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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2422 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Yes in the sense that if you have a shit ton of cheap labor just about any shortfall in efficiency can be made up for in raw manpower.

Notice a few things about the military, and how it is odd for socialista to laude it:

  1. The military is very strictly hierarchical. Whereas a lot of socialist propaganda rails against hierarchies.
  2. Being a grunt in the military sucks. Most military personnel are grunts. Thus life in the military generally sucks. Thus life in socialism would generally suck.
  3. It is not a self sufficient entity. It is reliant on resources from a supporting government. Resources in the form of taxes, manpower, and technology. This suggests socialism is not self sustainable.

Your number 3 is the one that most closely addresses the "socialista" argument, which is generally along the line of 'you say market mechanisms are so great for distributing goods and services among people, but that's not what the military uses for determining which supplies go to which troops where, is it? No, they use the kind of central planning — "to each according to his need" — that you capitalist boot-lickers always deride as inferior and unworkable. Where's your capitalist army, then, if markets are so much better?"

How about a corporation as an ideal Socialist organization?

It has strong central planning (by the CEO), often with literal five-year plans. Good managers will distribute tasks based on each worker's ability, and assign resources according their needs.

Where are the capitalist corporations, you ask? They took one look at the downfall of Sears, and decided that Socialism is best.

There's quite a few differences you're glossing over.

Companies can fail and be born, and there are thousands of them at any one time. Plus they can get information from the price system that central state planners cannot. They also pay people according to negotiation, rather than according to needs.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x

Coase's The Nature of the Firm is probably the finest exploration of why firms exist. Basically it costs a lot of money to come to an agreement, and agents within the firm can save a lot of the cost of those agreements. So optimal firm size varies with how costly those agreements are to reach.

That's what annoys me so much about Sci-Fi that dramatically changes the cost of reaching an agreement and then ignores the enormous world changing effects such a change would have on the business world (with extremely low transaction costs single person entities would probably be the most efficient firm size in a lot of industries).

Corporations exist in a market system that sets the prices for all their inputs and outputs. Without it, making those 5 year plans would be impossible.

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