10 ms·

I call myself a socialist but I wasn't born 100 years ago so I've accepted that absolute centrally planned economies are poor and money and markets will never b

I call myself a socialist but I wasn't born 100 years ago so I've accepted that absolute centrally planned economies are poor and money and markets will never be abolished. But what I want is more democratically forms of corporations, government policies that produce less income inequality and regulations over business which prevents monopolies and market distortions, along with much stronger unions (ideally a situation where we keep the government, corporations and unions all more or less at odds with each other in order to maximize actual individual liberty--defined to exclude the current contradictory definition of liberty as "wielding as much capital power as you possibly can over other people"). What we have right now is a situation where corporations run the government and are in the process of consolidating every more tightly into monopolistic cabals. That is also the end goal of unregulated free market capitalism, it isn't the optimum allocation of capital, it is the optimum exploitation of labor for profits. Yeah, the magic wand solution of government-run economies and doing away with money and markets doesn't work. Outside of some sophomorically edgy and loud tankies on twitter and reddit nobody really wants to do that, and it wouldn't get anywhere if they tried.

RC_ITR 4y ago
The big propaganda win has always been “it’s either no holds barred free market capitalism or its central planning.” Of those two, free markets lead to better outcomes, but rarely optimal outcomes. There are middle grounds. What’s worse is that America’s markets are already extremely skewed (tax deductible mortgage interest for example), but free market proponents ignore that, since it’s the baseline.
- dingusdew 4y ago
  [dead]
- seiferteric 4y ago
  Exactly, I find it funny that people will call themselves socialist, capitalist, communist... these are 19th century ideas or earlier. The reality is none of these ideologies are complete solutions, they are simply tools that can be used in certain cases. Yes it seems that capitalism/free markets works best most of the time (even China knows this) but there are many cases where it does not and something else has to happen (healthcare, housing etc.)
  - umrcumrcu 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - seiferteric 4y ago
      You have misread what I said, it is not either capitalist or socialist. Policies can incorporate both, using subsidies, tax policies, law/regulations etc to incentivize desired outcomes
    - halostatue 4y ago
      I can’t speak toward the latter, but the existence of high quality healthcare in pretty much every single western country that has better average outcomes than the US indicates that capitalist healthcare is an utter failure. Yes, the US is great if you have that one-in-a-million weird disease and/or sizeable funds to call upon in some way, but for the average Jane, there’s nothing that recommends the US healthcare system as better than, say, Sierra Leone’s. As far as I can tell, most of the world does better.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
        It might be true that they have better "average" outcomes. Were I some sort of mathematical abstract that existed only in the imaginations of statisticians this might actually be a winning argument. If the average can be improved simply by giving slightly more to the 20% who are chronically unhealthy, while letting things get worse for the 80% (I assume I'm in this bucket), then you're asking for me to be worse off so that a smaller number of people who are half-dead anyway can have a few more weeks of slightly less misery.
        seiferteric 4y ago
        Good thing there's nothing stopping you from paying more money to get better healthcare. That doesn't eliminate the good done from having some baseline healthcare provided to everyone.
        deleted 4y ago
- fallingknife 4y ago
  Interest expenses are deductible from all businesses taxes. (Wouldn't make sense if they weren't, as a money losing company could still be forced to pay income tax.) So If I build an apartment building and rent out the units, my interest expenses are deducted, and nobody is arguing with that. So if I buy a house and live in it, why shouldn't I be able to deduct the same?
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Ok, and credit card interest?
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      I would argue that should be deductible
      - RC_ITR 4y ago
        Ok let’s play that out. If I’m at the top marginal rate, I effectively gain 40 cents for every untaxed dollar. Loewe then tells me that instead of paying $5k for my calfskin bag today, I can take out a 1 year $1k loan with a 400% APR via store credit card. So now instead of needing $8.3k of gross income to afford that bag, I only need $5.7k! And you know who loses that $2.6k? The government. It’s a market skew, most people agree that frivolous consumption shouldn’t be subsidized in that way, but the home thing is still up for debate (though I think it’s a bad skew now that we aren’t trying to win the Cold War, personally).
