Maybe Karl Marx had a point? Sure, communist revolutions of the 20th century produced suboptimal results, but only because violent psychopaths were in power. We need democratic socialism. Maybe Bernie Sanders has right ideas.
The flipside is that markets are only efficient at distributing things that can have a price on them. They're mostly blind to externalities (pollution!) and to problems that can't be solved by distributing the goods most efficiently.
This is why both pure command (Communist) and pure market (Capitalist) solutions fail. You need to decide which system is best for each problem and use the one that works. Consumer goods are absolutely best handled by markets. Healthcare is far more efficient in a command system, because the demand curve is a total mess so markets can't price it efficiently. Utilities are another example where markets are typically worse.
But what about the previous paragraph where you said
> markets are... mostly blind to externalities (pollution!)
What about the externalities from consumer goods? (And everything else we value via markets, which is nearly everything else)
Wouldn't this point to CEOs not being super effective?
Just pointing out that the C-suite is also a kind of centralized power.
Unsure why these kinds of stories always devolve into some kind of ism-vs-ism in the comment section because it almost always missed the point.
CEO pay is held up as a symptom of something. My interpretation of that symptom is that it represents a shift in capital over a period of decades. The interesting discussions are around what changed? how did that happen? is it ok? if not, what should be done?
Me? I happen to think it's not ok but like most, don't have a coherent set of suggestions about a path forward.
[edited for grammar]
There were way more problems with socialism than just the fact it breeds dictators.
If you're starving your people in the time of greatest abundance of food in history it might be more fundamentally flawed.
What I always find surprising is that, as soon as it’s made abstract enough, even humanist and rational people are apparently ready to defend the worst atrocities.
Just set your priorities in the right orders. If you find yourself defending a system which see sick people die in the street in one of the richest country in the world and history, you are probably in the wrong.
Then came a real psycho, but that's another sad story.