Tim Worstall argues that socialism can work as long as it's voluntary. (I've always said it works great under my roof.)
But the two important words there are voluntary and sometimes.
For example, an employee-owned integrated steel company is going to be a rare beast. It’s unlikely that 10,000 workers are going to have a couple of billion in capital to build one, and if they did, they’d be fools not to diversify.
Employee ownership should, in theory, work well when it is human capital that is the vital ingredient in the recipe, but less so when it is physical such which matters.
The voluntary part should be obvious. If people desire to organize themselves into less and more communal forms of production, then good luck to them.
... What we need is a method of sorting through what works best when—and that’s where the market comes in.
The decision about what is the best form for a specific task is not something to be derived from theory in advance—it’s emergent from market competition.
There's that crazy notion again: finding out what works.
Supposedly it worked a short time during Biblical times, once after Jesus of Nazareth and once during Enoch's Zion city state.
ReplyDeleteBut these things only work by having the common Spirit that connects the Brotherhood of Man in common harmony with Gaia, each other, and the Divine Laws.
It doesn't work if you merely have human coercion, totalitarian writ, and human laws. With just human resources, the Pilgrims are probably the best you can get.
Even the Amish have capitalism and commerce. They are small enough to adopt some community storage and sharing however.