Socialism doesn't work

Socialism has not, currently does not, and never will work. Regardless of your particular type of "socialism" (eg. Marxist, Leninist, State Socialism, etc.), the key point is that it is going to take the means of production out of the hands of the "capitalists" or "landowners", and distribute it evenly to either the works or the state or some other similar combination. In theory, it sounds nice - why shouldn't the workers have full control over the labour? But such a simple analysis leaves much left to be desired, and leaves out crucial driving factors that are essential to the human race such as incentives, greed, hierarchy of needs, etc.

Looking strictly at Marx, and in particular, his work Capital, he theorized that the falling rate of profits in the capitalistic society around him and rising rates of exploitation would continually cause class tension, eventually leading to a revolution. From there, he hoped that a newly formed state would arise to the benefit of workers, but he didn't write much about what that sort of government should look like.

In general, Marx said that the value of a good was a function of the following 3 things:

Labour used to produce the good (variable capital)
Machinery used to produce the good (constant capital)
Surplus value (whatever is left over after the good sells and the monies are used to pay labour and machinery)

Marx therefore tried to prove that if a commodity sold for a price above the cost of paying labor and paying for machinery (i.e. depreciation), then exploitation over the workers was occurring since the owner of the means of production was pocketing the surplus value from the good being sold. Further, this would cause incentive among those who owned the means of production (i.e. capitalists) to try and keep the cost of labour as low as possible by ensuring that the supply of labour was large relative to demand (reserve army of the unemployed) and to advance mechanization by making machinery cheaper and more efficient.

One of the main issues is that Marx's analysis (arguably the foundation of socialism) relied on the assumption that the rate of time preference (i.e. the interest rate) was zero. Put more simply, Marx assumed that when a capitalist invested in machinery, so that the capitalist could combine his machinery with labour to produce a good, there was no opportunity cost for him, and therefore the capitalist did not deserve anything more than money to pay his labor and replace his machinery. However, this does not reflect reality at all. Interest rates exist, and act as an incentive to either invest in machinery or invest in something else, depending on market conditions. Why would a capitalist invest in machinery to produce a good (when combined with labour) if he could instead place his money in a savings account or bond market and enjoy a return of X%? Marx's assumption that there was no rate of time preference (opportunity cost of investing in machinery and expecting a return) was a critical flaw.

As humans, we operate based on incentives. There are incentives for you to get a better education because you think that your long term earnings are going to exceed the cost of going to school. There are incentives for you to get a job because you believe that you selling your labour is going to be more worth your while when compared to whatever else you would do if you didn't sell your labour.

Similarly, people with money use incentives to put their money to work for them, which ends up benefitting many other people. If the current interest rate on a savings account is 1% and someone has $100,000 to play around with, they may find that starting up a small restaurant may net a return of 3% per year. Therefore they go out and buy a building and pizza oven, hire 10 employees, and begin producing food. At the end of the year, they may have invested $100,000, but the return is $3,000 and their business is still worth $100,000. For the employees, instead of getting the $3,000, they get whatever wages were promised to them in their initial contract with the capitalist.

Other urls found in this thread:

praxeology.net/FB-PJP-DOI.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm)
youtube.com/watch?v=zIddCEBCKHQ
pastebin.com/vFtJDG21
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

CONTINUED

A socialist may say "well, why didn't the 10 employees just get together and start a restaurant, and then pocket the wages and the $3,000 in profit?" My answer to this would be "well in a democratic capitalist country, they could! But if they didn't, it's because they didn't have the ability to do so. So should that stop the capitalist from doing what he wanted?" And in a "socialist revolution", the capitalist would have his restaurant taken away from him without reimbursement (and he'd probably be killed), while the workers, who have no idea how to run a restaurant (because after all, they are just waiters and cooks), would be left a business they have no idea how to run. Therefore the state would try and put someone in place to "assist" the workers in running their business, and everyone would get a share of the profit equally. But fast forward 30 years, and no one has any incentive to start any more restaurants because they know any profits made will not go to them, but be evenly distributed to all workers.

