[impossiblefork]

Yes, but in this case the investors will be ordinary people, and the payment will effectively be the products that ordinary people want.

Suppose that cheap electric car mass production is possible with new production technology, and that there's inflation because of high petrol costs. Suppose that interest rates are 5% to prevent inflation. Even if the automobile manufacturers understand that it has to be done and is feasible with some for them to survive they won't be able to do it.

However, with this interest rates can be lower because inflation is prevented by the mandatory savings. The resources to build the cheap thing will actually be available.

If done internationally this will also greatly reduce the profits of oil producing countries: suppose that the US, the EU, China and India, all big consumers of oil, agreed on a mandatory savings rate of at least 1%. Then the ordinary people have less money to bid up the price of oil against each other, but do have money to invest in businesses that substitute for oil production. The co-ordination allows ordinary people and non-resource extracting countries to get more of the pie.

[owebmaster]

You are describing socialism. The US won't ever be socialist. And it works, China is proving that.

[impossiblefork]

How is it socialism? There's no löntagarfonder, there's no requirement to sell parts of companies-- wage labour still exists and while this would create a force which would lead to ordinary people owning a lot of capital, since the fact that companies would be making less profit on some goods would thus end up with reduced value, thus a reduced price, and that these people who are now required to be capital owners would likely buy at this reduced price, but it is not a socialist idea.

It's a patch on the floating-exchange-rate-and-policy-by-interest-rate of monetarist and Keynsianism to make it function in situations where there's both inflation and a need for investment.

I think the transition to this sort of as the US decision to decouple the dollar from gold. A way to get things more sensible.

[bigbadfeline]

> How is it socialism? ... There's no löntagarfonder

And yet that's also you:

> Yes, but in this case the investors will be ordinary people, and the payment will effectively be the products that ordinary people want.

Well, this is essentially löntagarfonder but worse because it's funded by the people under the threat of violence (mandatory savings), not from corporate profits.

> that these people who are now required to be capital owners would likely buy at this reduced price, but it is not a socialist idea.

So, the people are forced to buy the ridiculously inflated marked at ridiculously inflated prices for the faint hope that "likely" they'll get lower prices on something far in the "glorious bright future" (tm). And that's not socialism?

Well, a careful analysis reveals that "likely" is quite unlikely, the people forced to "invest" are going to lose their shirts and inflation will actually accelerate, only the well connected will benefit because they will be in control of this devious scam.

You are obviously not familier with the many forms of socialism and you argue about irrelevant details. Mandatory savings equals socialism, monopolization equals socialism - it's not Stalin's socialism, it's Mussolini's socialism - lets not forget, he was the Duce of the Italian Social Republic. As Hitler was the head of the National Socialist German Workers Party.

[impossiblefork]

>Well, this is essentially löntagarfonder but worse because it's funded by the people under the threat of violence (mandatory savings), not from corporate profits.

Eveything is done under the threat of violence, including things like land ownership. We're not running some kind of country-sized anarcho-syndicalist commune, so presumably we must operate on some other basis of morality, where we don't really care about this threat of violence stuff.

>So, the people are forced to buy the ridiculously inflated marked at ridiculously inflated prices for the faint hope that "likely" they'll get lower prices on something far in the "glorious bright future" (tm). And that's not socialism?

No, the people aren't forced to buy any stock. They keep the money uninvested or whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it. They'll invest it in order to achieve returns, to use at the point when they do get to spend it.

>Well, a careful analysis reveals that "likely" is quite unlikely, the people forced to "invest" are going to lose their shirts and inflation will actually accelerate, only the well connected will benefit because they will be in control of this devious scam.

Only if they're bad at investing, but many will joint together to form funds and try to hire professionals. Presumably banks would offer services to help people deal with their mandatory savings sensibly.

>You are obviously not familier with the many forms of socialism and you argue about irrelevant details. Mandatory savings equals socialism, monopolization equals socialism - it's not Stalin's socialism, it's Mussolini's socialism - lets not forget, he was the Duce of the Italian Social Republic. As Hitler was the head of the National Socialist German Workers Party.

That's the everything-is-socialism, including capitalism is socialism. I prefer the Marxist view: socialism is to each-according-to-his-contribution.

The only thing that is like that in our society is copyright, and this proposed policy isn't either.

[bigbadfeline]

> No, the people aren't forced to buy any stock. They keep the money uninvested or whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it.

There's no such thing as "uninvested", unless the money is in the form of currency under a mattress but this would create such a mess that if Keynes hears about it he won't stop spinning in the long term.

And what the fresh hell is to use money for "whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it"... excluding the mattress, what else can you do with money?

You're simply throwing ideas at the wall without understanding their implications, if you're human you've got to take some econ classes and find an example that is close to what you propose - everything has been tried at some point or another - then we'll have something real to discuss.

[impossiblefork]

They can start a company, they can put it in the stock market, they can invest it in a friend's company, they can invest in land, or in developing land, they can invest it in a fund, etc.