[TimTheTinker]

> democratically planned economy

Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale.

Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects.

Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving.

EDIT: Video of a grocery store in Moscow, USSR, 1989: https://youtu.be/jWTGsUyv8IE

[fragmede]

That video is so funny, no one is on their phone! Did they not have smartphones in 1989?

While command economies have numerous documented failures, including actual fucking famine during eg the Great Leap Forwards, crowd-sourcing is a very real phenomenon, enabled by the Internet, even under capitalism. Right now, however, we're witnessing the failure of a free-market economy to provide for their poorest citizens. At least the people that starved under Stalin didn't have a Safeway on their block that was filled with food.

Markets are so efficient that even socialist food banks[0] use a "market" on the backend. That doesn't mean that an infinitely free market is infinitely efficient.

[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/food-bank-economics

[rmorey]

democratic socialism does not mandate a command economy see: market socialism, anarcho-syndicalism

[TimTheTinker]

Whatever form of government and economy that arises most directly and naturally from the first principles of land and property ownership, the freedom to work, sell, and buy, and especially that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—which include freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, arms, etc.

Unfortunately, every other large-scale form of government that’s been tried has badly trampled on the personal rights enumerated in the USA’s founding documents. If anything should change here, it should be a dismantling of all the laws and institutions that have grown up like weeds since the late 1700s that are trampling on those rights.

That’s not to disparage some great things that have happened in the mean time: freeing the slaves, illegalizing discrimination by the government, women’s suffrage, etc. But each of those things I’ve named are good because they apply those first principles to areas of government that were lacking application when the country was founded.