Extrapolate this scenario to every sector of an incredibly complex economy: from agriclture, to reserouce extraction and refinement, to manufacturing, to retail. All incentive to innovate is taken away from individuals and the burden to innovate is passed strictly on to the state. While a state may have incentive to innovate in various sectors for external reasons (such as foreign military threats similar to the Cold War), the top down approach is not one that works well in a vast economy. Those closest and most involved in their respective areas of expertise (farmers, miners, and engineers) have the most incentive to change their working conditions and reap the benefits, but in a state planned economy, this is left to a ginormous bureaucracy that is far removed from the every day working conditions of the average worker.

It just doesn't work. Capitalism, when correctly regulated, is the best system which best suits man's inherently selfish nature while maximizing the benefits across the most amount of people.

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damn dude you sure got us
we've never had a spooked niggerfaggot come here before and tell us about human nature
nope
never before

You didn't read the rest of it though.

Striner-Foucault pro here

Did anybody say human nature? Where are the spooks in need of busting?

tl;dr

Socialism works because the proletariat doesn't have time to scrutinize all your bullshit.

Read the other stuff. It still doesn't work even if human nature doesn't exist.

HUMAN

NATURE

Socialism might not work but capitalism is going to doom everyone so unless you've got anything better to replace capitalism it's still what we've got.

Read the other stuff.

Adam Smith theorised that before money the main reason economic system is as barter but this was totally wrong, based on guesswork , so capitalism can never work.

Damn, you are an intellectually dead man

praxeology.net/FB-PJP-DOI.htm

The other stuff is propietor shit, read Produhon, that of course if reading him wont smash your superego morality

Man, who cares of socialism doesn't work. I learned on Wikipedia that capitalism is only a precursor to Marxism.

DUDE HUMAN NATURE LMAO

what?

Big Daddy Produhon destroyed your argument almost 200 years ago on the letter he sent to Bastiat

You have an excess of capital, you invest it, but this is not a service, no one requested it, thus there is no basis for you to demand interest back

Bohm-Bawerk's critique of Marx and Rodbertus, though the argument goes as far back as Bastiat's debate with Proudhon on the nature of interest. The argument is basically that since most people tend to want something sooner rather than later, then Capitalists (who have the time-preference to save their income and focus on future consumption) are providing a useful service (and hence, are 'productive') to the workers by advancing an income to them before the products are finished and sold. Surplus-value is explained as being the "price" that workers pay to the Capitalists for providing that service to them, and thus wage-labour is argued to be a justified exchange between equal commodity-owners and not a relationship of exploitation.
It's a pretty poor argument in many ways. I mean:
It treats "exploitation" as a moral category and not as a mathematical fact. Marx's theory states that the price of labour-power is lower than the value created by its expenditure, and the difference is accumulated as capital, that is all. If you think capitalists provide a "useful service" in the act of advancing capital, that's alright, but doesn't mean capitalists produce value and hence "time-preference" is not an explanation of where surplus-value comes from (only a moral justification for the fact it comes from unpaid labour).
The very argument that capitalists provide a "useful service" is circular. Workers only need capitalists to advance an income to them because they lack means of production and surplus, if production were organized differently (say, around common property), there would be no need for capitalists to provide this "useful" service. It is obvious that capitalists must be "useful" to the capitalist mode of production, because there wouldn't be a capitalist mode of production without capitalists! His argument is akin to saying that a monarch is useful and hence justified because you can't have a monarchy without a monarch, it's a true statement but doesn't justify the monarchy in itself.
The entire argument also rests on the notion that capitalists accumulate the capital by personally producing value and saving it, before they are capable of living solely off of what they have saved. This is, of course, a fairy tale (marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm) . Moreover, if someone is a professional capitalist, their only use for the sum of accumulated capital is to advance it in order to obtain more accumulated capital, thus are not truly "deprived" of any present consumption by advancing it (they have it solely for the purpose of advancing it in the first place!), so it is strange to think of this as being an exchange of "time-preferences".
Bohm-Bawerk's argument that "workers can always choose to lend their wages at interest" is just a joke. He seems to forget that people need to eat. This is the equivalent of telling workers "If you don't like being proletarians, just join the bourgeoisie!", forgetting that Capitalism is a social system that requires you to obey it's standards (in this case, it requires you to own means of production and enough capital to produce under the SNLT if you want be a capitalist). A counter-argument to Bohm-Bawerk: Suppose a worker has a high time-preference and is willing to wait to be paid the full value of their labour, so they go to their boss and try to make a deal to be paid the full selling price of what they make, but only after the products are sold. Which boss would accept this deal, when they wouldn't profit from employing the worker anymore? The worker wouldn't get to make this deal, and if they don't own means of production and is capable of producing at the SNLT, their only other "option" is unemployment and poverty

