LogFAQs > #965440562

ZeldaMutant posted...

No. What the hell? Where did this myth come from? Is this some pervasive American anti-socialist propaganda?

Socialism means that the workers own the means of production, and get all the profits. In theory, this would mean that working hard gets you even more money than in capitalism. In practice, in the Soviet Union workers' wages were directly based on how much they produced. This rewarded hard work even more than usual wage labor, but led to an inefficient bureaucracy and managers fudging the numbers out of compassion.

The Soviet Union also had a strong social safety net, but that's not really an inherent part of socialism, and is something capitalist countries have to varying degrees.

There's just the major gap of defining what someone has produced. When someone does the CAD model for a series production car, what is the value of that production? The concept was okay-ish in an industrial age where physical goods were the vast majority of productivity in a given country. In the modern era, there's a hell of a lot more in the software side. In a film production, how much is produced by the actor? They're the one actually doing the show, but then what value is the camera man? The director? The editor? The marketer? A large amount of the value of a given product is derived from these additional services that are difficult to quantify.

Just as all those jobs are productive work, so is being a business owner, being the manager of your assets. It is extremely hard to quantify the value that anybody's individual work brings to the end product, particularly when it's work that produces value long after it is done (like creating a film that's watched over and over again for decades). Capitalism settled this long ago by having people negotiate their own value since everybody's contribution is subjective anyway. Socialism simply tries to quantify value by its own standard, and accordingly makes some work less valuable to be done than its skills demand, it lacks the flexibility of the market to assert that those in demand have their productivity to society compensated.

We do socialised Capitalism for a reason. The government can't determine the value of product to society, but it can determine what people it wants to keep running if they can't produce sufficiently, since all people are a tax benefit to the government and so all are valuable to its production. Capitalism is the most productive method for a society to operate, it is socialised so that all people can find a way to be as productive as they are capable of being for society.

Unchecked Capitalism sees the less fortunate die due to failure to produce, unchecked Socialism sees the economy stagnate and in turn the living standards of all stay low. The better the country's economy is, the better chance there is for Socialism to provide a lifestyle that benefits all sufficiently.