But in reality, there's plenty of countries who've done it for a long time and had great success with it: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, India, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong for example.
Let's be honest: the only reason people in the US are scared of "socialism" is the fact that they've been immersed inanti-socialism propaganda throughout all their life.
Meanwhile, you can pretty much look at any European country to see how millions of people really feel about socialism.
Unless you confuse capitalism with an extremist Ann Rayndian neoliberal framework, and in that sense you can pretty much look at countries such as the Netherlands.
Capitalism is an economic system based on private property on the means of production, and collection of economic rents on the basis of ownership. All European countries have that. The fact that they also tax those rents and redistribute that wealth into welfare makes it welfare capitalism, not socialism.
> basic income scheme
Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.
Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".
> they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff
It's just as likely to be burned to the ground in protest, these days. Much as the computer is more the OS than it is the hardware, the factory is more the business processes + engineering than it is the raw assembly line. Take that magic smoke out and even the nicest equipment will produce nothing. You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?
How many businesses exist because someone had time to fuck around making a thing that nobody wanted, until suddenly they got it right and it was a thing a lot of people wanted? Basic income would grant that kind of time to everyone.
> Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".
dude we are living in the most extreme age of income inequity the US has ever seen, and you think me saying "what if we actually had the social safety net that I have watched corporate owned disaster capitalism systematically dismantle for my entire life" is "naive and sheltered"? ok, w/e
> You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?
No, I expect some of the people who were being severely underpaid to make the widgets to say "well, the boss is gone, but there sure does still seem to be a demand for widgets, let's keep making them and distribute the boss' pay more fairly".
We could even take the money we put into an increasingly militarized, dangerous, and expensive police force and put it into the things that reduce crime by making it a lot harder for someone to fall to the point where the consequences of crime are less than the consequences of being absolutely broke.
We could raise taxes on the tiny fraction of people and corporations who hold the vast majority of the money in the West, and especially the US, and send it back out into the system at the bottom with a basic income scheme, with the actual numbers on these tightly coupled with an assortment of cost-of-living indicators. If companies want to leave places that start taxing them, let them - they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff to fulfill people's needs for whatever they were making, with the profits being shared among the workers.
"But that sounds like socialism! Or even communism!", some will protest. Why, yes, yes it does. The people and corporations who want to accumulate huge amounts of money and power have been telling us that everything that sounds nice is "socialism" for my entire lifetime, and to be quite honest I have been at the point where they are making "socialism" sound pretty good compared to the capitalist hellscape they've turned the world into.
There are, of course, many ways this can go wrong. Utopia's not easy. But the present system sure isn't working either.