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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (359795)	11/21/2007 6:52:48 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578294

Yeah, whenever socialism fails its only "so-called" socizlism and it failed cause the wrong people ran it.

To: tejek who wrote (359795)	11/27/2007 1:23:05 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578294

The workers may have gotten screwed, but they got screwed in many other places and times without the specific type of problems that the Soviet Union had. The primary point of failure in the Soviet Union was indeed the socialist system. Government ownership of the means of production, and government planning of what is produced and to an extent how its consumed. Its true that the Soviet Union had many corrupt or otherwise poor planers and leaders, but its the nature of such a system to attract such people. In any case even the wisest, most intelligent and most benevolent group of planners ever assembled could not adequately plan a large complex economy. Their are numerous faults of a primarily socialist system, but two primary ones stand out. The first is the most widely recognized problem with socialism and communism. The 2nd is probably an even more severe issue, even if it doesn't get as much attention. 1 - A problem with incentives. If you don't get more by working, longer, harder and smarter, then you are less likely to work longer, harder and smarter. If you can't benefit from taking risks, than you won't take risks. 2 - While its possible to get limited groups of people, or large groups of people for a limited time, sufficiently motivated to produce enough even if they don't benefit from their increased efforts, and could free-ride off others if others increase their efforts; you still have a major problem in determining what should be produced, and how much of each item should be produced. In a free market system, you have real prices, and a profit motive that causes people to respond to these prices. If the price goes up its a signal that more needs to be produced and/or less consumed. If the price goes down its the opposite signal. In a communist or fully socialist system you destroy the information contained by prices. Sure a good might have an arbitrarily determined price but its meaningless. Both problems are smaller in a mixed system, particularly the 2nd. The free market can determine the proper price, and a "social democratic" government can give benefits to the poor to help them. Such benefits do distort price signals a bit, and certainly can reduce the incentive to work, but you can have a productive, healthy, growing economy anyway. Maybe not as healthy as it would be with less government control, but strong enough to work around most of the difficulties imposed by the government. Of course governments are tempted to go beyond assistance to the poor, and impose more and more restrictions and controls. Politicians like power, both directly (being in control lets you have a lot of say in what happens and politicians like that), and because they can wield the power in ways that increase their political support, treating voters as groups of special interests, to which they can dole out benefits, in order to to gain support.