Incentives: The incentive to work is to do what you enjoy and what benefits the community. If you choose to do nothing the community probably isn't going to put up with your bullshit for very long.

Greed: Obviously people are greedy in a capitalist market because we reward the accumulation of goods in a capitalist society, even at the determent of others. If you eliminate capitalism you will eliminate peoples overwhelming drive for greed and it will be replaced by mutual aid, which is arguably more based in evolution and human nature than competition and greed.

hierarchy of needs: does "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs" mean nothing to you. Distribution of goods in communist societies are based upon people hierarchy of needs.

In conclusion you are fucking daft.

Uncle Marx always wins against the bourgeois scum again!

Excellent analysis. Unfortunately the leftists won't have any of it because it's grounded in the reality of human action and its negation of their theoretical models. And a quick scroll down to view the existing comments confirms exactly that.

Nice word soup

I completely disagree that the argument for "interest" has been destroyed. As far back as history goes, people have had a preference for having things "now" over having things "at some point in the uncertain future", meaning that a basis for borrowing has always existed.

If you want a $10,000 car now but only have $2,000 saved up and only save at a rate of $200 a month, would you rather borrow the extra funds and pay some interest to have the car now or would you rather wait 3 or more years to have the same car 3 years from now? You may "I'd rather save than borrow", but there are millions of people who feel otherwise.

Same thing goes for capital. To people that exist today, a factory built and workers employed today means more than a promised factory built and workers employed 10 years from now. Therefore there is always going to be a market for saving and borrowing. People everywhere all the time are requesting "investment" in one form or another, and again you are wrong: those who choose to respond to the demand for investment deserve some form of compensation for putting up the funds to satisfy those demands. And we haven't even discussed the concept of risk yet!

Oh shit! you're right. But I'm too far in this. I can't go back now.

Are you seriously in Rojava?

youtube.com/watch?v=zIddCEBCKHQ

do you see that cutout in the fire selector?

wow my dood really good point there. wtf I hate leftism now

There is no basis for interest, again, read Produhon letters to Bastiat

If you have an excess of capital, and you willingly invest it, then no one has any sort of obligation to pay you back, as no one requested your service

Now you might wonder that if someone do request your services, then that would give you the right to demand interest, however this is incorrect, as the excess of capital currently in your possession comes from stealing the surplus value of the workers, either by exploiting them on the production part of the economy or the financial one and from natural resources, which again are under your illegitimate possession, so if anything, the interest should be then paid back to the labourers and to society as a whole respectively

Your argument is wrong necause it takes property rights as axiomatic, and they are not, property rights are legal fiction


Read a book

wew
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w

lol austrians

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Holy shit your right.I wasted my life fighting for a revoultion oh no.

Sage

Yeah dude the intricate mental labor of running a burger joint is too complex for silly proles. They clearly need a bureaucrat to tell them what to do instead of, I don't know, dividing any necessary administrative work among themselves freely. Liberals really do have an intense hatred of human beings.

If Socialism doesn't work how is this Socialist image board up and running? Checkmate Christians.

pastebin.com/vFtJDG21
(to be fair not enough people no about this)

Do you really think this?
also, surplus value isn't a moralistic argument, we all know capitalists risk their (that they got from workers or on loan lol) it's a part of explaining the functioning of capitalism, and why it generates poverty, misery, and crisis

are you talking about right-wing economists?

A crucial mistake! How will niggapol recover from this!?

top
lel

okay so say everyone is selfish. What about that prevents workers from controlling the means of production?

Because everyone is equal so no one is motivated to work harder

No one answered this thread satisfactorily and I'd like to see it done by our more educated comrades.

wrong

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ecks dee

Triggered cappie still trigged