Yes, you need a free market with competing organizations if you want your economy to keep developing. Breaking up private monopolies is an important role for the government.
The world is full of authoritarian assholes. Studies have shown they score high on narcissistic, sociopathic, and psychopathic scales. Unfortunately they also score high in values like charisma, leadership, and likeability. People follow them willingly and keep up their admiration long after most outsiders would have fled. On the other side, psychologists have identified people with authoritarian personalities.
The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by a disposition to treat the voice of authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect.
Neither side is the majority of most populations, fortunately. However, the presence of even large minorities of such people in the world makes any attempt to scale up societies dependence upon the good will of all not virtually impossible but literally so since no examples are known.
Most of us here have seen this catastrophic global failure in our lifetimes. It once was called the world wide web and was built on the notion that it would grant individuals the ability to speak their minds and communicate openly even with people who they would never meet and whose identities might never be known. Few or no guardrails were built in against malware, or malpeople. Remember when web proselytizers argued that with the ability to rate others for services, products, and ideas the truth would emerge without the need for official overseers?
Some people want to watch the world burn. Even the SDMB was infested with them. Only massive doses of DDT enabled its survival. Large communities cannot do that. When it is tried - as the MAGA movement is doing - the result is destruction of morality at the most basic level.
You can’t eliminate people from the world. Regulation irritates almost everyone. That’s the dilemma that makes the path forward so impossible to conceptualize.
To what degree did American interference, up to and including an invasion and blockades, lead to the authoritarianism of Cuba?
The current stock market is less a matter of investing in order to fund companies and more a matter of gambling. The question for many investors isn’t ‘is this company doing something useful or likely to become useful?’ or ‘is this company profitable or likely to become profitable?’ It’s only ‘do I think that someone will pay more for these shares next year (or next week, or even next minute) than I’ll have to pay for them right now?’
Yeah; I once heard the USSR described as “what you would get if IBM merged with the Pentagon and took over a country”.
“State capitalism” is a good term for it, that kind of nation works more like a single giant corporation than anything else.
Stalin’s version of communism didn’t work because it couldn’t provide it’s own people with what they needed never mind what they wanted. Stalin died in 1953, and even decades after his death the Soviets never figured out how to get their economy to function. For the Soviet economy to even exist, they had to rely on a robust black market that may have comprised up to 1/5th of their total economy by the end of the 1980s. Soviet authorities were certainly aware of the black market but knew they couldn’t end it for fear of crashing the whole system.
What about China? Decades ago they made the decision to allow capitalism to take root even if the party maintained a lot of control. i.e. They abandoned Mao’s vision of how the economy should work.
Why would the American blockade have any impact on Cuba? Wasn’t trade with the Soviet Union enough? Are you saying that communist countries need to be able to trade with capitalist countries in order to be free and prosperous?
Short answer: Because most people can’t spot a psychopath or a narcissist, and we tend to put them in charge of things when they say they want the job.
So what difference does it make if the company expands if the profits aren’t available to the owners? Why would I want that stock?
If the answer is “To keep buying and trading stock” this just turns all stock into the equivalent of bitcoin or NFTs, where the value of the stock is completely irrelevant to the ability to actually make money. It’d make the stock market WORSE, even further disconnected from reality and proper incentives.
Yes, gold is shiny and doesn’t tarnish, so it’s a nice thing to have even if no one will buy it from you. Stocks have no intrinsic value of they didn’t give you some claim to the profits, or the value of the property if the company is dismantled, or… Something.
That more or less is the definition of a bubble, and historically they’ve had a tendency to collapse once the supply of greater fools runs out.
Things have value because people believe they have value. That’s economics 101. Most companies would have at least some liquidation value that you would get from shutting them down but the idea of intangible assets is not a bizarre new idea.
I certainly agree that the OP’s odd suggestion wouldn’t be an improvement on the current financial system.
Poor Laika. I remember crying as a kid when I found out what happened to her.
I’m saying less industrially advanced countries might well benefit from trade and friendly relations with nearby wealthy countries while having the world’s largest and most expansive military as a hostile neighbour 90 miles from your tiny island (oops–let’s not forget Gitmo is on Cuba) is likely to impose all sorts of problems, including a not entirely unfounded paranoia that might well have a negative impact on how leaders see their options and opportunities and dangers.
And let’s add no one here thinks the Soviet Union was a cornucopia of consumer goods and even basic stuff, so being locked to them was a matter of necessity given the reaction of the US, not a free choice. Castro, like Ho Chi Minh before him, hoped the US would help his country develop and prosper. He was feted in New York just after the revolution. Then there was that little issue of the Bay of Pigs and more that practically drove him into the paws of the Soviet bear. The question as asked is a little baiting, but I have boring work to do and am happy to take the bait for now!
Cite?
It’s definitely Stalin’s version in the sense that it’s one he used. See e.g. Article 12 of the Soviet constitution:
ARTICLE 12
In the U.S.S.R. work is the obligation and a matter of honour of every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”
In the U.S.S.R. the principle of socialism is realised: “From each according to his ability, to each according to the work performed.”
That Stalin originated the version, though (the other reading of “Stalin’s version”,) would be mistaken. Its use in fact predates Marx:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_each_according_to_his_contribution#Definition_and_purpose
Of course Stalin got to be the one who defined what ability and needs were. For the greater good naturally.
Why doesn’t it work? It’s because it doesn’t have efficient feedback mechanisms like pricing in a competitive market. Labor doesn’t have an intrinsic dollar value.
While in complete agreement with the argument that Stalin was a dictator and a particularly awful example at that, it seems a little precocious to assert he weighed in at every level and on every decision in the Soviet Union. Lots happened all the time that Stalin knew or cared nothing about, as in any country, whatever the form of leadership. It doesn’t help us understand history and historical tragedies to simply blame Stalin or Hitler or Trump or Carney (“Cue ‘Blame Canada!’”). It’s usually a little more complicated.
Stalin set and enforced the agenda, which was “crash-modernize the Soviet Union, at any cost”. This not only meant keeping worker compensation as close to zero as possible but encouraged the falsification of bad news, production figures that disguised that what was being produced was shoddy garbage, and enhanced (not created) the Russian practice of above all else, cover your ass from your superiors’ displeasure.