It's Hard To Look At Senior Politicians Like McConnel Or Pelosi And Conclude That Experienced Politicians

I would try to design enough formal feedback channels (besides voting) so that public opinion could be inferred without a doubt. We already live in a time where people can yell at BART officials on Twitter directly about poor service; I don't think any official who ignored or willfully misinterpreted those demands would last very long in office. And again, the public would ultimately need to approve an economic plan, and could freely reject any that doesn't reflect their interests. This doesn't solve the tyranny of the majority, but it should prevent tyranny by the planners.

Exactly, what if people could propose what they want on the ballot via referendum, then the planners could crunch the numbers and come back with costs for the most popular choices? They could try to pull a fast one and say "actually bars and strip clubs will cost 10 million labor hours each; pick either booze or hospitals but not both" but I think the public would push back against that estimate. If the government's estimates are compromised, people could recall planners (or perhaps a new group of planners could be chosen randomly by sortition) and ultimately vote for any plan that seemed desirable and attainable, regardless of the source of the plan. If Jim Bob from Duluth has had better success in predicting costs than the professionals, there would be nothing stopping people from voting for his proposal instead.

On your point about labor discipline, this is kind of one of socialism's basic arguments: when capitalist states (or historical socialist states) suppress labor movements and protests, not only is it immoral, but it also denies the government the opportunity to solve the public's problems or inefficiencies. If the public is unhappy with working conditions, then their rights to free speech, protest, and even to prevent production via striking must be protected- not only because it is morally right, but because their dissent is the only means of epxressing their real preferences to the planners and society at large. Ultimately, control of production (and of enforcement, to whatever degree necessary and practical) must belong to the workers, because otherwise they are at the mercy of whoever really calls the shots and can set the narrative (whether that is a capitalist state or state socialist planners.)

Finally, about the market: the market primarily allocates goods depending on peoples' ability to pay, not their willingness. The working class is kept in a state of debt (and in some places, literal) slavery and fear of absolute poverty. Those with vast wealth can artifically and disproportionately skew demand towards their own interests. Thus markets often fail to capture accurate demand, and we end up with outcomes that are bad for the majority but benefit the owning class (privatized health insurance, private cable monopolies, etc.) On the supply side, goods and services are overproduced and wasted (food, unsold vehicles) or are underproduced/overpriced due to regulatory capture (such as laws forbidding direct sale of vehicles by manufacturers), poor policy (either the result of upper class interests, or of government attempts to compromise between opposing classes, such as rent control). Even when production of goods adjusts to market signals, it is slow and imperfect. What if we could just decide to produce however much we would likely need to satisfy a certain goal or demand, plus a bit extra?

Overall, I feel like we're talking past each other somewhat, and I also think I could give you any number of policies, whether practical ("planners could be recalled at any time by the public") or ridiculous ("people could humiliate planners in the street to discourage them from acting too arrogant") and your response would either be (understandably) skepticism, or some variant of "the Serious People will always be around, and will find a way to exploit any system or rule to their own ends and/or to enable bullying". I don't expect to change your mind, especially with nothing but hypotheticals, but I don't think it would be productive to continue the dialogue. But nevertheless, I have appreciated the opportunity to clarify my thoughts and beliefs via answering your questions, and I am sincerely appreciative that you have asked your questions with civility, given how bad other leftists seem to have treated you. I hope I have extended you the same courtesy.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

This Armistice Day, what better way to repay veterans than to ensure that none of them are ever made again?

Exactly. A civics professor I had in college had a lot of fun telling us how one of the most hated occupational groups in America ended up running everything.

As for why people believe that politicians get paid so much, I think the answer is related to the ignorance of the mechanism behind "corruption", as stated above. We read about politicians accepting absurd amounts of money from corporate interests and assume that it is a function of greed and desire for personal enrichment (which it certainly sometimes is), rather than a desire to fund re-election.

Conservatives also have an interest in portraying politicians as decadent and wasteful with the average person's tax dollars, so that also contributes.

Idea: I don't want to settle for choosing the lesser of two evils; I want to abolish the system that confined me to those choices in the first place. Choosing a lesser evil is better than choosing a greater evil, but choosing good is best.

I KNOW IS TOO MUCH TEXT BUT I DID MY BEST DON’T BULLY ME.

I'd be more sympathetic to the protestors if blocking highways actually accomplished anything. At least chaining yourself to a redwood saves the tree, but what's gained from stopping people from driving down a certain road? At least Occupy Wall Street blocked a couple office buildings, which inconvenienced some business scumbags. But the only thing produced by blocking roads is bad PR at best and dead protestors at worst.

Unusually poignant example of how stupid the "blocking traffic with protests is fine if it's for a good cause" argument is:

These are reasonable complaints; it sucks when people

1. Fail to interpret you correctly and act reasonably 2. Act polite to such an extreme that it comes off as passive-aggressive, sarcastic, or even threatening (a big man staring resentfully at a small woman for "making" him side-step is probably threatening to the woman, especially alone and/or at night 3. Treat you like a fragile object or an antagonist rather than someone who's entitled to basic civility.

I just had three guys consecutively stop dead in their tracks and side step me. One of them even said, “excuse me, mam!” I want to puke.

I’ve been out shopping a lot lately and this is the new hot trend and I may start screaming soon

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

What about direct-democratic planning, with or without the recommendations made by a committee or any individual?

Instead of subordinating our economic desires and the associated information to the anarchic market, why don't we discuss potential economic activity and share all perspectives and information?

I’m not sure what a socialist society should look like, but I’m pretty sure of this: factor markets should be replaced with national, regional and local planning

"Importantly, the market and private property by themselves cannot prevent the total depletion of the commons. In fact, the depletion of the commons follows inexorably from the distributed actions of agents following profit and loss signals. It is only when private property is circumvented, where information not revealed by prices or profit and loss signals is taken into account, that sustainable use of common resources becomes possible."

Carol Cohn, 1987