        fallingknife 4y ago
        You are not the first person to notice the tax shield effect of debt. Companies take on debt the don't need all the time to optimize their balance sheet to minimize tax liability. If they can do it, why not individual taxpayers?
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  Tax deductible mortgage interest is a favorite whipping boy, but consider the alternative - It would be more effective for corporations to buy properties and rent them out, because corporations could still charge the mortgage payments as operating loss. I would gladly incorporate a C-Corp and rent my house at market rate to myself.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    I would prefer that too. The more people are exposed to the true cost of housing, the more likely they are to care about it. I also don’t think it’s an intrinsic good that people own their homes. Looks what it has done in places like CA where nothing gets built anymore.
WalterBright 4y ago
> where corporations run the government Are you sure about that? In this state, at least, a politician cannot get elected without union endorsement.
- t-3 4y ago
  Why do you think seem to think unions are independent from corporations? The regulations on unions and corporate capture of union executives make them little more than external HR departments. The strike suppression and sheer number of sellout contracts pushed through in the past few years under the "most pro-union president" should make it abundantly clear that unions in the US are a total joke.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > should make it abundantly clear that unions in the US are a total joke. The teachers' union rules the states, for example. It's illegal for teachers to strike, but they strike anyway with impunity, and the elected officials they endorsed always cave. The unfunded pension system for public union employees is entirely due to their capture of the governments. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2022/07/07/states-unfunded-pension-liabilities-persist-as-major-long-term-challenge https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    The largest union, by a huge margin (over 1.2m larger than #2) is the NEA (teacher's union), and three of the top six unions are public unions. It would be reasonable to say at least those operate independently from corporations.
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      But they seem not to operate particularly independently from governments, which is kind of the problem.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
I feel pretty much the same way; is there a better name for this besides democratic socialism? > Yeah, the magic wand solution of government-run economies and doing away with money and markets doesn't work. Outside of some sophomorically edgy and loud tankies on twitter and reddit nobody really wants to do that, and it wouldn't get anywhere if they tried. While I agree the "socialists" who want full-blown (central, government run with no free market elements and no money) socialism are the minority, it's frustrating that good conversation around socialism is hard to find because detractors specifically attack this extreme side of the dichotomy.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism might work.
- hospitalJail 4y ago
  I'm a moderate/independent and probably a capitalist due to the pragmatism. However, I tell people that I would be a radical socialist if it worked. I might be okay with inefficiencies if we really could get rid of class, or that we could keep our excess value of labor. That puts me on the extreme side. The less extreme side just seems inefficient and creates a class of government workers/politicians who control resources are the new upper class. It really sounds like you want capitalism with some sort of redistribution or better taxation. I most recently found Green Capitalism as a word I could likely get behind, but it still suffers from the issue of resources going through government workers/politicians.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nivenkos 4y ago
Income inequality is good, and fighting markets is like trying to stop the tide. It's accumulated wealth that is the problem (and leads to the corruption of free markets and democracy). Policies should be focused on that - taxing wealth rather than work, and encouraging profitable investments rather than sitting on assets. Whereas now the so-called "left-wing" policies are awful - rent control is popular in Europe despite being an unfair disaster in Sweden. There are high taxes on income and high VAT, whilst inheritance, land and wealth taxes have been abolished, greatly hurting social mobility while benefiting established, inherited wealth. Same with a lot of focus on patching up symptoms - like not prosecuting low-value shoplifting, allowing squatting on "empty" properties, etc. rather than trying to improve market conditions, education and training and the housing market, etc. to ensure that everyone could get a much better salary to begin with.
- danaris 4y ago
