> > Under socialism, how do you make sure an economic project adds value?
Not through market forces, that's for sure. You can forget about that, it wouldn't be socialism for a start and it wouldn't work anyhow. You see, market forces are only an efficient regulatory mechanism in the context of a degree of scarcity.
As to ensuring that an economic project adds value and does it reasonably efficiently, the strategy has to revolve around ensuring there are no incentives to do things inefficiently, or to engage in useless activity. I think we can then trust in human nature to a large degree. All things being equal, why would people freely choose to engage in futile work, or freely choose to do things the hard way?
The only reason that I can conceive of why people might still choose to do things inefficiently, in the absence of any structural incentives, is sentimentality. It wouldn't hurt to be tolerant of that though. In the name of "Art", for instance, why not let them build furniture with anachronistic methods, or build houses from hand-carved stone? If it takes their fancy.
It wouldn't do to make a fetish out of efficiency.
But allow me to repeat myself, the answer to your question is extremely simple in general terms. Eliminate the systematic incentives for doing useless work or doing things inefficiently and any analysis of human nature will tell you that most people will try to find the easiest and thus cheapest way of getting things done. The others are "artists", there's a place for them too.
Of course what some people like to believe is "socialism", state ownership of the means of production, with pretty-much everyone working for the state, doesn't achieve that. But then it isn't socialism either.
I agree with most of that other stuff you said too, about learning from the successes of capitalism, about adopting some the systems (like systematic legal/policy frameworks, accountability, democracy, etc), about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But a market system for distributing goods and services, and especially a market system for coercing the population to produce goods and services, is the bathwater, not the baby. The solution is a system of free labour, no coercion. And free distribution. The means of production and distribution socially owned and democratically managed, including systematic democratically controlled policy frameworks and accountability systems for the management system.
But none of this dictatorship of the proletariat bullshit. In fact no proletariat at all. Individuals people all need to be free, able to exercise free choice about their role in society. Not just political freedom, in the sense that no-one holds a gun to their heads and marches them to a work-camp, but economic freedom, in the sense that no-one is able to use deprivation of the necessities of life as a coercive tool.
In this way, we would all serve as instruments for regulating efficient and useful production. Individuals would simply refuse to waste their time. As a whole that is, it would be a perfect solution, people make mistakes and so forth. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time and without any systematic incentive to keep doing things inefficiently or wastefully, why would people keep doing it? Why would people keep voting for it?
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas