[SpaceCadetJones]

Income inequality is just the symptom, capitalism is at the heart of the problem. This is what happens when you get a saturated labor market and employers have all of the bargaining power as the vast majority of people are unable to obtain the means to sustain themselves without selling their labor. The way I see it is we can only solve this problem possibly through a livable UBI, or preferably doing a major overhaul of how property rights work. Rather than having individuals own productive property where they employ others and keep everything the employees make, the property should be collectively owned and managed by those working it.

If anyone is interested, I recommend reading up on socialist theory. If you like markets mutualism, market socialism, or collectivism may be interesting to you. If you think planning might be a better route for the 21st century check out syndicalism or communism. There's a number of other philosophies I'm not acquainted with. Also, inb4 "communism/socialism is big government and authoritarianism", I'm tired of explaining the failings of tankies.

[hueving]

>Also, inb4 "communism/socialism is big government and authoritarianism", I'm tired of explaining the failings of tankies.

There hasn't been any evidence yet that central planning is effective in the long run. What do you think will work this time around?

[RodericDay]

Actually, the questions discussed in Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" are alive and well

Central planning and command economies work really well inside corporations, such as Apple or Google. They don't make internal decisions by hosting mini-markets and pitting their workers against each other, they have departments who study demographics and departments that study research and logistics and so on.

Tankies claiming the fall of communism is just around the corner are in the same bucket of "bad" as free market libertarians who adore corporations.

[hueving]

>Central planning and command economies work really well inside corporations, such as Apple or Google.

That's because they can fire anyone that works for the company who doesn't agree with the goals. Do you propose to jail or disappear people that disagree and work against the direction defined by the central plan?

[SpaceCadetJones]

I mean that's only if you have some over arching entity that does all of the planning that commands from the top down. Some people argue for planning at a regional level and cooperating on a larger scale as needed, or organizing work into industry wide unions where leadership is democratically elected, immediately revocable, and the unions go around to communities to gather input for what is needed. If people were being difficult they would likely be kicked out, like a company today. I would hope people still provide for them

Again though, I'm not here to talk about the failings of autocratic state planning advocated by tankies.

[hx87]

The government equivalent would be loss of citizenship or residency rights (exile), not jail or death.

[xixi77]

Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't -- corporations fail all the time. The crucial difference is that when a corporation gets it wrong, it fails and is replaced by another that does not get it quite as wrong.

[digi_owl]

Iirc, even old man Marx back in the day considered central planning a stop gap measure for the transition, not a end goal.

That said, while most people seem to barely know about his writings in Capital Volume 1, Volume 2 and 3, published by Engels after Marx death, went on to point out that while there was a struggle between the factory owning capitalists and their workers. There was also a struggle going on between production capitalists and finance capitalists. And that the ultimate culprit of capitalism was likely to be finance.

IIRC, Marx even noted that in the long run it would likely be better for production capital to ally themselves with the workers against finance. But that production capital was more likely to squeeze the workers as they themselves got squeezed by finance (with landlords and other rent seekers lumped into finance).

[SpaceCadetJones]

Note: I'm not an advocate of central planning. However, I do believe that technology could make it viable. Our purchases in markets are used as inputs to companies so they can plan and allocate resources. I don't see any reason this sort of interaction couldn't be emulated by people giving input as to what they desire. We also have to admit that the USSR and China saw possibly unprecidented growth with centralized economic planning, although I wouldn't really argue that's necessarily a good thing and came at great costs. Personally I believe in more of a transitional approach by converting all corporations to cooperatives and allowing communities to democratically manage property, and seeing where that leads us.

[marcosdumay]

The problem is how could a central planner ensure technological progress and manage people in a bureaucracy composed of the entire country population.

Managing static resources is easy.

Now, cooperatives are interesting. They mostly don't work, but when they work, they are great.

[imtringued]

Central planning doesn't work because to achieve a perfect result the people in charge of the planning have to be perfect too. This clearly doesn't work in practice. Think of it this way. Communism has a better best case scenario than capitalism but this is rarely achieved. On the other hand capitalism has a better average case scenario and gives us consistent results.

[mindslight]

> capitalism is at the heart of the problem

What we call "capitalism" is a perverted incarnation with low interest rates and extremely high monetary inflation. This eliminates the ability to save for the lower class, and pushes in the middle class into wall street's fake "investments" where they can be scavenged by management fees, insider gaming, and bubbles caused by the surplus of dumb money.

Despite what the inflation acolytes preach, prices should be downward trending because price is the primary metric that an economy optimizes for! Gains in productivity should be directly reflected in the price of goods (eg computer technology, which has been advancing strong enough to resist the forced inflation). Instead, these gains are inflated out of sight and the corresponding new money is distributed to the gatekeepers of monetary creation.

In a functioning economy, workers should be able to gradually save some surplus, decreasing their reliance on weekly income, and giving them more bargaining power. This should cause wages to rise, creating a feedback cycle where workers demand to work ever less (as their marginal utility per extra dollar drops).

Instead, extremely low interest rates create a zero-sum treadmill for any modern necessity that can be financialized (eg housing, healthcare, cars, education), leaving us to compete against one another for minute changes in standing while the banksters collect the surplus as rent.

Then again, perhaps my argument is just a no true Scotsman similar to the ones defending communism, and any fiat capitalistic system will eventually succumb to itself and centralize in this manner (deprecate wealth in favor of income).

What I do definitely know is we're not going to get there by demanding top-down change, because the top retains power for itself regardless of what paradigm it promises. We must secure our freedom through technological means and build a better system from the ground up.

[SpaceCadetJones]

Definitely have to agree with you. I do believe it possible to have a functional capitalist society, however it will always devolve into something like the present day as groups natural accumulate large amounts of capital and use it to tip the scales in their favor, continuing the trend and making it so damn hard to account for market externalities or ensure the working class has bargaining power. This also is separate from what I believe to be one of capitalisms greatest ills: worker alienation and the capitalist class expropriating what the employees produce. It creates a huge conflict in society. Collective work requires collective expropriation, otherwise people will feel cheated.

The point about organizing from the bottom up is spot on. I believe many of socialism failings were because of attempts to organize top down and not allowing people to manage themselves. This is why I'm particular to anarchism, as the focus is on creating freely associated communities that come together so power comes from the bottom up and there are no concrete hierarchies. Many also have abandoned the idea of some great revolution to topple the system and instead opt for building structures like co-ops, mutual banks, neighborhood assemblies, community gardens, and charities in hope of building a new society in the shell of the current one.

[mjevans]

I believe in a balance.

The goals of society at large should be reached through agreement.

These goals might be reflected in decreased costs (or even funding) for desired activities and 'taxes' on undesired or activities that should be limited; or maybe through another agreed means.

Individuals, and possibly small groups of individuals, should then be free to choose their own means and methods for realizing those goals (or abstain from that process).

[greendestiny_re]

Excellent comment, thank you for posting this description!

[imtringued]

>the property should be collectively owned and managed by those working it.

In that case the solution is not communism, the solution is compensating people with stocks or other forms of equity.