I have a few friends that are hard line “socialist” and I will give them the benefit of doubt and assume they mean “democratic socialist”. At first I had no ambition to learn more about it since they are all like “DOWN with that EVIL capitalism!” …which makes me think they are just tribal brainwashed idiots.
However, the responsible thing is to learn about it. Make up my own mind. I started with a google search just to get the generic idea behind it. The main idea seems to be “social ownership of the means of production”. Ok, I can get on board with that. I’m thinking that means instead of private ownership of production, it is more like a collaborative effort where the group own the business and decides on compensation and the rest in a democratic manner. Workers control the business… yes? (Sounds kinda cool actually)
Ok… but how is this inconsistent with capitalism? To me, capitalism is about competition and survival of the best suited. Is that not still happening in democratic socialism. Within the collective, workers must still compete to be valued in that collective. Collectives must themselves must compete with other collectives to win over the consumers.
Im just confused. It seems like the democratic socialist are making capitalism a scapegoat when the real evil is the SAME evil that plagues capitalists themselves!
It sucks, because maybe they DO have some good ideas, but they alienate people like me by improperly villainizing capitalism as a whole rather than specifying the flaw with certain parts of it
It is a system that does not reward competent individuals than appropriate ones. After all, in the socialist system the elite class lives better than majority of country population.
The current system, despite its numerous, numerous flaws, is rewarding me just fine and so I’m not on board with the idea. I’m cautiously constructive on the current state of affairs.
the bottom line is who has control of enterprise and who gets the profit.
essentially in capitalism it emphasizes private ownership. with private ownership the capitalist is incentivized to take the risk by the rewards of profit. to maximize profit they need to make sure they maximize revenue by having the best product that provides the best value to their customers. then they would focus on minimizing the cost of all factors of production, worker wages is just one factor, along with cost of goods, operational costs, debt interest, tax, capex, etc.
on corporation being evil… the rise of corporations introduced the idea of limited risk! which meant that the capitalist minimized their downside only to the amount that they put up. the capitalist also protects itself for any bad behavior done by the firm aka taking unnecessary leverage, legal liabilities, or criminal actions. it also allowed them easy access to capital, by allowing them to sell portions of themselves to others to further grow their business. It also allowed them to be valued by the market through many individuals as oppose to selling themselves to 1 sole buyer (fewer potential buyers results in lower valuation)
social democrazy focuses on social ownership, either through state owned enterprise, or the workers of the company.
state owned enterprise is essentially communism. the government owns the enterprise and takes all the upside, in theory the government is the people, hence the upside is redistributed to everyone. in practice the government forces its control and the upside is redistributed to government officials. the people at the very top make appointments and assigns an official to run the enterprise. the rep is paid a fixed salary, and typically does not share in the upside. in practice, the rep tries to make side hustles by taking bribes to have the upside aka corruption and is to the detriment of the people!
the birth of silicon valley is actually a form of social democracy because these engineers revolted against their boss and decided to start a new firm where they owned the company and participated in the upside as oppose to a fixed salary. early venture capitalists funded them for a share of profitsand perhaps a little control (negotiable). the workers with higher ownership, decided on direction collectively and were paid more if their company did well, hence each worker was incentivized to work harder for the firm’s collective success.
i’ve never seen it this way but i am a social libertarian. it is a confused viewpoint but how can one’s position not consistently deal with cognitive dissonance?
basically my take is right wing on liberty, rights and economic structure (private ownership, etc) and left wing on everything else. you fund the left wing with high tax which i do not see as an infringement on liberty or rights but simply paying homage to the society that allows for liberty and rights. liberty and rights are not something that you are entitled to (i mean, philosophically you are) but something that society pays for as a whole to maintain.
i bet the vast majority of canadians are actually social libertarian but don’t really realize it.
Both involve control of means of production by the government which is inneficient in allocating scarce resources and leads to worse inequality among populations and no opportunity for a better life unless you are involved with the government which innately leads to corrpution.
The only difference is the beginnings. One starts with a pretense of providing fairness and equality of outcome, altruistic intentions of lifting up the “victim classes”. Poor management of resources and no competition exacerbates the difference between the haves and have nots because you destroy class mobility . Fascism begins from extreme nationalism, disenfranchisement, racism, religious or ideological extremism, gov’t once again controls everything, and and you get similar outcome.
btw, social ownership of the means of production is always the worst idea ever. it is impossible for it not to lead to huge and unexpected mismatches in supply and demand and therefore result in persistent and robust suffering. while the negatives of corruption are what most people talk about when they talk about socialism, the true issue is that supply/demand imbalances are innate to social ownership of the means of production and pricing mechanisms aren’t available to rebalance supply and demand.
