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Comment by iopq | Hacker News Reader

> Maximum production quotas

How does the government know the exact amount to produce?

Forget knowing how much to produce, the idea that maximum productivity quotas would constitute an improvement in the economy is risible stupidity.

If you had the online data of what was being ordered of Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, and a handful of grocers, you'd know exactly how much to produce. .

The myth that a planned economy is inefficient comes from a time when not everything was computerized.

You're talking about food production, which is already centrally planned with subsidies to not grow certain foods. This has been in place since the dust bowl. It seems to be working pretty well. Probably wouldn't work in anything that isn't a historical staple though. Think of how much the congress is knowledgeable in tech for the last 20+ years. Could you imagine if congress centrally planned how the tech revolution and how it would pan out? We'd still be using whatever the first viable tech was (ENIAC?).

Every computer advancement we take for granted today is due to industrial policy, and a time when the top marginal tax rate was over 70%. The idea that government is not effective and should not participate in industrial developments is all relatively new.

Every year that goes by without a reset in industrial policy, the web gets worse and there are fewer companies doing actual hardware. It turns out when you let the people who focus solely on finance and efficiency run things, it goes well for a while and then your foundational companies become like Boeing.

Government should participate more strongly, not less - including by breaking up big tech.

The Soviet Union had armies of mathematicians and surveyors to try to predict manufacturing needs. That is like saying "just use surveys"! Equating retailers with the entirety of the chain is massive willful ignorance. It is like equating knowing how to repair a car with knowing the entire manufacturing process of the car down not just to the ore but to the "production" of the individual workers themselves!

There’s been a lot of technological progress since the Soviet Union’s demise.

There’s probably some point where running a full command economy becomes feasible with modeling, oppressive surveillance and repression, etc. Not sure I’d want to live in it, but “the Soviets failed” is a weak argument.

I can't see anything in a command economy indicating it requires repression?

Clearly humanity will get there, or will likely destroy itself in the process.

A command economy gets a lot easier if you can force people to work certain jobs and produce certain things. The Soviets had trouble with this because measurement and enforcement were challenging; they'd have loved Amazon's warehouse worker surveillance systems.

That's an amazing point.

What we have under "capitalism" is essentially the Soviet wet dream: being able to force workers into work, "willingly", and they work so hard they piss into bottles to stay on target.

We've got all the repression right now, just for a slice of the population that everyone considers effectively disposable.

Woah.

Apart from going back to agrarian communism central planning by ill-informed bureaucrats, the issue is an absolute lack of systems and personnel in government to meter and observe corporate transactions in a localized, specialized, distributed manner who know the terrain up close whether degrees of gouging or catastrophic imbalances are happening or not.

Can't let farmers empty water tables, let prices of eggs go insane, or corporations up prices just to take advantage of customers to the point it causes a price spiral.

The Fed is ill-equipped, the FTC doesn't do much, and the CFPB was neutered.

> let prices of eggs go insane

I could just eat fewer things made out of eggs

There are people who don't eat eggs at all!

Unless you're a bretharian, eggs or beans are both items that you must buy.

Why?

If I choose to eat a steak with some veggies on the side, where's the egg in that? Where are the beans?

Yesterday I had a pizza. It had no egg or beans on it, just bacon, cheese, pizza crust, tomato, etc.

> the issue is an absolute lack of systems and personnel in government to meter and observe

Ah yes, a bloated bureaucracy has always been the recipe for a flourishing economy. The US is still probably the most solid, wealthy and - compared to its peers - fast growing economy in the world. The lack of administrative meddling is what made the US the dream destination for all the most ambitious people around the world. A radical shift to jeopardize that is a terrible idea.

I'm not from the US, but I'm glad different systems with different strengths exist. Even if only so we can compare how differences in e.g. amount of regulation etc affect a country overall.

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