Is socialism actully bad and can you explain why?

I would be the last person to argue against that. I've been with my employer for twenty years, and that history does mean something. However, at the end of the day, I'm still not an investment. I'm a man that can leave, and there is nothing owed.

 

Investment is the action or process of investing money for profit or material result.
Economist Theodore Schultz invented the term 'human capital' in the 1960s to reflect the value of our human capacities. He believed human capital was like any other type of capital; it could be invested in through education, training and enhanced benefits that will lead to an improvement in the quality and level of production. - This has been the experience of our company.
Investment in human capital does not create a debt. It creates wealth.

 

That is true and we also know that external "capital investments" don't actually fund the supply chain by providing funds to corporations. Recently I reviewed a month's worth or SEC reported transactions as well as corporate stock offering where the funds would actually go to the corporation. Less than 0.00005% of the "investment" dollars actually went to corporations. The vast majority of stock transactions, for exampe, are between individuals or investment firms where none of that money goes to the corporation.

Corporate expansion is overwhemingly funded by profits from sales and not from outside investors. The greatest myth of capitalism is that outside investments create jobs because the facts simply don't support that belief. Demand and sales fund expansion and creates jobs and not investments.

 

The Republican solution: "STARVE TO DEATH"

That's like the Republican solution to health care. "DON'T GET SICK AND IF YOU DO GET SICK DIE QUICKLY."

 

Both can work just fine. It's not about what system you have, but the people running it and in the case of both capitalism and socialism, it is just that all too often you get people who claim to represent the ideallic points of both, but basically turn both into avenues of increased consolidation and control.

Also, you'd have to note that the reason capitalism seems appealing is because the US worked laboriously to undermine any economic system that presented a viable challenge to it's own. Socialism...communism...all were targets and much blood was spilt to make capitalism seem viable. You'd also have to note that the US and Western Capitalism is largely a feudal network on the overall world stage. Criminally low-waged labor from most third world countries (or in the case of China, a country willing to sell it's own people out) and the forced concessions of other more formidable countries.My theory...It's not capitalism that is the reason behind the success of the US, but the military. The power to force the board according to your will and make people play by your system. When everyones playing your game where you make the rules, of course you profit.

 

your statement isn't accurate
the vast majority of jobs are provided by small businesses that are not listed on the stock market they get their capital to either start up or expand from banks so using the stock market to measure if investments create jobs is using the wrong venue to make that determination

who are listed on the stock market are large international companies that haven't created significant amount in American jobs in decades so the capital they get from the stock market has been going to create jobs else where

 

I would love to look at this source data. Would you please post a link?

 

Socialism is not bad. It's worst aspect is that it is limited to a status quo and lacks elements of incentive that can be found with capitalism.

There are many forms of capitalism.

The Indigenous American people of the north west were capitalists, but also they had the potlatch.

Once a year there was a major potlatch that brought people from afar. There were minor ones in most areas every couple of months.

They practiced "spiritual capitalism". In other words, having material power was only valued if it was used to help others with their needs.

A powerful person could prove their worth publicly by giving away their wealth. The more they could give, the more power they had. They also used the opportunity to give their right to free speech meaning, so could influence the thinking of many people.

The tribal upbringing of all people was very different in order to make this work. But, it allowed the entrepreneur to have what they needed to invest heavily in new concepts, just as capitalism does in the best cases in our society. Occasionally, these would produce more material power than it took to create them. Everyone benefitted because they adopted the new concept which advanced all of the people.

The Indigenous people of that area found so much empowerment that the potlatch was outlawed under penalty of death in order to prevent those people from the benefits of that aspect of their capitalism. After a while, about 20 years, it was under penalty of arrest.

 

The may have a profound grasp on being disingenuous but that is about it.

You are the one who injects socialism into the conversation in the same breath as Totalitarianism and Collectivism.

Your claim that Totalitarianism is "totally collectivist" is simply false.

Just go look up the definition of the two words. You can have totalitarian regimes that are collectivist and collectivism is thought to lead to totalitarianism but you can also have totalitarian regimes that are not collectivist in nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivism

Clearly "horizontal collectivism" does not fit into totalitarianism.

What you have is not a "profound grasp" of the material. What you have is a profound ability to exaggerate your grasp of the subject matter.

 

Ideology wasn't masterminded by society or a common citizen, it was masterminded by extreme individuals that sided with the system, to get control over society. A powerful strategy to change people's thoughts/emotions and by that to organize them slowly but surely (over a century of political emotional strategy for a big society like the USA (even China became 'red', over a billion citizens; numbers don't count, the spread of the same information does)

Socialism wasn't masterminded to make a society more civilized while you think it does because of the feeling of the political term and how politicians explain it to the voter (to point them in a political direction) People defend or attack socialism, by these political fights a society is also weakened.

 

Actually according to the National Bureau of Economic Research http://www.nber.org/digest/feb11/w16300.html

"The younger companies are, the more jobs they create, regardless of their size.

