I keep trying to respond to this but I end up sounding like a crazy silicon valley venture capitalist :)
I don’t think capitalism particularly promotes invention - most pure research is done in academia which is often government funded and even when not is extremely sheltered from market forces. What it promotes is the success of better products for consumers and more efficient business processes in the marketplace. I believe that collective systems in general provide weaker incentives for shudder “disruption” and stronger tools for incumbents to resist that disruption.
Even if this were true, the benefits of disruption diffuse quickly.
Maybe the iPhone could only have been invented in a hyper capitalist country like the USA, but the dirty socialists in Scandinavia all have iPhones too, the Chinese are paid to build them, and Ireland got to tax the profits. The USA mainly gets bragging rights, and a socialist might decide it isn’t worth it.
Indeed, it was the dirty socialists in Scandinavia who had ‘disrupted’ the cell phone market first, and more or less owned it until the iPhone came along. How did that happen without innovation and a better product?
My view on the big picture capitalism vs regulation vs socialism issue is that we have an idea that the far extremes (autocratic control of the economy vs totally unregulated laissez faire capitalism) both have serious problems, but there is a range of potential “sweet spots” in between there that we are still figuring out.
The one thing I want to throw in here is that I think it’s important to view markets, regulation, capitalism in general, socialism in general as tools to achieve certain goals rather than ends in themselves. For example, a lot of people on the right say they are “for small government” but I ask “small government for what?” What do we want government to do? Does it need to be big or small to best facilitate those goals.
I’m not a “big government” person or a “small government” person: I’m in favor of the level of government that does what is needed better than the available alternatives, full stop. If a fully public option is the best course, great. If a fully private option is the best course, great. In most cases in my experience, some form of well regulated market based option is going to be best, except in certain cases (policy,fire,military,health care, education, infrastructure etc.) where a more public-oriented system is better.
And then of course there is the market for paperclips, the closest thing to a perfect market we humans have achieved. I’m pretty much a libertarian on paperclips. Go paperclips!
People who argue for smaller government don’t actually care about the size of government. ‘Small government’ is simply code for ‘don’t tax me to provide a reasonable social safety net’. If you think the government should be doing health care, education, infrastructure, unemployment compensation, etc, you’re for ‘big government’.
I’d add one word in there: overwhelmingly, as in “People who argue overwhelmingly for smaller government don’t actually care about the size of government”. Likewise, people who argue overwhelmingly for more government intervention don’t understand (or are ignoring) how incentives and market forces work. As @Sharpe said, there’s a balance needed.
Eh, don’t go putting words in my mouth :O. “Balance” in the current context is often code for letting the right wing work the refs. My view is not in favor of “balance” for the sake of balance. I’m in favor of “the right fit” - there are some areas (like health care) where a bigger government role is needed, and some areas (paperclips) where less government works fine.
For example, relative to where we are now, the US definitely needs more government involvement, in health care, in education, and in infrastructure. On the other hand, we need less government involvement in terms of the size of the military and in reaching into the bedroom / reproductive choices, and in regard to surveillance / civil liberties. And it’s not a matter of “balance” - my ideal setup would probably have overall more government than we do now, but not a totalitarian or autocratic level.
Small government in practice is just code for being okay with the government forcing and doing things on people when someone wants those people to submit to their ideal society and starving or removing the governing bodies from areas they think doesn’t help them directly.
Fair criticism, a better way to put it would have been that we need the right mix. Which won’t be 50-50, or probably any other ratio you care to name, since this is a large and complex beast that would likely evolve pretty much constantly.
I am a big government person. I work in a regulatory industry and it’s scary how little government oversight actually takes place. I wouldn’t say cheating is rampant, but I would argue that the private organization holds most of the cards when it comes to the IRS and the DOL.
The problem is that they got rid of earmarks. If they brought those back there’d be a lot more incentive to be less of a “compromise is selling out” partisan (which I’ll point out started in Congress with Gingrich and Co. over 20 years ago).
I don’t think that the socialist idea of “collective ownership of the means of production” need be incompatible with a free market and competition as a driving force for innovation and quality. At least not if you go the route of smaller collectives, and not the state owning everything. For instance, a company owned by all the employees is not necessarily at a disadvantage in a free market where everyone is playing by the same rules of employee compensation and work safety rules. Only where it is allowed to treat employees badly in order to increase competitiveness will there be a disadvantage to having all employees have a say in how the company is run.
But that means that one does not simply transition to socialism without first strengthening workers’ rights under the current system. The first step to sustainable socialism must be to make the playing field equal when it comes to employee rights and work safety rules. If you don’t, you’ll have to either nationalise everything (and that’s never turned out well) or provide some sort of incentive system for companies that “do the right thing”, which is going to cost a lot of taxes.
True, but most have more government run services, whether it’s public transportation, healthcare, or other tasks that we in the US see taken up by Private Institutions.
The inclusion of this one kind of confuses me a little bit. A lot of public transportation is run locally and the issue is the lack of not that it’s run by private groups. I mean if an area has bad public transportation that’s often a sign it’s not being supported locally, by votes and money. If it doesn’t have one at all, again no votes no money. You might be referring to interstate or national systems like Amtrak and Greyhound, but Amtrak was actually kind of formed publicly and neither of those two are combating the heavy congestion of cars because those are often daily commuters not distant travelers. Heck even the airline industry, which is largely private run, is regulated federally and the airports they use are often run locally, thus public.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say. Lego is talking about public transportation like the reason we don’t have public run services is because the private sector has it… but they don’t. The reason we don’t have it is because the voters often say no. That’s not the burbs, that’s the public. The public gets a chance to vote and they often say no, burbs or otherwise. It’s still the public making the decision, and they’re not being denied because some private industry jumped in and decided to run the local bus service instead.
