this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
1098 points (97.6% liked)
Socialism
5184 readers
5 users here now
Rules TBD.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Then what you consider to be socialism isn't possible.
There are more people that want live on a beachfront than there is beachfront available. There are too many cases of scarcity that are impossible to resolve without some concept of property. Utopia literally translates to "no place" because while it's easy to talk about fictional paradises where there is no need for money or property, it's just something that can't be implemented in the real world.
@SpaceCowboy You can absolutely implement it instead, for one simple reason: they already have. Do you really want to tell me that on 372,000 kilometers of coastline that exists in the world there can't be as many people as they would like? Which by the way is certainly not eight billion because many people, like me, hate the sea. It is not the resources that are not enough, it is not the planet that is too small. The real problem is that the resources are poorly distributed.
I see you're not aware of the coastline paradox.
At any rate, even in a capitalist system where people don't always get to live where they want we've had to destroy a lot of ecosystems to make room for houses. So no, it's not feasible for everyone to live where they want to live, and attempting to do that isn't even a good thing to try even if it were possible.
Besides people don't want to live in Greenland. They want to live in Malibu Beach, or on the French Riviera. For people that don't like the beach, maybe they'll want to live on a vineyard, or maybe in the Swiss Alps for the skiing. There will always be desirable locations to live and not everyone is going to be able to live in a dream house there. Most people will have to live in an apartment building that has a view of other apartment buildings. It's just a physical reality of the world that 8 billion people aren't all going to have a beautiful view. It's also a reality that some people will. Some apartment building will be facing the ocean or a park or the mountains or whatever. But most aren't. Living in 3 dimensional spaces means things can never be 100% fair.
I agree. The fact that things can never be perfectly fair doesn't mean we can't do better in resource distribution. But to accomplish this, we need to somehow measure the value of resources... but that leads us to the concept of property, doesn't it?