[twoquestions]

Providing enough for everyone to exist is trivial, what's distinctly non-trivial is satisfying those needs in an economic system like ours. Right now our economy requires access to necessities to be precarious, to motivate people to sell their time and most of their freedom to Those In Charge to buy them.

The alternative to this, where everyone has what they need to exist without submitting to one leader or another, is true Liberty, which rightly terrifies our ruling class.

I know this is a bit abstract, but I hope it makes sense.

[jules]

The only reason we have enough is because of that economic system. Take a look at Venezuela. It ought to terrify everyone that so many take what we have for granted.

[maxxxxx]

We shouldn't always point at obviously dysfunctional examples when we look at problems in our society. There is no natural law that things will always end up like Venezuela or the Soviet Union when we change things.

[jules]

Or North Korea, or Mao's China, or Pol Pot's Cambodia, or...

Until all the necessities are 100% automated there are only two options to motivate people to produce those necessities: through force, or through self-interest. The list above is where they tried force. Maybe it's not a natural law that such a system has so far always failed, but it's not a mystery either.

[gremlinsinc]

Why does it have to be either socialism or capitalism?

What if every employee became a shareholder and reaped rewards for such, making companies employee owned and 'SHARING' everything.. ---it's a more privatized way of running socialism and imho works better...

I do think gov't should cover healthcare/education -- maybe require service in military, or local community initiatives for those who are pacifists/not fit enough to serve.

Employee owned companies / Worker Co-ops I think are the wave of the future, and the next big economic shift. I'm wanting to start a web dev / growth hacking company built around that principle, where even the janitor would be an employee-owner (that's an example, janitorial would probably be contracted out).

Good examples are Winco foods -- where some cashiers who started with them in the 80s/90s are worth > $1 million dollars and are still working in-store: i.e. haven't necessarily moved to any sort of 'exec' position. They've just received shares/stock to raise up their living standards substantially.

[jules]

> What if every employee became a shareholder and reaped rewards for such, making companies employee owned and 'SHARING' everything.. ---it's a more privatized way of running socialism and imho works better...

There is nothing stopping this from happening. You can start such a company now. Heck, you can start a communist commune within a free market system. It doesn't happen much because it doesn't work well enough. The classic corporate structure is far more common because it works.

Even if you took all the shares from the shareholders of an existing company and gave them to the employees you'd revert to inequality soon enough. How much are the new cashiers at Winco foods worth? How many of the old Winco foods employees are still rich? How many of the ones who got rich and stayed rich are still working as a cashier? How big is Winco foods compared to Walmart? Most people who have a million dollars don't want to work as a cashier, a few counterexamples notwithstanding. The basic principle of making employees invested in the success of the company is a good one, but the government shouldn't force that model. Let businesses apply that model where they think it works. Google gives stock to employees, great! Company X doesn't, also great.

> I do think gov't should cover healthcare/education

I agree, the government should finance this for people who can't afford it, but the government should not be running the hospitals or the schools for the same reason that the government should finance food for people who can't afford it, but they shouldn't run the supermarket.

> -- maybe require service in military, or local community initiatives for those who are pacifists/not fit enough to serve.

Why? The all-volunteer military works well. Compensate people for the job instead of forcing them to do it.

[maxxxxx]

You could also take a look at Europe or the US in the 50s. More income distribution than the current state doesn't mean that Stalin's successors will take over immediately.

[jules]

Europe or the US in the 50s didn't guarantee the necessities for people who choose not to work either. I'm not even necessarily opposed to flattening the income distribution by government intervention, but guaranteeing all the necessities is a radical change. Let's try it on a small scale first.

[baursak]

Communism does not imply totalitarianism, and capitalism does not imply democracy.

[jules]

Give one example of a communist country that didn't turn totalitarian. Capitalism doesn't imply democracy, but capitalist dictatorships do tend to gravitate in that direction, e.g. Chile.

[maxxxxx]

My point was that making changes to the current system doesn't necessarily mean communism. Capitalism or market economies can have many different shapes without becoming dictatorships.

[twoquestions]

"Our economic system could be improved" != "Full Communism Now!"

I don't think the improvements I hope for will resemble Capitalism (where Capital is controlled either by a dictator or an oligarchy of shareholders) or past implementations of Socialism, where the State controls Capital.

[baursak]

Venezuela is more capitalist than China. There are more state controlled industries in China than in Venezuela by a large margin. How come you're not saying "take a look at China"?

[pault]

Perfect resource allocation requires a perfectly incorruptible coordinator. Perfect socialism might become possible (and even preferable) if/when AGI is solved.

Iain Banks puts it nicely in his "A Few Notes on the Culture" essay [0]:

"Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

"The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

"It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

"Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy."

[0] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

[samsgro]

Great rebuttal to one of the other commentator's lines... "Yes, the accumulation of capital gains should rightly go to the owners of capital." This position elevate the good of capital assets while ignoring/not balancing it with the "... acute, prolonged, and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings".

[baursak]

What is AGI?

[aswanson]

It is, but a good point of departure for discussion. Can you elaborate on how that alternative can evolve from the present way of doing things?

[js8]

I am not PP but I think a decent basic income is a good alternative.

Effectively, it is splitting of fruits of economic production into two portions. One portion is redistributed to everybody, and the other is subject of free competition. So you can get the best of both worlds, capitalism and socialism. If you want to compete for the other portion, you can. If you don't want to compete (and be dominated by people who do compete), you live on the basic income.

[twoquestions]

Not easily, I'll admit. We've been working for so long at dealing with scarcity that when presented with abundance we don't know what to do.

I'm at least glad that people are at least starting to understand that our economic system while better than it's predecessors by a mile, should be improved.

This kind of question is better answered piecemeal, like how do we get the homeless into one of the 4-5 empty homes per homeless person, or how do we avoid throwing away 40+% of the food we grow? Correcting horrific market failures like this is a wonderful way to start.