  > Income inequality is good [Citation needed] To be clear, I'm not implying that it would be good to have absolutely everyone make exactly the same amount. I'm saying that income inequality at high levels is bad, demonstrably so, and inevitably leads to concentrations of wealth. I'm also not sure why you think that high VAT and lack of inheritance and wealth taxes are "left-wing" policies. Those are all regressive, and exactly the kinds of things that the right wing is pushing for here in the US. At most, I would think that such policies would be compromises between a left wing that wants progressive income taxes alongside inheritance and wealth taxes, and a right wing that wants VAT and basically nothing else.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- PrimeMcFly 4y ago
  We need wealth limits for companies (which should be more like co-ops), proportional to the size of the company, with everything pasta threshold going back into UBI or something. Same for individual wealth accumulation. People could do more projects/start more companies to earn more, but no one should be accumulating millions by doing almost nothing as is the case now.
int_19h 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
reso 4y ago
It's unfortunate that "socialism" came to mean "central planning" in the 20th century. It didn't mean that before the Bolsheviks and Marxist-Leninism out-competed (and then destroyed) the other socialist movements in the 1920s and 30s. By first principles socialism == worker control of the means of production, or the idea that the people who do labour should have a major stake in the decision making surrounding it. This general idea of worker control is entirely compatible with markets and with price-discovery as a coordination mechanism between firms and localities. There's even partial examples of this in many "capitalist" economies today. Volkswagen is required to have union reps on their board of directors. That's socialism!
- asdff 4y ago
  There is socialism in the U.S. too. If you work for the government in some capacity you are participating in the socialist side of our nation in practice. IMO the US military especially is a model of what a fully socialist US would look like, if it were allowed to scale to all sectors. WWII with the socialist centrally planned economy was an interesting case study for the U.S.; it showed how this manner of socialism can reorient an otherwise depressed labor economy into the dominant world power in a few short years.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    It works well, when all the other world economies have been devastated by war. The US government/military control in WWII was essentially totalitarian, with rationing and price controls.
    - asdff 4y ago
      We went from 25% unemployment in the great depression to less than 2% unemployment during WWII. I'd say that was a remarkable economic recovery by any measure, and it amounted to offering government jobs to people. It would be interesting to imagine an alternate history where that historically massive labor effort went to infrastructure building rather than infrastructure destruction, however.
  - 4y ago
intalentive 4y ago
A fish rots from the head. Any talk of reform must begin with price fixing in the capital markets.
kwere 4y ago
>regulations over business which prevents monopolies and market distortions, along with much stronger unions monopolies can be the "natural" outcome of market forces or economic realities. Like having the best product by far or owing the only possible railroads tracks. The solution would be to cap ownership/voting rights to make shareholding as decentralized as possible and having a progressive tax rate on ROA or similar metrics Unions have shown time and time again to not be able to scale efficiently, shifting power from the "people" to the secretariat when becoming a mass organization. Secretariat that engage in political squabble to enlarge its own power and those of its associates. Unions become a tool for societial corruption. I consider also the concept of antagonistic union a somewhat relic of the past (at least in europe) and will much more appreciate organizations acting more like consortiums of workers and getting consulative seats in the boards of the target industries akin to german unions
- Kbelicius 4y ago
  > Unions have shown time and time again to not be able to scale efficiently, shifting power from the "people" to the secretariat when becoming a mass organization. Secretariat that engage in political squabble to enlarge its own power and those of its associates. Unions become a tool for societial corruption. Isn't this true of corporations or any other mass organization? Unions, AFAIK, are at least democratic.
wesapien 4y ago
Treat every corporate criminal like criminal and maybe they will leave the US. Then treat those criminal corporations as terrorist orgs if they continue to do criminal things overseas.
mech765 4y ago
It is perfectly legal to start a company as a co-op, or as any other non-traditional structure. There's an argument to be made that corporations have a growth advantage because their profit motive makes them grow faster than other structures. How would you propose balancing that?

