>> There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues.
I read the OPs post as an example of propoganda (mega corp - capitalism, small company - socialism) not reality.
In reality it's almost the opposite, it's bootstrap capitalism for the little guys, and "socialism" and government handouts for the ultra wealthy. (I put socialism in quotes because this term is extremely commonly misused.)
It's an oversimplification to highlight the main point: workers' relationship to the means of production. In capitalism, capital owners own the means of production. In socialism, the workers own the means of production.
IME most Americans not only don't know what socialism is (despite being opposed to it), they don't know what capitalism is either (despite supporting it).
> Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment.
It's doing an awful lot more than that. It's pillaging the Global South. It's impoverishing us under the massive weight of housing, medical and student debt. And it's quite literally killing people. People decry the failures of the USSR, for example, but 9 million people die of starvation every year. Why isn't this attributed as a failure of capitalism in the same way?
Communist countries are the most polluted ones.
Free markets, on the other hand, work even if they aren't perfect. The more free they are, the better they work.
Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?
The trouble with calling free markets folly is they are enormously successful, in every place and time where they have been tried. The trouble with central economic planning is it always does badly.
BTW, one of the functions of government in a free market is to regulate the externalities - costs of doing business that are not borne by the business. Pollution is the most obvious one of those externalities, so calling a polluting business "extreme free market" is incorrect.
> Endorsing free markets does not have to equate with an unquestioning obsession, bordering on fetishistic, with liberty.
Question it all you like!
You shouldn't have a problem demonstrating this then? It's easy to enumerate all failed central planned economies, there really never was one that succeeded. Why don't you give an example of country that failed miserable with millions of deaths because of too much free markets.
The beauty of capitalism is that it works (or seems to work for some people, for the time being) by externalizing its true costs to other countries, other social strata -- and indeed far into the future.
Though mortality rates seem not to have risen (and may in fact declined) in the U.S. during the peak depression years (1930-1933) -- as a global phenomenon, the collapse of a system based on "too much free markets" is generally seen as one of the primary drivers of WW2, so we would have to attribute some share of its 70-85 million fatalities this market-driven collapse as well.
And not just by accident. There's also the fact that "free market" interests and Western financial support were key to Hitler and Mussolini's rise to power in the first place, as the former saw the latter as a perhaps unsavory but ultimately necessary bulwark against the rising spectre of a global socialist movement (whether on the Bolshevik model or otherwise).
Plus the whole European colonial project in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the several hundred million deaths that it brought to the table. Though to be fair, this wasn't so much a matter of any collapse of the free market system of the time -- but rather of it working exactly as it was intended, from the very start.
And of course now we're headed for a much larger disaster with likely at least as many hundred millions of deaths looming on the horizon -- in the form of climate change and its attendant disruptions, also very much a direct result of "too much free markets".
So there you go.
Are there any sustainable socialist economies by any metric?
> European colonial project
Colonialism is not free market.
> also very much a direct result of "too much free markets"
Again, communist countries are the most polluted ones. The reason is straightforward - their economies produced so little, they couldn't afford environmental protection costs.
China has hit it out of the park, I think it's quite fair to say. (Could easily name a whole bunch more, but gotta keep this short. It's also a moot subject, per my last item below).
Colonialism is not free market.
That's the thing -- "free market" societies have never really been free, once externalities are accounted for. But the multi-century European colonial project was no mere externality. Its genesis, ideology and economics were inseparable from the development of Western-style capitalism as we know it.
Again, communist countries are the most polluted ones. The reason is straightforward - their economies produced so little, they couldn't afford environmental protection costs.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. But this also gets into a much more important topic we've been leaving out: there's no dichotomy between "socialism" and "capitalism" -- and never was. Nearly every modern, large-scale economy has been a working hybrid of both systems.
Even the good ole' USA.
> "free market" societies have never really been free
Of course. But the free'er they are, the better they work.
> has been a working hybrid of both systems
The socialist part flounders along, supported by taxes on the free market. The bigger the socialist part, the worse the economy as a whole performs.
We weren't talking about communism, but rather socialism. Also, its markets are very far from free.
That's all I have time for. Good luck.
It seems to work for any country that embraced free market ideas the same way socialist policies predictably don't work in any country that tried them.
You are seriously claiming WW2, colonialism and climate change is a direct consequence of people having too much choice? If only Germany had a strong dictator preventing people to be too free to choose, oh wait,...
The vast majority of folks have comparatively few meaningful choices available to them. About things like Android vs. iPhone, sure. But about things that actually matter -- like the fact that they have to work so hard all their lives; and that they probably have to drive a car to get there; that the oceans are filling up with microplastics, and their drinking water with something called PFAS that very few people had even heard of until very recently, and so on -- not all that much.
What I mean is that these bad things are the result of centuries of the elites of these partially "free" societies having too many choices available to them.
Or more specifically: of not having to account for the true costs of their choices.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how...
https://www.britannica.com/place/Russia/Post-Soviet-Russia
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/alcohol-blamed-ha...
An infestation of pyramid schemes (also happened in post-communist Albania, too, leading to civil war).
>>>Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues.
>>>There is no value without labor. The great thing Marx did was show that everything could be converted to a value measured by labor. But, economists afterwards showed that once you have that conversion, you can do it literally with anything. We could have a system based on the number of bumblebees required to build a house. That is a normative judgement that labor is somehow special.
Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment. But it has brought the standard of living up across the entire world past a Malthusian cycle of more food means more people, means they eat the food, and we have starvation.
The same can be said for current implementations of Communism all across the globe.
Lastly, cooperatives may be a great solution for a lot of manufacturing and housing challenges. And when you get to the scale of a country, a co-op is just a government, and a capitalistic democracy feels a lot more like a co-op than a dictatorship or authoritarianism even with all its pitfalls. A populous who then really starts to demand through votes that we change to improve the blight of our fellow humans seems an even better place to live, if we can just get there.