
Socialism Requires a Dictator - andrenth
https://fee.org/articles/socialism-requires-a-dictator/
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maxander
No half-educated modern socialist thinks that the Soviet Union was a
successful implementation of communism, much less that it has anything to do
with the aims of the modern socialist movement. To be sure, there are several
distinct problems faced by non-free-market economies, some of which the
Soviets demonstrated through their dramatic failures, but simply pointing at
these challenges doesn't support the thesis that socialist systems are
automatically despotic.

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altstar
So if there is no autocrat, how do the collective allocate resources?

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maxander
A trivial answer would be; through systems overseen by elected
representatives, roughly the same system that allocates state resources in the
U.S.. There's more to be allocated, and allocating resources correctly becomes
_vastly_ more important, but the problem is the same.

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altstar
Any place you can point to where this was implemented and works or worked?

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maxander
The Scandinavian socialist countries are a step in the right direction, but
no, not really. To some degree, this is because communism is a new idea that
has had relatively few chances at implementation, and their implementors were
either immediately corrupt or had undue faith in themselves. But also because
there are fairly major unsolved problems with letting elected representatives
manage resources, as abundantly demonstrated by capitalist democracies. And
likewise, there are manifest (social) problems with letting corporations
manage resources; humanity has yet to find a solution for governing that
reliably "works," IMHO.

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altstar
The Scandinavian countries are not socialistic. The means of production and
ownership of capital is still in private hands.

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audunw
It should be pretty obvious by now that Marx had (partly) the right diagnosis,
but did not really have a clue about the cure. That's understandable though.
It's easy to say what's wrong about society.. harder to predict which fixes
will work.

I think the closest we can come to the socialist ideals, is to have a free
market economy, but have the ownership of capital be more distributed.

The government can not efficiently control the economy directly, at least not
without some powerful, yet-to-be-invented, AI. The beauty of the free market
is that it's basically an enormously powerful computer which, given the right
conditions (relatively fluid markets, lack of monopolies, etc.), calculates
the correct prices for goods and services for an efficient economy. Not
utilizing that computer, without some equally good replacement, is doomed to
fail.

But the government (and by extension - in a decent democracy - the people) can
be a responsible owner of capital. It requires some discipline, and low levels
of corruption, but there are plenty of examples.

I do think less government involvement is a more ideal solution, but it
requires better technology and better organization. I think the way going
forward, is to create a harder separation between capital and income, create a
system where capital more naturally tend to distribute evenly among people,
and to improve the efficiency and quality of stock markets.

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colatkinson
Ignoring the fact that this article is from a very biased source, it also
shows a distinct lack of education. Marxists would argue that the capitalist
system is a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Most of the West does not have
an autocratic political system, but one economic class does hold the vast
majority of social and political power. The goal of a "dictatorship of the
proletariat" is to place the majority of the power in society in the hands of
those who create that society's value through labor.

Also, there's a whole lot of Anarcho-Communists who _really_ don't like the
authoritarian left, but let's just ignore them because it makes it harder to
associate Communism with imminent doom.

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cyansmoker
TL/DR: In this article, the FEE only does what it was created to do: tell us
how socialism is a bad idea while liberal capitalism is a good one. No
surprise here.

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guest
Liberalism is based on an egalitarian society, if that is not upkept it's
plutocratic capitalism (aka aristocracy).

Liberalism capitalism is good, but not on all of the markets.

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jressey
This is propaganda at worst. Misguided idealism at best.

