> Brad De Long wrote:
>
> > Can't I just wish for a high-pressure economy in which unemployment is low,
> > businesses are eager to train, educate, and cosset their workers, and I can
> > vote with my feet for the most pleasant employer?
>
> The problem, Brad, is that you already live in that economy, and the
> price which the other 90% of humans pays is to live somewhere much less
> convivial, and they always will until you and I agree to give up a few
> things and share a little more. That's what social-ism means (social
> democracy is just a tax-deductible conscience-saver).
I think this is a terribly out-of-date 19th-century view -- and puritanical to boot! Today the problem isn't scarcity, but abundance. It's overproduction that killing us. And above all overproduction of "goods" that are, on balance, more bad than good.
To me, socialism means subordinating the market to the benefit of the WHOLE society--including the least powerful of all, the vast majority of generations unborn. (Conventional economics, discounting future value, says that this vast majority has NO standing whatsoever.) It means profoundly DIFFERENT kinds of production -- for durability, social utility (rather than individual-only utility), conviviality, environmental restoration, etc.
Thinking of socialism from WITHIN a capitalist framework, it looks like a lot of the folks on this mailing list would have to be big losers. The point is, the capitalist framework SEVERELY misrepresents reality. This isn't just a nice little theory we've got folks, it's a FACT.
Just one itsy-bitsy example: under socialism I wouldn't need a car, even though I live in the LA Area. In fact, under socialism, we'd be building electric cars with a mean lifetime of 20 - 100 years, using a FAR smaller resource and labor stream, producing FAR more end-value, which would be used on an as-needed, rather than an ownership-determined basis. So the LA basin would be a far more lovely place to live, as well.
The main thing people would have under socialism that they don't have now it TIME -- oodles and oodles and oodles of it. We'd have more stuff that lasted a whole lot longer, and a whole lot less MANUFACTURED need for rapidly obsolete-junk.
Yeah, okay, I'm more of a utopian anarchist than a dialectical Marxist, but without a really inspiring antithesis the whole thing breaks down, don'tcha know?
"I get knocked down, but I get up again They're never gonna keep me down"
-- My Friendly Local Capitalist Radio Station As I Finish This Post.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"