonstrating any sort of utility in the workers councils we are discusing.
All economic models require coercion. We are coerced to fill those tasks in which society places value through their purchasing patterns, because we have to make money to survive. I don’t find that argument very perceptive, since a planned system would merely take off the facade and debate the value of labor on an intellectual level. There are certainly good arguments to be made against an economy solely based on the risk and manual effort inherent in a job, but that’s not one of them.
For instance, why is manual labor inherently more valuable than intellectual labor? Whose work is more valuable to a car company, the engineer who designs the transmission or the line worker who welds the casing? Which role is less interchangeable? If you’re going to put forth a system based on a meritocracy in economics, the value of the labor is going to have to come into play.
Which still leaves the CEOs out in the breeze, so don’t hold your breath.
You have completely misunderstood the definition of coercion.
Coercion: the act of compelling by force of authority
You have, in fact, confused this concept with the one of need. Your need for food is not an act of coercion by me. Even if I have food and refuse to share it with you.
I probably haven’t posted this much to the SDMB in such a short space of time ever. Usually i find others have said what i want to say already, and usually better than i could. Anyway…
A typo with the word typo… 
No it wasn’t a typo. The workers council doesn’t transfer money to the employee in question directly, so the amount the employee is paid, and the amount the workers council is charged can be different. Demand and supply are matched by the interaction of consumer and worker councils using indicative prices.
I just meant that money isn’t transferred around like in market economies. The money in participatory economies is more like an accounting unit than a transferable claim on resources.
This system would breed terrible inefficiencies; rather than doing the job which one is best suited to, many would likely choose jobs that are more highly compensated. In fact, the system encourages poor matching between job and employee: workers are rewarded for undertaking “personal sacrifices,” including training. Obviously, I will have to sacrifice more to learn a job to which I am poorly suited (say, for myself, violin player) than to learn a job to which I may be well suited (say, for myself, actuary). If we encourage the mathematicians to become violin players, and the musicians to become mathematicians or engineers, society as a whole will suffer.
LOL
This still does not make any sense. Let’s drop, for the sake of clarity the verbiage about accounting units. Let’s agree that we are talking about money, and that it does not take the same form as in other economies. OK?
If we can, then can you draw more clearly the movement of money between the person with the broken sink, the local workers council (and any competing workers councils) and finally the plumber in question. I still cannot get into my head at all how this would work.
How do “consumption rights” differ in any meaningful way from money?
But then you’re right back to rewarding results rather than effort (or punishing the lack of results, which is the same thing). You’ve negated one of the central premises of this system.
How do you think the “prevailing market price” is determined in the first place? All products are or were at some time completely new. No one knows what to charge you for the first plasma TV.
You have to remember that if this system is put in place, it might work great for a short period of time because everyone would “know” the value of goods and services based on our current experience. Over time, though, price and value would be more and more disassciated from each other. So, if you desigh a system that rewards effort but not results (ie, price is not associated with value), guess what you’re going to get a lot of and what you’re not going to get much of.
I wonder how art would be “valued” in this system. If Picasso spends 15 minutes doing a drawing, and I spend 2 days doing one, which drawing has more value? In this system, mine would, righ?. Unless you’re going to tell me that there will be some “workers council” that judges the value of art tell us all what we’ll pay for any given painting, book, or movie.
I’m still not seeing the difference in this and communism, except maybe the emphasis on “effort” (and that doesn’t really strike me as much of an improvement).
The difference is in the absence of the “to each according to his need” aspect. Still way out there, though.
Ah, yes, you’re right. So it would be “to each according the effort he put in?”
Still seems like it would result in lots of surplus/shortage.
The difference is that it’s bottom-up democratic. There’s no intellectual elite running the show, no party apparatchiks or “vanguard of the proletariat.”
Am I the only one hearing echoes of Atlas Shrugged in this thread? 
So, you want to reward brute force over intellect and ability ehe? The mine worker gets paid a high salary, but the mine engineer gets paid less? The auto assembly line worker gets paid more, but the line Forman…or the design engineers…get paid less? And this makes sense to anyone here…why exactly?
Well, you know, I NEED a new car, a boat and a big screen TV. I don’t have any real talent or ability, but I sure work hard…and really, I NEED it. I COULD have fixed that sink if someone would have just showed me how…or better yet done it for me. YOU have the ability and talent…get the stuff I NEED for me I have pull with the board (and ‘friends in Washington’)…
:rolleyes:
So…I’m a network engineer. I design and build IT WAN’s, VPNs and intranets for major companies, design logical architectures, routing schemes, split brain DNS systems, security and firewall architectures. However, if I want to be paid a decent salary I must go and work in a blast furnace or a mine…or just go on producing for the thrill of it so that blast furnace or auto assembly plant worker or miners get high salaries. Again…this makes sense exactly how to people?
Anyway, to me this thing is just communism without the term COMMUNISM. I’d think it was a joke (or a caricature) if people weren’t taking it seriously. Reading through the cite was like reading Ayn Rand all over again.
-XT
With all due respect, that is beyond stupid. To establish a planning period long enough for the political process to work, they wouldn’t be able to account for shocks to the system.
More fundamentally, a distributional scheme that requires truth telling is bound to fail. If the the scheme is worked so that truth telling becomes optimal for the individual actor, odds are that the scheme will have to accept a sub-optimal distribution.
If every person gets a say in economic decisions that affects her, we would literally have a nation-wide debate on how much toilet paper each individual person needs. Vast committees will be stuck working out the prices of millions and millions of goods and services.
If you want to paint your house? Forget it. Everybody who has to look at your damn house gets a say in the decision.
It is, BTW, no different from communism, because the people are doing all the central planning. One may own property and make contracts to the extent that society sees fit, and that will include decisions to not sell property. I really like you jacket, will you sell it to me? No? Bullshit! I’m affected by that decision to not sell, therefore I get a say in it. As do my sister, since she’ll be seen in public with me, and my friends, whose social status depends on how much of a dork I am.
No. It would involve so much technical know-how and so much deliberative time that it would not be practicable. Short cuts could be taken, but then you’re back to a representative gov’t., except that all your consumption decisions would be governed by the state. The state would not be viable enough to carry out its mandate because it has neither the knowledge nor the computational power to set prices. Black markets will thrive and sooner or later the system will collapse. Your choice is spectatular failure like the Soviet Union, or quiet acceptance like China—either way, the real distributional demands of society are going to dominate and the best way to do that is with economically-competitive market prices.
Yes, myriad. The time required to involve one’s self in every relevant economic decision would leave no time for work or leisure. Life would suck. Basically, it would be a pretty good model for Hell.
You’d be in committee meetings from dusk to dawn and back through to dusk again. Since your labor-leisure decisions are economic decisions and since they affect other people, you’ll be setting your bedtime by committee.
Become a serial killer and hope Satan read this thread.
I don’t think so. My own opinion is most folks would opt out of the whole mess and leave it up to the ‘central committee’…which means in the end we are right back to communism. The ‘participatory economics’ system itself would simply collapse under its own weight and people would do what people always do…let someone else handle the details. I just NEED what I NEED…
Other than that I agree with most of your points on this.
-XT