<p>Yeah, but I’m not a huge Rand-objectivist fan. And excuse me, I’ve read Anthem and Fountainhead too, tyvm. I like what she says about the individual more than her economic and political ideas. </p>
<p>The idea is that some people are not going to get favored and some people will. So capitalism, which favors the people at the top and **<strong><em>s the bottom, is better than a system like socialism, which *</em></strong>*s everyone except the people who end up running the show. So if one group is going to get favored, it needs to be the Rockefellers.</p>
<p>Pure capitalism doesn’t work. Pure socialism doesn’t work. </p>
<p>Capitalism is great in that it promotes free trade and competition, but terrible in that it exploits workers.</p>
<p>Socialism is great in that it protects workers and provides services for citizens, but terrible in that it helps the many at the cost of the few.</p>
<p>Nearly all first world countries are democratic socialist, with the US being towards the right of the democratic socialist spectrum (almost capitalist) and Scandinavian countries being towards the left (almost Marxist).</p>
<p>For pure Marxist and pure capitalist societies, you’d have to go to the third world.</p>
<p>China’s not democratic but their economy functions similarly to a democratic socialist one.</p>
<p>The last first-world capitalist country was the USA in the 1920’s and the last Marxist country was the USSR in the 80’s. Neither did too well.</p>
<p>Capitalism involves vast inequalities, and huge penalties for losing your job, often going below the poverty line. Marxism involves little to no inequality or penalties for job loss, often having the government employ workers to prevent job loss.</p>
<p>Democratic socialism has medium inequality and medium job loss penalties.</p>
<p>So… you’d have no problem if the Rockfellers bring back full-scale aristocracy? How about if they enslave you entire family and every other non-Rockefeller out there. I mean, it favors the people on top VERY much.</p>
<p>I always thought that the biggest problem with pure socialism is that there’s no impetus for social progress. Either way though, neither “pure” system works.</p>
<p>Socialism may protect workers in the short run, under an ideal system, but logic and history shows time and time again that any attempts at socialism fail because people are humans. There has been no attempt at socialism where workers end up being protected in the long run, and even if such a system did occur, eventually workers would still be exploited.</p>
<p>You have two scenarios: ideal socialism, where all forms of currency are done away with, and less-than-ideal socialism, where currency exists (but other tenets of socialism are retained).
Let’s look at the latter scenario first - if currency is retained, then all you end up having is money running through a socialistic system. That’s exploitative of the worker almost by definition, because a government that has access to money and control over the market will inherently abuse control to tighten it’s control over the money supply. In other words, money is what a worker can use to protect himself, but since the government controls businesses, they control the money anyway. You have a soldier going into battle but he’s not allowed to use his sword.</p>
<p>The former scenario is where there is no money in the government. Now a worker has no protection against government abuse. The problem with socialism is that if production is misjudged (an almost unavoidable consequence of a command economy) , distribution of goods/wealth will inevitably be challenged. How does a government take care of people whom it cannot feed? (given underproduction of goods). The simple answer - it can’t. The dispensable people in society are left to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, they will not be able to try and pay for goods from a neighbor, or even use the black market. Since there’s no money or stuff.
They’ll have to rely on the kindness of a stranger (HA!) or somebody else to survive. </p>
<p>And given the overly-generous nature of humans, that will ALWAYS work just beautifully.</p>
<p>Of course, my argument doesn’t apply to anarcho-socialism (or whatever it’s called). That’s a whole other ball game.</p>
<p>“True capitalism” actually requires limits to survive, if it is to maintain the competitive environment we define it by. Thus, what some people consider socialism is actually a truer form of capitalism.</p>
<p>You mean government-free communism? That’s really just a fairly tale. Pure-capitalism would be a better description of what you would end up with.</p>