In a socialist economy, to what extent should prices and employment emulate a free market model?
Even if you think skilled laborers are paid too much now and unskilled laborers not enough, you would have to incentivize pursuing skilled labor in some way. Otherwise nobody would do it because it's harder and you wouldn't be paid any more or less.
But this could then support a more limited class system, less capitalists vs. workers and more skilled labor vs. unskilled labor (like existed in the USSR).
Listen, man. You cannot set prices. Empirically shown to NOT FUCKING WORK. If you're gonna use the market, you let the market play out and set prices. What you do, however, is to set the ground game such that the people entering the market as employees and buyers are not overall systematically fucked by legally acceptable unethical advantages which go unpunished.
This requires a strong organized democratic will, but so does any government system for that matter.
Carter Hughes
Markets with worker-control of MoP all the way
Gabriel Morgan
Sorry, us {democratic, technocratic} socialists live in the real world where states are necessary and unions can't hold everyone else hostage
Isaiah Davis
So basically capitalism which through state controlled means attempts to stop what we would call crony capitalism? Is that libertarianism?
I belive in a strong state though. Not only is it necessary to survive in the short term against foreign aggressors, but it should also be a voice for the will of the people. But will less skilled people have the wisdom and benevolence to realize that more skilled workers deserve more in return for their job?I do not know
Thomas Clark
...
Camden Garcia
You've never read Marx. I always suspected as much, but this proves it.
Ryan Jenkins
Skilled work is usually less stressful than unskilled, not more. Money is not the only incentive for seeking this or that position, the working conditions themselves are part of that. In an economy where the means of production are mostly in private hands an increase of state/union interference in setting money wages to make the income spread less extreme would cause a reaction towards using more of the other incentives besides money to get professionals in high demand, meaning even better working conditions for them. (I don't think that the reaction would amount to nullifying the effect of the policy.)
Inborn differences in learning ability are a thing, but there is more than that. When obtaining a necessary degree requires funds from the individual or that individual's parents or going into debt (or all of that together), the expectation of high future income has to make up for that. When higher learning is entirely funded by the public, the carrot of the high future income doesn't need to be that big. (However, you have to consider here whether we are talking about a society spanning the entire world or just a country where people can move out. If there is an adjacent country that has the going-into-debt-for-possible-high-income combo, what do you do? If you don't want to build a wall, maybe the people in your country who want to be doctors have to sign some sort of contract that requires them to work for say three years in the country that gave them the education.)
What I don't like about market mechanisms is that the market measure of efficiency used to justify the income distribution is itself dependent on that distribution.
Depends. Surely a monopolist can set prices.
Michael Wood
None. There should be a planned economy with production for use and no currency or trade. Markets are counter-revolutionary.
Hudson Thompson
It's even more than "there should be": it's basically the definition of socialism.
Julian Williams
Higher skilled labor is more intrinsically satisfying Developing mastery is satisfying But as long as necessary, we will have to compensate highly skilled laborers more through workplace democracy and bargaining. However, most disparity in wealth is based on property ownership and dividends and rents, so I don't think it's a huge problem
I would be more concerned with what having a good incentive to do the unsatisfying, physically demanding work.
Julian Reyes
...
James Sanchez
Prices can be set by monopoly, but that defeats the whole point of markets and gets rid of the only efficiency they can claim to have, which is driving labor content and value to a minimum. If you claim that we somehow know the 'real' prices, meaning values, we would basically plan the economy without money.
Isaiah Morales
Stopped reading.
Mason Thomas
Everybody does it and takes turns
Bentley Johnson
Monopolies and cartels exist in the real world. Monopolies don't just exist because of corruption, there are also structural reasons like the network effect, and splitting up a monopolist can be wasteful.
Monopolies under public ownership can operate on break-even basis instead of maximizing profits, so that amounts to a closer correspondence between price ratios of products and their labor content. I absolutely do believe that estimating the labor time needed for production of different things is possible without doing everything post-hoc. Private ownership, profit-making, strong incentives to hide information, and having to rely on post-hoc market evaluations for everything - these issues reinforce each other.
How much of which resource goes to this or that plant and what do they produce with it, all of that will be public information. Not only will the new society be able to estimate labor content of a thing like under capitalism, it will be better at making these estimates. That's not to say that there will be zero post-plan adjustment, prices ratios of products can be varied from their labor-time ratios in order to get rid of over-supplied things or to ration under-supplied things, and this in turn can be used to go analytically backwards and re-evaluate the importance of different types of production equipment (starting point is their labor content) without the need to have a market for the means of production.
In the above I left out something: I don't care so much about labor time per se, but how stressful work is, how much sacrifice goes into producing something. This is something that the market doesn't care about much, especially not when unions are weak and there is high unemployment.
Gabriel Myers
Deng, that's some fucking heavy liberal brainwashing there.
