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Comment by adasdasdas | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop rehashing arguments for planned economies; they are terrible because they ignore the million micro signals that drive the economic engine. Instead they over and under produce just about everything because the central planners have an impossible job. Furthermore, older socialist theories still operate under the assumption that production is the biggest economy, rather than service. You can't translate the theories since the value add of service economies are rarely bound by the "means of production"(factories) and the labor value add fluctuates wildly with skill which breaks any sense of worker solidarity.

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Socialism isn’t a planned economy. That was one attempt, the Marx-Leninist attempt in the USSR, at socialism. Socialism is the fundamental reordering of society to benefit the lowest wrung. You can have socialism with markers still, which is what is done in syndicalist style socialism. You can have limited social programs as a form of socialism as per social democrats. Or you can have more extreme radical direct democracy. There are thousands of ways to implement socialism, not all of them are the same.

> Socialism is the fundamental reordering of society to benefit the lowest wrung.

That is not the definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

> You can have socialism with markers still, which is what is done in syndicalist style socialism.

Co-ops have never operated outside the bounds of a democracy with a State. Notwithstanding, they don't appear to scale very well. The most common use case is related to agriculture, though there's a single mid-scale company in Spain that ancoms like to tout.

No one wants to take on all the risk of starting a business while socializing all the profit, hence, we don't usually see these spring up. But if the model is so good for workers, naturally, you'd expect popularity to rise. They've been around a long time and we're still waiting for that to happen.

> You can have limited social programs as a form of socialism as per social democrats.

That's just mixed economy, part of the fabric of Liberalism. Socialism necessitates the elimination of Capitalism.

Capitalism is not markets. Liberalism is says nothing about social programs, liberalism is about unrestricted markets and decoupling people from castes and traditions.

Did you read your link to socialism? It agrees with what I said.

> Capitalism is not markets.

Capitalism is markets + the right to private property and gains. It's not a philosophy.

> Liberalism is says nothing about social programs

Social Liberalism does, which is the prevailing Liberal school of thought today.

> Did you read your link to socialism?

ctrl+f "lowest rung"= 0 results.

Redistribution isn't just about "the lowest rung" or most impoverished, social ownership is intended to be utilitarian. Not unlike Liberalism.

Capitalism is private ownership. Markets are human, completely predating capitalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

People always discover that certain things they want require centralized planning, like welfare, a strong military, or high tech goods. The problem with socialism in practice is that it always ends up being more about being anti-capitalism than pro-syndicalism or pro-direct democracy, so you always end up with a scenario where power gets more centralized to the state.

You can’t reorder society to benefit the “lowest wrung[sic]” without planning at least some extent of the economy through directed means. Yes yes, there’s a bunch of variations of this but they’re just window dressing for the underlying ideology, usually to make it more palatable for the less bureaucratically natured among us.

> Can we stop rehashing arguments for planned economies; they are terrible because they ignore the million micro signals that drive the economic engine.

The economic engine you speak of today relies on an astonishing amount of centralization, it's an illusion that it is some kind of 'organic' engine.

We have billions of literally biological brains making many economic choices every day. Our current economy is a very distributed organic engine, it wouldn't work unless everyone contributed by deciding what to buy with their money.

It has central parts but the main decider in the engine is what consumers choose to buy.

Which is influenced by what products consumers can buy in the first place and what products they know and have a good impression of - which is in turn influenced by the decision of large distributors and media companies etc...

This even before getting into financing and regulations.

This assumes that people have access to accurate, up to date and unbiased information to make informed choices about what to buy.

Yes they buy things, to what extent the things available/popular are the product of a free market vs established conglomerates having regulators in their pocket for example is highly debatable imo.

How many of these giants would survive without a steady stream of government contracts?

This is a great discussion. We should define what the engine is.

United States spends ~3% of the GDP in defense. Obviously this creates markets but there is a relatively centralized decision to spend that amount of money.

There's a book "The People's Republic of Walmart" that makes these arguments. Walmart is a massive company, as large as some entire countries even, that operates an internal economy based on central planning. They tell all their suppliers exactly what will be produced, in what quantities, when it will be delivered and largely what it will cost. Modern stock control systems and supplier integration make it feasible.

Calling walmart centrally planned is a massive mistake. Walmart is only responding to what its customers want. That is not central planning as it has ever been used to describe an economy. Central planners repeatedly tried to dictate what consumers want. Walmart is quite literally a market, the opposite of centrally planned.