The popular perception that small businesses create most of America's jobs has been the focus of heated debate for three decades. However, the more telling characteristic for predicting job creation is the age of the firm, not its size, according to a new study by John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda. In Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young (NBER Working Paper No. 16300), the researchers conclude that the younger companies are, the more jobs they create, regardless of their size.

Of course, all startup firms operate in a volatile "up or out" environment. After five years, many of these young companies are "out" -- they fail and, as a result, destroy nearly half of the jobs created by all new companies. Nevertheless, the surviving firms continue to ramp "up," growing faster than more mature companies, and creating a disproportionate share of jobs relative to their size.

"Firm startups account for only 3 percent of employment but almost 20 percent of gross job creation," the authors write. "[T]he fastest growing continuing firms are young firms under the age of five," the authors conclude.

In this study, which relies on data from the Census Bureau, the authors confirm that smaller companies created more jobs than larger companies during 1992-2005. But the importance of firm size depends very much on the assumptions one makes about the base year of the analysis, the number of employees used to define "small", and other factors. The real driver of disproportionate job growth, they find, is not small companies, but young companies. It is the startup firms that generate the surge of jobs that earlier research attributed to small companies.

Indeed, grouped in traditional ways, businesses tend to create jobs in proportion to their importance in the economy. Thus, large mature firms – those more than ten years old and with more than 500 workers – employed about 45 percent of all private-sector workers and accounted for almost 40 percent of job creation and destruction in this study.'

 

Banks do not invest in companies. They loan money to companies and the repayment of the loan is based upon future profits. A loan merely represents the premature spending of future profits. It also comes at a cost as the loan requires interest payments on top of repayment of principle.

As noted very few stock purchases result in funding of an enterprise. Virtually all stock purchases represent a change in ownership as opposed to an investment in the corporation. If I purchase Micorsoft stock today not a single dime of that purchase goes to Microsoft.

As I mentioned only about 0.00005% of all capital investments fund corporations. In short if we round off to 1/1000 of a percent the amount of investments used to capitalize corporations is zero!

 

Seeing that we already have Socialism, you should be able to answer that for yourself; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcwJt4bcnXs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb0UNRl-paQ

 

Has anyone mentioned the economic calculation problem, yet? I've seen some allusions to it.

 

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm

 

Did you actually read any further into it? Have you read the critiques? I suspect that you are missing the point of Caplan's argument. He argues against Mises' alleged hyperbole in calling socialist calculations makes socialism impossible. I don't think you'd find him arguing that socialism is either beneficial or would not be far more primitive in it's form than a free market one.

 

Your original post.

My point was to debunk this as a valid argument against socialism. There are valid arguments. This just isn't of them.

I do not argue for a purely socialist system. However, here in the USA, we could use a good hard turn in that direction.

 

First of all, bryan caplan is a bloody fool. Secondly, mises didnt say socialism was impossible. He acknpwledged it could work in smaller economies on the level of individual households, but not on a national scale.

 

Without private property and market exchange (and hence price signals), how would the socialist central planner know what to produce and (perhaps more importantly) how to produce it?

 

Except that Caplan doesn't debunk the economic calculation problem. He debunks that socialist calculation makes socialism "impossible."

If you shared any other points, I didn't see them. Just a link to an article by an anarchocapitalist economist.

So, you agree with Caplan, then, on what would be the result. You want a more primitive life for everyone in the US.

 

Again, I am not arguing for a purely socialist system.
However I'll take a stab at this.
Today we have POS (Point Of Sale) systems that could easily be modified to instantly inform the planner what items were being sold and which items were in inventory. Just like in modern business, production could be adjusted to sales.

 

It removes competition from the market place in selective industries in the name of fairness and shared costs.

This reduces the quality of the product while increasing costs by removing the mechanisms of efficiency for profit.

 

Have you ever heard of Market Socialism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

"Market socialism is a type of economic system involving the public, cooperative or social ownership of the means of production in the framework of a market economy. Market socialism differs from non-market socialism in that the market mechanism is utilized for the allocation of capital goods and the means of production. Depending on the specific model of market socialism, profits generated by socially owned firms may variously be used to directly remunerate employees, accrue to society at large as the source of public finance, or be distributed amongst the population in a social dividend."

There are many variations of socialism that are not debunked by the Economic Calculation Problem.
You guys just love choosing the lousiest socialist model and holding it up as the archetype.

 

While perhaps true in practice these are not principles of socialism.

 

Still sounds like interference in what the "market" really is. Exchange of property between individuals. What you describe is ownership by government, and individuals get to do all the work without the benefit. Or, to go back to economic calculate, individuals have to make calculations on behalf of government, rather than their own wants or needs. Bureaucrats then "distribute" based on some other calculation the results. Market socialism is an oxymoron.

I find that unlikely.

It's always the "lousiest" one, not the one that supposedly works if everyone just plays nicely.