Thread: I just realized something... Version 1.0 was Socialism in practice.

Challenging questions, I like it.
Incoming wall of text!

How do we decide what constitutes a "fair" distribution? How is such a thing determined or measured, and by whom?

I'll refer to the examples of police and fire fighters again to explain this point. Fairness in this context, is service rendered by the police and fire fighters without prejudice of any sort towards the citizens. Police and fire fighters would not be allowed to refuse to render help to someone based on their wealth, social status, ethnicity, or any other form of discrimination, that is what I meant by fairness without prejudice. Nix gave some good examples regarding how healthcare and social safety net in the UK work, which shows how more assistance and resources are given depending on how dire your situation is compared to others. I don't think I can explain it better then Nix's post, so I will leave it at that.

Can you think of any example in which a privately owned company has not benefited the citizens in its local area?

Right now in the field of medicine research, pharmaceutical companies are in direct competition with each other. As a result, their research and development labs most often do not share research data or analysis with one another until they have developed something that they can patent. The reason being, they do not want to give their competitor a chance to use their data and develop a new medicine for some illness or disease before they do, and get a lead on the market. Although progress are still being made, it is progressing at a slower rate than if there were more cooperation and information sharing. If they weren't in complete competition with one another, and if pharmaceutical research and development of drugs were socialized, with the sale of any development re-invested by society back into more R&D, all our best scientists would be able to work with each other and get more done.

Personally, I feel that society works best when there is a proper balance between capitalism and socialism, as going too far to the extreme on either side will result in inefficient progress. I'll give two hypothetical examples, one is a nation that is pure socialism with no free market, and another pure capitalism with no government infrastructure support.

Problem Example in pure socialism:
Lets say the government distribute out food in specific quantities to it's citizens, enough to match the daily recommended calories, vitamins, proteins, etc., so that everyone gets enough to stay healthy, but not over eat. But then some people have allergy to certain food, and would need to request a change in the type of food distributed to them. With a huge population, there will be too many food substitution request for the government to efficiently process, resulting in delays, and people end up going hungry for prolonged periods before their request are finally answered, while the food they are allergic to end up being spoiled and going to waste because it was still being delivered during that whole time and didn't get sent to someone else who could've benefited from it.

Problem example in pure capitalism:
A construction company specializes in building highways, and since the government isn't paying for the highway to be built in this pure capitalistic economy, the construction company make their profit by putting in road tolls so that anyone who need to use the highway have to pay, because after all, the roads are privately owned, not publicly owned. This isn't a major problem in of itself, but lets say Pepsi Cola decides to buy controlling shares in this construction company, and thus take ownership of all it's highways. Pepsi then decides that any vehicle transporting Coca Cola for the purpose of sale distribution isn't allowed to use their road, in an attempt to block off supplies of their competitor. Coca Cola responds by buying their own highway paving company, and proceed to buy up land and have parallel highways and inner city roads built so that they can transport their product. Aside from the obvious wastefulness of raw materials and redundant nature of having two sets of roads made, other problems occur for the economy, such as cost of houses sky rocketing because of less available land due to double road construction, and increase demand for construction labour which increase labour cost and construction cost.

These examples may seem extreme and silly, but then again, so is the idea of running society and economy based on a pure socialism or capitalism model.

As a final note, I want to further clarify all the terminologies, and their counter part.
Socialism is opposite to Capitalism/Privatization
Communism is opposite to Democracy/Republic

Hence, you can have a communist country that is using capitalism as its economic model. China is a good example as it has allowed for more privatization and moved towards more capitalism. Venezuela on the other hand is an example of a Democracy that leans towards socialism for their economic structure. The decision of what is the right balance between capitalism/socialism depends on the country and it's citizens, hence why we have elections to decide if we think our country is leaning too much to one side or the other. Although in the US, both main political parties are right-wing parties, one is just not as far right as the other.

Originally Posted by Rau

tl;dr 'MURICA

I miss you Rau. D: -licks-

I see you hold a firm partisan view on this subject, and that's ok. I too used to believe that capitalism was far superiour, until I studied it more and realized that there are some things that are far too important to be left to special interest control. My main point is, there is a place for everything, and you can't use one system over the other exclusively to create the best economy and living standard that can be had. An artist who is painting a realistic portrait, can't stick to one brush, because he requires different bristle sizes and strokes to create the best picture he can.

