[Atlas667]

Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.

> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.

There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.

> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...

Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy.

This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.

The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

> Both of them freed the slaves.

But only one of them ever gets credit for it.

> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?

There are two ways to frame this.

The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.

The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.

> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?

Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.

We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?

[Atlas667]

> The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.

Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.

It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.

> Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.

So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.

This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.

This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.

The reason direct democracy doesn't work at national scale is that once you've diluted someone's vote by enough (i.e. there are 100 million voters instead of 100 voters), everyone knows their vote has a negligible effect on the outcome and therefore lacks the incentive to spend time researching every individual issue. And at the same time, a larger government is in charge of a wider jurisdiction, and then people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.

The attempt to paper over this is to get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite afflicted with the principal-agent problem and you get a corrupt/captured government.

> It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.

None of that is going to fix the problem that most people don't have time to read about all the details of fisheries rules or the economics of operating a power grid, and then the people who show up are the people with the goal of corrupting the process for their own interests.

Notice that this has nothing to do with capitalism. If the head of the computer science division -- a government department -- wants to do AI stuff, and the most expedient way to generate the power to do it right away is to bring decommissioned coal power plants back online, whether that happens depends on whether the bureau in charge of that has more political power than the one in charge of protecting the environment. There is no magic that makes the trade off go away or requires the alternative you would have preferred to be chosen when people who are better at political games want something else.

> I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government.

That isn't a thing.

Suppose you have a piece of property, like a house or a phone. If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's. You come home and there is a stranger sleeping in your daughter's bed and you can't even object to it. If you have naked pictures of you and your spouse on your phone, those belong to everybody. Obviously this isn't the thing that anybody wants.

But as soon as you put anyone in charge of deciding who gets to use what, those people are the privileged elite. They go gerrymander the districts so they can stay in office even after doing things you don't like, or use their existing control over media outlets to convince people to vote for their continued control over media outlets etc.

"Socialism" does nothing against that. It makes it worse; it's why the USSR was a dystopia.

For markets to work you need them to be competitive, which requires you to limit government corruption, and the best way we know how to do that is limited government so that the government doesn't have the power to do the things most strongly associated with corruption, like imposing fixed mandatory fees/costs or onerous regulatory barriers to entry. And that mostly works when you actually do it.

For a command economy to work you need some way to limit government corruption even while the government is fully enmeshed in every aspect of the economy, which no one has ever managed to pull off and there is not even any apparent means to do it.

[Atlas667]

> ...people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.

You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making. You're presenting your absurd ideas and saying their mine. There are many, many ways of going around this. Mind you, states are somewhat independent within a federal system.

> ...get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite...

Political parties are actually the BEST way to achieve this. A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.

> If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's.

This is the most childish take of socialism I have seen in a while, I'll still address it. Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property. Productive property being property that serves others. A house is personal property, even a mansion or a castle is personal property but a retail company that feeds 180 million people should not be personal property. But it is.

Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.

My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.

Production is limited by the profits of a few and ONLY socialism can unleash productions best side. With everyone employed we can satisfy most material human needs. Right now.

> it's why the USSR was a dystopia.

This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires. And there's plenty of them. It's propaganda made for you as an American citizen. The CIA themselves claim the USSR wasn't a dictatorship in analysis they made in the late 60s. They then lied to the American people, such as yourself, because of the threat their ideology presented to the megacorps who rule america.

I do not believe the USSR was rainbows and sunshine tho. Do not misinterpret me. My point is not that I want to imitate a USSR, not even in the very slightest. It had flaws that caused its take over by capitalists. The USSR was a real country like any other with real flaws.

My point is that production can only be accelerated by socialism to go past the confines of capitalist ownership and into a realm of self satisfying production.

You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.

These are, really, gestures towards socialism that I'm giving you. I'm just one guy, I don't represent much past me. But I know this, with the current technology that we have there should be much less needs in the world than there are now. And i know some people make money off others' needs.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making.

If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.

If you elect representatives, the rules of the elections process and thereby the seats become the target of capture efforts. And the more having a seat gives you the power to do, the stronger the capture efforts will be.

> A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.

The premise here being that if the party becomes successful, its leaders would somehow be immune from the principal-agent problem. But what stops them from using the fact that most people don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to all the details to stuff their own pockets the same as Democrats and Republicans?

> Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property.

That isn't a discernible category. If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it. And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.

> Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.

I mean, there is no law against this right now. You can literally get your friends together, pool your resources and open your own retail store. The biggest existing barrier to this is raising the money for the real estate, which is the thing kept artificially scarce by government zoning restrictions.

> My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.

So how are you envisioning this working? You and your friends get together and open a retail store. You all work there and collectively control the company. Do you all get an equal share of the proceeds, even if one of you is the janitor and another is an engineer? If the store is successful and you could use more staff, by what means do you determine who is allowed to join and what they get in exchange for signing on? If the store is successful but you don't need more staff, e.g. because you're good at automating things, does that mean everybody who works there gets a bigger share and no one new is allowed to join? What if someone is already a member and they turn out to be a schmuck who refuses to do their part?

> This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires.

The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.

> You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.

Money is a proxy. To produce you need labor and materials. But where do they come from? What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?

[Atlas667]

> If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.

You're right. I was making a mistake.

What I'm actually talking about is delegate democracy. Where representatives act only as mouth pieces for their directly involved constituents.

The title of this wiki article may make you cringe but its a good, short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy

For this to work it requires a culture of active democracy, not just, often rich, representatives estimating what we need from their detached lives.

It may answer your logistical questions, though i suspect it won't ease your power-dynamic worries.

> If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it.

You're right as well. In many cases the type is defined by its use. In many socialist practices local councils barred individuals or group of individuals from employing others for production. This settled that distinction. While at the same time using your own property to produce yourself (or your family) is fine. The point of socialism is recognizing that capitalist production becomes a social illness, not individual production.

Another way of putting it is that socialized production for private profits creates a power imbalance.

If you are an employee at MY food farm, helping produce the same food you consume, then I have leverage. This is a very very simplified view of capitalism.

> And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.

True, this is what lead to the fall of the USSR. There was a conspiracy to destroy it from within. When it fell what happened next is national assets worth billions were bought by individuals for literally next to nothing.

And this same thing you point out is also what is causing so much corruption and de-regulation in all capitalist economies.

> So how are you envisioning this working?...........

These are things that would be worked out by the people in that job. The point is to keep the place running and everyone satisfied. Generally, people are paid according to how much they work. You don't work you don't get paid. If the place is running efficiently the people keeping it operational reap more benefits.

Look at it this way. In capitalism efficiency is kind of terrible for workers because they get laid off. In socialism efficiency means less work for more benefit. And if you automated it, great, the world is a better place, go find another thing to do. There's always shit to be done, no need to limit work to profit-generation.

It's self sustaining, actual social benefit.

> The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.

Many people who lived through it remember it fondly. Especially when they're comparing it to their now capitalist countries. The CIA actually recognizes that at one point the USSR had similar or greater avg caloric intake per person than the US. Sure, there were downturns, sure there was Stasi (Stasi is a CIA/FBI). But a lot of it is bogey man propaganda.

People are people, you can't run a country with absolute abject repression anywhere in the world. Sure, there are always periods of repression in any country. The US has had its periods as well: the great depression, the red scare, the extreme racism, the deep classism, the defense of megacorp theft, the war-mongering at the cost of its youth, the US also has the most people in jail, more than any country on earth (this gets spun as tough-on-crime).

I'm sure the USSR was a tough place during the civil war and during WW2. The US benefited from not having a civil war in the 1910s, and it benefited from not having a world war fought on its soil. The Germans were literally trying to annihilate the USSR, where more than 2 times more Slavs than Jews died during WW2. These things objectively made the USSR rougher to live in.

Even then, socialism, to me, is only tangentially related to the USSR. I am not a fanatic or anything like that. The USSR was a country who tried to do it and failed, plain and simple. They made terrible mistakes leading to massive loss of life AND also had terrible conditions to work with. In my mind it is similar to how the US has lead to terrible loss of life inside its own borders and through out the world due to policies and wars that have only made a few people rich.

What I'm saying is that for socialists the USSR, in and of itself, is never the point.

> What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?

The satisfaction of their own needs. A council of workers can abstract resource distribution in an even better way than money ever could. Money is like the lamest proxy for work with too many exploitable flaws.