[theamk]

It's not like there are good options out there. USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A most damning example is that it was impossible to leave USSR during the most of its existence, and people had to do crazy things like jump off cruise ship and swim many miles [0] just to get out of country.

If I have a choice between being jailed in the country and having VCs drive some companies into the ground, I'd choose the latter every time.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov

[dragonwriter]

> It's not like there are good options out there

Yes, there are.

> USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A

The USSR and other Leninist-derived regimes showed what one narrow set of models of authoritarian state “socialism” looks like, sure, and its not pretty just like the pure private capitalism that was generally abandoned netween the early and mid 20th century for the modern mixed economy was not.

OTOH, Leninism and its authoritarian state capitalism (that is, featuring a narrow elite that control society via control of the non-financial means of production, just as the private capitalist class does in private capitalism) is not the only option to to the presently dominant mixed economy that reduces or eliminates the private capitalist elements.

Democratic market-oriented socialisms where the private firms still exist but the non-financial means of production are controlled (either entirely in pure forms, or simply more than in the status quo systems in forms which are still mixed economies but with a different mix) by those working in the firms employing them are possible. In fact, variations along this dimension already exist among modern mixed economies, and the ones further along it are not the limit of how far that can go.

[nine_k]

I'd love to hear about examples.

Sweden tried to become more socialist in 1970s-80s, and it did not look pretty. (Then Mr. Palme was shot and killed.)

Venezuela... well, does not look like an enticing example either.

I would say that socialism as a state-imposed regime does not work, same as communism. BTW communism does work in communes of like-minded individuals, be it a bunch of hippies or a bunch of monks. The key is self-selecting people who subscribe to that way of living voluntarily. This can't work for a whole country.

OTOH what the TFA suggests does work, exactly because mission-driven open-source projects / foundations and non-profits attract the right kind of motivated people, while providing little to no incentive for entities seeking pure profit to take over. Debian is one example: it exists for decades in the normal capitalist economy, is going strong, and shows no signs (and no ways) of selling out.

This, to my mind, is the future. Maybe 50 years from now our grandchildren will be appalled by the fact that we kept giving our free labor and free time to for-profit entities which did not have our best interests aligned with theirs.

[aspenmayer]

> I'd love to hear about examples.

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

> The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer, and the system embodied his notions of management cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories.

> Project Cybersyn was ended with Allende's removal and subsequent death during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. After the coup, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.

Yes, it's that Stafford Beer:

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

[smsm42]

Yeah, it's always "wrong socialism" when it's built. But the next one (after the next one, after the next one, after the next one) will be the right one and will not murder millions of people, despite the previous attempts doing exactly that. Please go away already, we had enough of suffering caused by ivory-tower theoreticians unable to perceive the reality.

[pydry]

It's important to remember that when the British Empire triggered a famine in Ireland justifying it using the free market, it had nothing do with capitalism.

But when Stalin murders millions with a famine, it's all communism's fault.

This is rightthink, and belief in it is the model for being a good little citizen. Wrongthink would be to consider both of these crimes to be separate from the economic system which they were committed under.

[smsm42]

I know a number of places where you were rewarded for "rightthink" and could be imprisoned or murdered for "wrongthink". Most of them had been countries having "People's Democratic" or "Socialist" or something in that vein in their names. I'm sure that's also a pure coincidence having nothing to do with those systems. Though, to be fair, modern followers of those doctrines made a serious headway to implementing the same approach in countries which don't have such words in their names and even considered "capitalist", so I assume in a short while you'd have another excellent argument - that freedom of speech also wasn't particularly suppressed by totalitarian (which is, all of them) socialist governments, it's just something totally separate. Which always happens under socialism, but that's just a coincidence, and it was a wrong socialism anyway, under the right one it won't happen.

[ml-anon]

Are you just ignoring the whole capitalist systems killing millions of people then?

[galfarragem]

IMO, the most dangerous (and unique) characteristic of socialism is its immortality and capacity for reinvention. It is indestructible as a vision.

[closewith]

There are many better options right now then US-style kleptocapitalism. Just look at the HDI index.

[MrGilbert]

How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism, but how about getting the proportionality back on track? Does a single person need to make billions and billions of money? Should I, as a CEO, earn millions of dollars while my workforce can barely survive with one job?

I don’t think so. This is what needs to be fixed on a global scale.

[dragonwriter]

> How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism,

Yes we do. Capitalism, even at the somewhat attenuated level it exists in the modern mixed economy compared to the original system of the same name, creates too strong of a reward system for immoral behavior to correct the moral problems while preserving the system.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” is a systemic, not isolated individual, problem with capitalism.

[BrenBarn]

That's true to an extent but I think that problem increases as that salary (or, more likely, capital gain) increases. So just limiting total wealth increases would likely reduce the temptation to sell out.

[dragonwriter]

Well, sure, but that limitation is very much contrary to capitalism. A very good idea, but definitely moving away from capitalism.

[BrenBarn]

Sounds good to me! :-)