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Comment by bad-joke | Hacker News Reader

This is why some strains of socialism advocate a regulated market wherein businesses can freely experiment, then the optimal path is nationalized.

Free market or centralized economy, at the end of the day someone is making an executive decision about how resources are allocated. Whether you believe that executive person (or committee) should be acting in the best interests of the public or a group of shareholders is a matter of principle, not logistics.

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This creates exactly the same set of problems. A CEO has to compete with other CEOs, if they don’t do so efficiently they will fail and another will take their place. A government committe doesn’t have to compete with anybody, if they fail, you just end up with a society that gradually deteriorates. A CEO also has to deal with market forces, a government committe does not. A government committe doesn’t have to produce goods that people want, they only have to align their resource allocation with the central plan, as their country is gradually eroded underneath them. Your argument is trying to have its cake and eat it too, it doesn’t resolve any of the inefficiency of central planning, it just shifts it down the road a bit.

> A government committe doesn’t have to compete with anybody

In theory, a failing government is replaced by a different government. In practice, whether voters successfully identify problems and pick a better winner is an open question.

Even if they did, this proposal is simply a much less efficient alternative to free market competition.

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