this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Socialism
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It may be possible that socialism and capitalism are just economic tools that can applied to different sectors of the economy depending on which works best in a given context.
But sure, let's all form up into groups that either think only socialism works or only capitalism works and try to misapply these to sectors of the economy where they've already been proven not to work. That makes sense!
It's like one group deciding that hammers are better than screwdrivers and trying to beat a screw into something with a hammer. Then the other group decides screwdrivers are better than hammers and are trying to use a screwdriver to hammer in nails. They'll both kinda work for everything, but for anyone that's not caught up in the argument it all seems kind of silly. Why not just use the screwdriver for the screws and use the hammer for the nails?
Or right, because of ideology.
@SpaceCowboy @cyu i don't think that's possible. In an economic system private property is either present or it is not present, if it is there it is capitalism if it is not there it is socialism, I don't think there is any middle ground
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?