Responding to purchasing decision by downstream consumers is what the USSR tried to. In theory you would buy things, the price would be slightly higher than the cost, and whatever was being bought more would be produced more, with the profit reinvested in trying to make new products and services. In practice organizing the production efficiently was too difficult due to a confluence of a dozen factors.

Point being, responding to consumer demand is indeed what central planning is supposed to do.

And in practice, every level that has a say in the central planning - even at Walmart - tries to impose other agendas. What they would like to see more produced and consumed as opposed to what the would be purchaser wants. In Russia it might have been that someone wanted to drain off some money, while they knew some regional admin who wanted their figures to look good, etc up the chain. Result: garbage tractors and not enough of them. In the US, with central planning, gas engines are penalized or electrical ones are pushed - whether you think this is a good reason or not.

At least in the US, if Walmart central planning insists on procuring crappy paper towels, there is a good chance that their competitor Target, literally across the street, is at least ignoring them and perhaps even deliberately exploiting their mistake.

Free economy doesn't mean that a business shouldn't try and plan the hell out of things. It means that each business planning process is not the only one around, and all these business are free to have various obsessions (ethical, religious, racist or whatever - none of them traps everyone in), and all these are free to have other blind spots and bugs, etc. They do have bugs. They look for each other's bugs and respond to them.

> they over and under produce just about everything because the central planners have an impossible job.

A free economy is full of over and under production also - probably because exact production is an impossible goal. I feel the better difference is in how free and responsive all the actors can be. Free to over-sheep in a bubble. Free to copy-cat when there is demand. Free to try and exploit any perceived imbalance. Responsiveness and freedom from dogma is a more important characteristic?

> A free economy is full of over and under production also

Not nearly to the same degree, especially if you take into account various distortionary government policies.

This argument is 75 years old. I take it to be less of an argument, and more like history.

I dunno, but China seems to do pretty well economically.

One can argue that all those infinitesimal signals are akin to brownian motion, if so, who better to talk about it than the man himself?

I agree that the labor theory of value isn't useful, and pricing signals are more responsive than any command economy has yet been able to achieve.

However, overproduction is also a problem in capitalism, from a lot of perspectives. The profit motive assures that surpluses are produced, sometimes absurdly bountiful surpluses, and then must be consumed. In the short term, many businesses will fail or be amalgamated if their inputs are too abundant and can no longer support a profit margin. Long term, capitalists will arrange the economy such that surpluses will be consumed by the creation of new desires, rentier capitalism on the necessities of life like housing or healthcare or education, or, failing that, wars.

I'm not saying this is the only factor creating an insatiable loop; humans are pretty good at that by themselves. What's different about capitalism is that there just aren't any brakes you can apply, anywhere.

Are there solutions? Well, we could go back to before capitalism, but that wasn't so great either. When Adam Smith wrote his treatises, the prevailing view among elites was that giving the poor more wealth was a bad thing. It was more important that they be obedient and content with their lot. Smith correctly saw that it mas moral to increase the general wealth, and the wealth of the people was (roll title) the wealth of the nation. So Smith's insight was an important corrective.

I wouldn't want to go back to a system where elites arranged things so that I would be virtuous and poor. By many standards, I live a better life than an elite of the 18th century. But I also am part of a system that has no brakes at all, even as life becomes increasingly frantic and the externalities are piling up all around us.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that it's the government's fault since capitalism has pretty much trounced good governance, at least in the countries where I live in. It's not politically possible to do things that reduce the power of capitalists, even if they are widely popular.

I don’t have to be Adam Smith or elites to know how lottery winners from low end social strata end up.

One cannot simply drop wealth on poor.

So it should be a process.

Only problem we have now is that rich are getting more rich than poor are getting wealth. Where ideally rich could get more rich as poor get out of being poor but they also should be bound by process and timelines.

I think taxing any wealth that will last longer than one lifetime will be needed. But it has to be real and not that ultra rich hide wealth in bs trust funds.

But it will be super hard to implement.

> I don’t have to be Adam Smith or elites to know how lottery winners from low end social strata end up.

Is this actually true or just an appealing stereotype? I have no idea about any studies that looked into this. A quick google brings up this slate article[1] which seems to indicate most lottery winners are doing fine.

[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/07/mega-millions-jackp...

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