RC_ITR 4y ago

The big propaganda win has always been “it’s either no holds barred free market capitalism or its central planning.” Of those two, free markets lead to better outcomes, but rarely optimal outcomes. There are middle grounds. What’s worse is that America’s markets are already extremely skewed (tax deductible mortgage interest for example), but free market proponents ignore that, since it’s the baseline.

dingusdew 4y ago
[dead]
seiferteric 4y ago
Exactly, I find it funny that people will call themselves socialist, capitalist, communist... these are 19th century ideas or earlier. The reality is none of these ideologies are complete solutions, they are simply tools that can be used in certain cases. Yes it seems that capitalism/free markets works best most of the time (even China knows this) but there are many cases where it does not and something else has to happen (healthcare, housing etc.)
- umrcumrcu 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - seiferteric 4y ago
    You have misread what I said, it is not either capitalist or socialist. Policies can incorporate both, using subsidies, tax policies, law/regulations etc to incentivize desired outcomes
  - halostatue 4y ago
    I can’t speak toward the latter, but the existence of high quality healthcare in pretty much every single western country that has better average outcomes than the US indicates that capitalist healthcare is an utter failure. Yes, the US is great if you have that one-in-a-million weird disease and/or sizeable funds to call upon in some way, but for the average Jane, there’s nothing that recommends the US healthcare system as better than, say, Sierra Leone’s. As far as I can tell, most of the world does better.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
      It might be true that they have better "average" outcomes. Were I some sort of mathematical abstract that existed only in the imaginations of statisticians this might actually be a winning argument. If the average can be improved simply by giving slightly more to the 20% who are chronically unhealthy, while letting things get worse for the 80% (I assume I'm in this bucket), then you're asking for me to be worse off so that a smaller number of people who are half-dead anyway can have a few more weeks of slightly less misery.
      - seiferteric 4y ago
        Good thing there's nothing stopping you from paying more money to get better healthcare. That doesn't eliminate the good done from having some baseline healthcare provided to everyone.
      - deleted 4y ago
fallingknife 4y ago
Interest expenses are deductible from all businesses taxes. (Wouldn't make sense if they weren't, as a money losing company could still be forced to pay income tax.) So If I build an apartment building and rent out the units, my interest expenses are deducted, and nobody is arguing with that. So if I buy a house and live in it, why shouldn't I be able to deduct the same?
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Ok, and credit card interest?
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    I would argue that should be deductible
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      Ok let’s play that out. If I’m at the top marginal rate, I effectively gain 40 cents for every untaxed dollar. Loewe then tells me that instead of paying $5k for my calfskin bag today, I can take out a 1 year $1k loan with a 400% APR via store credit card. So now instead of needing $8.3k of gross income to afford that bag, I only need $5.7k! And you know who loses that $2.6k? The government. It’s a market skew, most people agree that frivolous consumption shouldn’t be subsidized in that way, but the home thing is still up for debate (though I think it’s a bad skew now that we aren’t trying to win the Cold War, personally).
      - fallingknife 4y ago
        You are not the first person to notice the tax shield effect of debt. Companies take on debt the don't need all the time to optimize their balance sheet to minimize tax liability. If they can do it, why not individual taxpayers?
GauntletWizard 4y ago
Tax deductible mortgage interest is a favorite whipping boy, but consider the alternative - It would be more effective for corporations to buy properties and rent them out, because corporations could still charge the mortgage payments as operating loss. I would gladly incorporate a C-Corp and rent my house at market rate to myself.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  I would prefer that too. The more people are exposed to the true cost of housing, the more likely they are to care about it. I also don’t think it’s an intrinsic good that people own their homes. Looks what it has done in places like CA where nothing gets built anymore.

WalterBright 4y ago

> where corporations run the government Are you sure about that? In this state, at least, a politician cannot get elected without union endorsement.

t-3 4y ago
Why do you think seem to think unions are independent from corporations? The regulations on unions and corporate capture of union executives make them little more than external HR departments. The strike suppression and sheer number of sellout contracts pushed through in the past few years under the "most pro-union president" should make it abundantly clear that unions in the US are a total joke.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > should make it abundantly clear that unions in the US are a total joke. The teachers' union rules the states, for example. It's illegal for teachers to strike, but they strike anyway with impunity, and the elected officials they endorsed always cave. The unfunded pension system for public union employees is entirely due to their capture of the governments. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2022/07/07/states-unfunded-pension-liabilities-persist-as-major-long-term-challenge https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  The largest union, by a huge margin (over 1.2m larger than #2) is the NEA (teacher's union), and three of the top six unions are public unions. It would be reasonable to say at least those operate independently from corporations.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    But they seem not to operate particularly independently from governments, which is kind of the problem.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

I feel pretty much the same way; is there a better name for this besides democratic socialism? > Yeah, the magic wand solution of government-run economies and doing away with money and markets doesn't work. Outside of some sophomorically edgy and loud tankies on twitter and reddit nobody really wants to do that, and it wouldn't get anywhere if they tried. While I agree the "socialists" who want full-blown (central, government run with no free market elements and no money) socialism are the minority, it's frustrating that good conversation around socialism is hard to find because detractors specifically attack this extreme side of the dichotomy.

lamontcg 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism might work.
hospitalJail 4y ago
I'm a moderate/independent and probably a capitalist due to the pragmatism. However, I tell people that I would be a radical socialist if it worked. I might be okay with inefficiencies if we really could get rid of class, or that we could keep our excess value of labor. That puts me on the extreme side. The less extreme side just seems inefficient and creates a class of government workers/politicians who control resources are the new upper class. It really sounds like you want capitalism with some sort of redistribution or better taxation. I most recently found Green Capitalism as a word I could likely get behind, but it still suffers from the issue of resources going through government workers/politicians.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nivenkos 4y ago

