by Max Barry

Latest Forum Topics

Advertisement

Post

Region: The Confederacy of Free Nations

I'll take red velvet cake and black coffee.

David Lynch: I've heard that he's a famous director, but I don't really study filmography.

The Battle of Stalingrad: It shows the extent to which the name of the place mattered. Hitler was so intent on capturing it for a strategic and a symbolic victory against the Soviets by taking the city named after their leader.

Socialism: It depends on which kind of socialism you're talking about. With market socialism, you have to wonder why it already hasn't taken over the economy if workers in any free market are able to create cooperatives that can compete with privately-run businesses. What it indicates is that said cooperatives generally don't operate as efficiently and as successfully as more traditional businesses do. After are, if they truly were better, then they would be much more competitive than they are today.

With non-market socialism, the problem is in figuring out what to replace the market with. In most cases, the free market has shown itself as being the most efficient means of distributing resources as buyers and sellers respond to price signals and the forces of supply and demand. Centrally planned economies have generally fallen behind due to the human calculation problem. No human or group of humans can plan something as complex as an entire economy, which has shown itself to be the case in the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

In addition, central planning centralizes economic power among a handful few, which gives them the ability to take advantage of their positions to enrich themselves at the expense of the proletariat they claim to represent. And with such a consolidation of economic power will inevitably come a consolidation of political power.

ContextReport