This will be my last post on this thread so as to let this thread die into the graveyard. No disrespect to the OP, but I don't believe people on a game forum is interested in a topic like this entering their leisure time. However, I will address some of your points, and if you still wish to continue debating I'll be more then happy to take it into private messages.

I dunno. Personally, I think competition can drive companies to develop more products better, faster, and more efficiently than they otherwise could. I believe progress is sped up by competition, not slowed down by it.

Competition doesn't always speed up progress, especially when the main resource for that progress is scientific knowledge. Scientists being able to share ideas and data allows them to not have to recreate experiments or tests that have already been conducted by someone in another lab, thus allowing more time for them to work on something to add on to the data, rather then recreating the same data. It's much like how a reading group in Universities and Colleges work, where group of students work together and each read a section of a book, then get back together and share the main points of their section with each other. It allows them to get the data from the book faster then if they all had to read the book seperately.

The government makes you pay for the roads, too. They just call their payment taxes, rather than tolls.

I feel you missed the forest for the tree by focusing on this point. You cut off the part where I said, "this isn't a problem in of itself" when referring to the tolls, because I already recognize that the cost of using roads come from either tolls or taxes.

More roads means less traffic -- that's a good thing. Only about 20% of the Earth's land is populated by human beings, so there's certainly no shortage of real estate; there's plenty of room to expand.

You're also forgetting the environmental/ecological cost of constructing double the amount of roads. Also, if you are correct and 20% of the land surface is inhabited by humans, we have a lot less living spaces left then you may think. 10% of the land is covered in ice (*1), 33% is a desert(*2), and 40% is used for food production(*3). There are some overlaps since some people do live on either ice, desert, or resides within farmland, but their numbers are relatively small compared to the the rest of the population, thus if we lose prime real estate land to roads, you'll be pushing more people into those less comfortable environment.

Increase in demand for manual labor would drive prices down, not up, due to the fact that employers would need to stretch their budgets further.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this line here made no sense to me. How is increase in demand within a labour field drive the cost down?

Plus that sounds like a large amount of job creation. With all the millions of impoverished and homeless people who are out of work, that sort of large-scale economic production sounds like just the sort of thing we need.

Indeed, large scale infrastructure work is what government often do in times of recession to stimulate the economy. However, in the paragraph I wrote, I listed the negative effects of over development of roads (or any infrastructure for that matter). One of the biggest problem is an inflation in housing cost and real estate prices. There is a domino effect in the works here since everything in economy have a connection to one another. With housing costs going up, less people will be able to afford to buy a house, and the problem is compounded with less real estate available making it even harder to own your own land. Home equity is a strong factor in consumer confidence and spending, as people tend to draw from their home equity to make purchases of goods and services. With less home owners, there will be less demands for goods, resulting in lower business activity, so even though demand for building roads have gone up, other businesses will be winding down due to lower demand for their products. As you can see, there's a lot of give and take in economy and it is an ever changing dynamic, which is why there's no consensus amongst economists on what is the best solution.

If the contest is between Venezuela and China, then China definitely wins, as they have a very real chance of surpassing the U.S. as the world's dominate super power this century.

Comparing economies of different nations is like comparing apples and oranges, since there is a vast difference in geography, population, natural resources, and even culture. But for the sake of argument lets make the comparison, if the contest is about consumer purchasing power and profit potential for corporations, then yes, China is the clear winner. If you're comparing standards of living for the average citizen on the other hand, Venezuela runs ahead in that category. Making money is great and all, but if you're not improving the standard of living for your citizens, then what's the point? Contrary to popular belief, the richer the country is, doesn't always equate to improved standards of living. The US for example is the richest country in the world, but the standard of living for the majority of it's citizens is below that of Canada. A lot of political, social and ecological factor must be considered to create the best living environment for people, and a purely capitalistic or socialist economy can't create that ideal environment. Again it's all about finding the best balance, and it's not always about making more money.

*Links to geographical data cited
*1 - http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/...ith-ice-288137
*2 - http://www.universetoday.com/65639/w...face-is-desert
*3 - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...crops_map.html

Originally Posted by Eldryan

This will be my last post on this thread so as to let this thread die into the graveyard.

And this shall be mine.

And no, I don't think 1.0 was related to socialism, Especially since this was only a temporary measure removed early on, and it seems a pretty simplistic(or jingoistic) view of socialism. And as far as being prevented from mining 2000-3000+ items after a certain point day after day? Well, I'd rather not return to disturbing headlines of people that play for too long.