Income inequality is good, and fighting markets is like trying to stop the tide. It's accumulated wealth that is the problem (and leads to the corruption of free markets and democracy). Policies should be focused on that - taxing wealth rather than work, and encouraging profitable investments rather than sitting on assets. Whereas now the so-called "left-wing" policies are awful - rent control is popular in Europe despite being an unfair disaster in Sweden. There are high taxes on income and high VAT, whilst inheritance, land and wealth taxes have been abolished, greatly hurting social mobility while benefiting established, inherited wealth. Same with a lot of focus on patching up symptoms - like not prosecuting low-value shoplifting, allowing squatting on "empty" properties, etc. rather than trying to improve market conditions, education and training and the housing market, etc. to ensure that everyone could get a much better salary to begin with.

danaris 4y ago
> Income inequality is good [Citation needed] To be clear, I'm not implying that it would be good to have absolutely everyone make exactly the same amount. I'm saying that income inequality at high levels is bad, demonstrably so, and inevitably leads to concentrations of wealth. I'm also not sure why you think that high VAT and lack of inheritance and wealth taxes are "left-wing" policies. Those are all regressive, and exactly the kinds of things that the right wing is pushing for here in the US. At most, I would think that such policies would be compromises between a left wing that wants progressive income taxes alongside inheritance and wealth taxes, and a right wing that wants VAT and basically nothing else.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
PrimeMcFly 4y ago
We need wealth limits for companies (which should be more like co-ops), proportional to the size of the company, with everything pasta threshold going back into UBI or something. Same for individual wealth accumulation. People could do more projects/start more companies to earn more, but no one should be accumulating millions by doing almost nothing as is the case now.

int_19h 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

reso 4y ago

It's unfortunate that "socialism" came to mean "central planning" in the 20th century. It didn't mean that before the Bolsheviks and Marxist-Leninism out-competed (and then destroyed) the other socialist movements in the 1920s and 30s. By first principles socialism == worker control of the means of production, or the idea that the people who do labour should have a major stake in the decision making surrounding it. This general idea of worker control is entirely compatible with markets and with price-discovery as a coordination mechanism between firms and localities. There's even partial examples of this in many "capitalist" economies today. Volkswagen is required to have union reps on their board of directors. That's socialism!

asdff 4y ago
There is socialism in the U.S. too. If you work for the government in some capacity you are participating in the socialist side of our nation in practice. IMO the US military especially is a model of what a fully socialist US would look like, if it were allowed to scale to all sectors. WWII with the socialist centrally planned economy was an interesting case study for the U.S.; it showed how this manner of socialism can reorient an otherwise depressed labor economy into the dominant world power in a few short years.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  It works well, when all the other world economies have been devastated by war. The US government/military control in WWII was essentially totalitarian, with rationing and price controls.
  - asdff 4y ago
    We went from 25% unemployment in the great depression to less than 2% unemployment during WWII. I'd say that was a remarkable economic recovery by any measure, and it amounted to offering government jobs to people. It would be interesting to imagine an alternate history where that historically massive labor effort went to infrastructure building rather than infrastructure destruction, however.
- 4y ago

intalentive 4y ago

A fish rots from the head. Any talk of reform must begin with price fixing in the capital markets.

kwere 4y ago

>regulations over business which prevents monopolies and market distortions, along with much stronger unions monopolies can be the "natural" outcome of market forces or economic realities. Like having the best product by far or owing the only possible railroads tracks. The solution would be to cap ownership/voting rights to make shareholding as decentralized as possible and having a progressive tax rate on ROA or similar metrics Unions have shown time and time again to not be able to scale efficiently, shifting power from the "people" to the secretariat when becoming a mass organization. Secretariat that engage in political squabble to enlarge its own power and those of its associates. Unions become a tool for societial corruption. I consider also the concept of antagonistic union a somewhat relic of the past (at least in europe) and will much more appreciate organizations acting more like consortiums of workers and getting consulative seats in the boards of the target industries akin to german unions

Kbelicius 4y ago
> Unions have shown time and time again to not be able to scale efficiently, shifting power from the "people" to the secretariat when becoming a mass organization. Secretariat that engage in political squabble to enlarge its own power and those of its associates. Unions become a tool for societial corruption. Isn't this true of corporations or any other mass organization? Unions, AFAIK, are at least democratic.

wesapien 4y ago

Treat every corporate criminal like criminal and maybe they will leave the US. Then treat those criminal corporations as terrorist orgs if they continue to do criminal things overseas.

mech765 4y ago

It is perfectly legal to start a company as a co-op, or as any other non-traditional structure. There's an argument to be made that corporations have a growth advantage because their profit motive makes them grow faster than other structures. How would you propose balancing that?