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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2365 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 28, 2024

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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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