• @vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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    11 year ago

    But in reality, profit does not require you to do any good.

    It requires you to do something, and scale may make production cheaper, for example.

    Not necessarily. Insurance is one example.

    How so? Insurance is one of the most ingenious things I can think about which market economy allows. Leveraging probabilities to protect each separate participant from some event which would be too expensive without it.

    In the abstract, I agree. But left to play out, monopoly and bureaucracy inevitably emerge.

    That happens in planned economies just as well and worse.

    Why not?

    Because with private\public companies there is some criterion by which a company is being optimized, it’s profit (in general, though with public companies things already work more complex, which is how Apple\MS\etc look so weird).

    With what you describe, first, the response is going to be slow, as it’s democratic planning, second, every worker is going to vote in his own perceived interest. At best it’s going to be just like public companies, at worst most of such companies are not going to be able to support themselves existing.

    I mean, okay, it’s going to have an element of optimization too (cause it’s still going to be capitalist in essence), just possibly less efficient in general. But may bypass some of the traps for public companies.

    Under capitalism, it requires the state to intervene to regulate it in order to, for example, add safety measures to cars.

    Only to make them mandatory for everyone. And then see the following.

    Socialist economies are, as I mentioned, democratic.

    Not necessarily. But they are all bureaucratic.

    The people need safety measures, and the people are in control of production, so safety measures will be in place.

    What one needs, what one thinks one needs, and what one can choose from are three different stages, and then there’s another stage of what one receives in response.

    And these are managed by bureaucracies. Point being, with markets you at least don’t have to build a bureaucracy for market operations per se.