Internally most big companies function like dictatorships.
Workers totally owning the means of production can still exist hand-in-hand with a marketplace that allows the best product to succeed.
A free market...
Free to die in the gutter alone after the capitalists have bled you dry.
Free to be spat on by your deluded countrymen barely hanging in themselves as they tell you to die faster for lowering their property values.
This country makes me feel the opposite of free. Everyone against everyone as the owner class laughs.
Tell them that a "Free market" was never a real thing All markets are controlled & planned
I like checks and balances so I want a combination of worker owned co-ops and a planned economy
A free market would be nice. We don't have that. We have a captive market.
They’re making arguments! Quick — prepare the violence!
Planned economies don’t have a great track record. Why not suggest something new instead of the same tired old ideas?
From an older comment of mine:
And despite the corrupt character[,] AES brought forth massive progress in all fields of society. Free education up to university for everyone who didn’t slack at school. Millions of emancipated people learned to read for the first time ever. Massive scientific progress. Access to culture for millions. Making things like theatre, operas, ballet, cinema and chess accessible (and affordable !) for the masses. Making sure everyone had a place to work, sleep, smth to eat and clean water. Giving women the right to work, vote, choose whom or even if to marry, to go through life unveiled and just generally choose their own lives.(but this is one of the errors again. Patriarchal social structures were still kept and social conservatism took hold, which is why women rarely if ever had the rly high positions and were barred from the military f.e.) Making sure every child had a place at a crib or kindergarten. Making good quality healthcare accessible to all free of charge. Including vaccinating even the furthest regions, that had never even seen a doctor before.
[...]
TL;DR: dismissing state socialism [and thus planned economies] as “something that didn’t work for the people” is disingenuous and disregards the fact that it did work and that, despite its flaws, it worked for hundreds of millions of people.
[...]
And all that without exploitation that is required for capitalism to get even close to that (e.g. China rn). Historically centrally planned economies struggled at larger scales (which is why decencralizing/devolving into regions might have been a good remedy). But they excelled at creation of industry or rather primitive capital accumulation but without all the horrible effects capitalism had at those stages.
Computers at our advancement lvl change all that or rather make them even more feasible
I'm glad you agree that they didn't work well at larger scales, and I'm open to trying newer, computerized versions in narrow cases. The more experiments the better to find an improved economic system. But in general I think you are massively overstating their benefits. Yes, economic planning works alright for some things. Utilities where competition basically can't exist can't have markets, so some level of planning is needed there, although there are still market forces at play to some extent. But they also had catastrophic failures in food provision in particular that market food distribution usually didn't have. And large, centralized economies are vulnerable to seizure by centralized power structures, who then turn them to their own ends.
But even ignoring those issues, a lot of this is just the same argument apologists for capitalism use. "Life got better and it was all thanks to our ideology!" A lot of this is conflated with general technological progress and other social changes, and the fact that human welfare was shockingly low in the economies that preceded modern ones. Being better than despotic feudalism isn't too impressive in my book.
And all that without exploitation that is required for capitalism to get even close to that
without all the horrible effects capitalism had at those stages
Looking at history I don't see much difference. Both systems centralized wealth and goods into fewer hands at the expensive of those that lacked political power, often with horrific consequences. Both destroyed the environment as they industrialized, and continue to do so. We need to do better if humans are going to survive long-term.
Breaking news, capitalism operates off of planned economies. More at 10.
By and large, no. So-called capitalist economies are actually mixed economies and do contain some elements of economic planning. Some industries are more amendable to centralized planning than others. But these economies are still largely market oriented on the whole. Even the supposedly socialist economies in the USSR and China have participated in world markets, which is one of the reasons they weren't even more dysfunctional than they were.
Markets have a lot of flaws (at least as currently designed) but they are very efficient ways to aggregate information and make collective decisions without any top-down decision-maker. There's no clear and obvious replacement for them. I think if there was we would have adopted it already. But they are also drivers of tremendous environmental destruction and human suffering, so I do encourage discussion of alternatives... just not ones that are well understood to not work for most use cases.
oh boy do i have a new suggestion for you (I think it's mostly new, or not in common discourse). Haven't read through all their reasoning or evidence. It's just extremely out of left field.
Market socialism with an emphasis on genuine co-ops. It's not hard, it works, and you don't necessarily build an immutable heirarchy.
Exactly. Capitalism isn't bad because of free markets, free markets are great and arguably way better than planned economies in most applications (minus things like healthcare, if you can't reasonably choose not to buy a product then prices will inflate out of control).
The problem with Capitalism is the concentration of capital which inevitably leads to oligarchy. Put profits in the hands of workers instead of investors and watch the problems melt away. Hell, I can see the merits of totally replacing wages with proportional stake in the company. When everyone gets a percentage of the profits, they're way more motivated to work efficiently with less waste and higher productivity.
As an aside, idealistic free market is impossible to achieve without regulation. At the very least, contracts need to be enforced. Free market also demands price forming to happen through bids on the market, needing protection from extra-market negotiations. As an elastic system, it can also be broken by a concerted application of force and needs protection from such actions.
Whatever is being sold as free market sounds like a myth at best.
PS: Coop corporations should really become the norm. Trickle up systems create concentrations of power by design, and concentration of power is how you stretch elastic system beyond its deformation limits.
