[Workaccount2]

The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good, rather than accept selfish gain and leverage it for greater good.

At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.

[WalterBright]

The 38% of Stanford students that claim to be disabled is an ample illustration:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715

[solatic]

> someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more

This is true of all societies, not just socialist ones. In capitalism, it's called philanthropy and charity. The underlying social contract is noblesse oblige, that the right to enjoy the trappings of wealth comes with an obligation to ensure that the poor are reasonably taken care of.

The real difference that socialism poses is not that it should happen at all, but that it should happen by force with the power of the State, due to the wealthy as a class no longer making the independent free choice of discharging such obligations.

[M95D]

I see 3 flaws here.

> The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good

1) You think that human behaviour is selfish by default (it is, but only until adolescence) and not subject to parental education and/or influence by media and general society. Everything in the western world promotes selfishness. Selfish people are a natural consequence of that.

2) If you read the article, socialism can still use (free) markets, which is the basis of your argument that people acting in their self-interest are still good to society.

> socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more

3) Another of your flaws is to think that only in socialist/communist societies some people need to get less for doing more. Completely wrong. In all societies some people need to be getting less for doing more. The only difference is which, and how many of them. Poor people in capitalist countries can work 2 jobs and still can't get out of poverty while stock owners get passive income for life. You should judge societies by the proportion between those getting less than they work and those getting more than their work - a statistic traditionally called "inequality".

> pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets

A correct and fair approach is to find out why Beth is a pot head and why she doesn't attend group meets (most likely a separate issue with the group).

College campus communists don't have the resources to do drug education, health (including mental health and addiction treatment), career counseling, drug police, etc., but states (communist or not) do. The communist state I lived in did all that, but badly because of corruption, and treatments and counseling didn't invovlve any psychology, which was entirely forbidden as a science.

[sirponm]

I'm not sure if you read more than the title... this isn't socialism. Yet even the title suggests that it isn't socialism. Instead, this uses the selfishness that the free market is built upon and removes the capitalist wealth-extracting layer to provide the rich egalitarian society that socialism and broader anti-capitalist movements aim for.