Oh, shit no. It’s just an answer to jandrese’s question, not a recommendation.
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Yeah, it really makes me wonder if the only reason the economy was more sustainable back then is because TPTB had no other choice…
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Walmart.
Its internal economy is larger than the USSR at its largest, and is run entirely as a command economy.
See also:
Amazon
The Pentagon
etc.
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THIS. It should probably be done through a wholesale change to a tax on net wealth. Encourage people to spend, it will bolster the overall economy. Tax 100% over a few hundred million, maybe. If we could get everyone to agree to that, that it will lead to basically Star Trek, we will be very secure as a planet. All of humanity will finally reap the benefits of the technological developments of the past couple hundred years, versus just the tippity-top. Why the 99.9999 or whatever percent who will likely never be worth 100 Million don’t agree to this immediately, I just don’t understand. Oh yes I do, many people are very very dumb.
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I think Bezos and Musk are pursuing a business opportunity with the Mars thing. They’re not fleeing capitalism.
This seems silly.
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Precisely. Capitalism is the apex pyramid scheme. For the wealthy to continue to increase their wealth, they must draw increasing amounts from the lower classes. At some point those lower classes will no longer be able to afford goods/services/taxes to support the upper classes, which will douse the fire of the financial market casinos.
I’m not exactly sure what the endgame is, though. Perhaps with the entire system frozen, an outside conquering force can step in and take over. Which may lead to nuclear retaliation and the end of most species on Earth. Or it might be as mild as mass guillotinings of the upper classes. Hard to say.
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Yep, feudalism, indentured servitude and then to chattel slavery. The few get to own more and more and MORE, to the point that they own everything, even the 99.999%. Someone else here said that capitalism is not a zero sum game, and I agree. Then taking that to a logical conclusion, this is what you get (or that’s what I get, but I’m not an economist or whatever field this is). A couple people finally own the entire earth and all that’s on it.
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Maybe it’s just the genius of Jim Backus, but this thumbnail makes me want to side, uncharacteristically, with the capitalists.
They seem to be really hurting.
Much the same point has been made about high- and progressive taxation during the Cold War. Gotta keep the proles happy with shinies, lest they go all commie.
It’s probably just a coincidence that that period also happened to see decades long sustained growth …
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The time of severe rationing? It required mobilizing a whole new workforce to make up the gap. This isn’t an efficient system. It produced a few materials that were highly prioritized, but only by cutting off production of goods people would normally buy and repurposing the infrastructure. It also depended on huge amounts of unsustainable deficit spending. If you tried to keep that up long term your economy would be in shambles after just a few short decades.
This is an interesting viewpoint. I’m not sure you can say it’s a command economy when it’s pretty much just responding to external market forces however. Each manager has to figure out what to order, but it’s mostly responding to demand from the shoppers. It’s not like the manager is sitting at the door and telling each shopper what they are allowed to buy.
The Pentagon is a much more apt example, but it’s really hard to make the case that they are efficiently run.
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According to the manager I used to know who worked there, nobody who actually works at an actual Walmart ever did much ordering, and the input of shoppers was largely irrelevant at the quantities Walmart commands.
Which is why it’s so fascinating watching them try to pivot to a more Amazon-like model of doing business.
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P.S.:
The time of severe rationing?
there was negligible to nil rationing in the US. In the UK food rationing led, perhaps perversely, to better nutrition for a large segment of the population.
rationing improved the health of British people; infant mortality declined and life expectancy rose, excluding deaths caused by hostilities. This was because it ensured that everyone had access to a varied diet with enough vitamins.
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Can we just donate money to have Bill Gates sent to Mars? Without any Internet capabilities, so that he has no way of sending us his annoying “book lists” (which promptly go onto my “Do Not Read” list anyway). I mean, we’ll send him to Mars in a Linux-powered rocket, but have all of the communications systems running Windows. That should take care of it.
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All this talk about colonizing Mars, occupying the Moon and so on always reminds me of one of the best first lines in literature. “In five years, the penis will be obsolete said the salesman.”
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I’ve never heard of this… I’ve been able to avoid it without trying. Apparently Mr. Gates doesn’t have my email? Or maybe I made the right decision in avoiding private sector work so far.
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I agree with everything you’ve written. Though, to be pedantic about the bit above: How you (billionaire) spend the money also seems fairly important. Bezos sitting Smaug-like on piles of gold or buying up the U.S. annual wheat production and dumping it into the sea, will have a significantly different impact than using it to employ more workers, increasing pay, or even just buying a lot of something that takes human effort to produce.
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But market economy isn’t synonymous with capitalism. Markets distribute goods pretty well, which is why we’ve had them since prehistory. But capitalism (i.e. wage labour, accumulation of capital by owners who don’t necessarily do any of the work, etc.) has only been around for a couple of centuries. We could have a market system that distributed the proceeds differently and more fairly by changing ownership (worker co-ops), greater redistribution through taxation and spending (social democracy), or a system we haven’t even thought of yet.
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Makes sense to me.
