Comment by r14c
6 months ago
I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but isn't the idea of socialism that you make a unitary democratic government fill the role of Huge Monopoly Foundation so you can do stuff like fund research labs and be accountable to the public?
It's the statist idea. Socialism in practice usually involves regulating the market heavily, or into oblivion altogether, and giving the State a huge redistribution power. See my comment nearby on why such a setup fails to work.
A socialism where the only way to work is to own a part of an enterprise (so no "exploitation"is possible) would likely work much better, and not even require a huge state. It would be rather inflexible though, or mutate back into capitalism as some workers would accumulate larger shares of enterprises.
Having some kind of default steward for market developments that get so competitive and fundamental that they reach full market saturation is helpful. Under a market system, at that scale, the need for growth starts to motivate companies to cut corners or squeeze their customer base to keep the numbers going up. You either end up pricing everyone out (fixed supply case) or the profit margins get so slim that only a massive conglomerate can break even (insatiable demand case). This is why making fundamental needs and infrastructure into market commodities doesn't work either.
The problem with social democracy is that it still gives capitalists a seat at the table and doesn't address the fundamental issues of empowering market radicalism. Some balance would be nice, but I don't really see that happening.
Across the OECD average government spending is 46% of GDP.
https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/policy-issues/public-finance-...
How is that 'market radicalism' ?
How is government spending ~25 trillion USD a year somehow not considered?
2 replies →
Sounds like distributism.
It depends. Socialism is one of the better alternatives for areas where markets function poorly, like healthcare.
Hardly. Socialism is about workers/communities owning the means of production. Research labs these days are mostly funded by the public. That's just about allocation of government resources.