A thought experiment on True Communism...

[MrWonka]

I have seen numerous times over the years people argue in favor of "True" communism, to be differentiated from all of the failed Communist regimes over the course of modern history.

I've never really seen that. Sounds like you're starting off with a straw man to me.

So here is my experiment:

Read the classic intro to economics essay "I, Pencil"

Now, by applying the power of "True Communism", explain the decentralized economy that could produce enough pencils such that anyone who needed a pencil could have one.

You people focus very heavily on this concept of a single mastermind making all the choices. I'm not going to focus on Communism so much because it seems like you're trying to use that as a straw man in place of Democratic Socialism which is very different and what is growing in popularity today.

Democratic Socialism has little or nothing to do with planning an economy. I like to use the analogy of the NFL. You seem to think that Democratic Socialists want to call all the plays and tell the quarterback who to throw the ball to. That's false. Democratic Socialists want to be more like the Commissioner of the league establishing rules for fair and safe play as well as providing referees to preside over those games and throw flags when they see people playing dirty and violating the rules. What's more than that is they want the actual players on the field who are doing almost all of the hard work and risking their bodies to have the most say in who is the commissioner of the league.

Right now we have a system where like the NFL the commissioner is largely chosen by the owners of the teams. These investors who have a lot of money in the game, but who aren't themselves on the field banging their heads together to entertain the masses only truly care about the players on the field insofar as they need those players health in the short term to win games and put people in the seats to make them more money.

Now thankfully at least in the NFL the players have a Union that has influence and can force the owners hands in many cases, but all across this country sociopaths Capitalists are targeting Unions and trying to weaken or destroy them.

The Premise of Capitalism is that 100% individualistic. As a result an individual with a ton of Capital that can wield it uniformly has a lot more power than a ton of individuals with a small amount of capitalism. Unless those individuals have the means to join forces and unionize for their common good they can be overpowered by one individual. The Premise of Democratic Socialism is simply that this power dynamic is wrong. That each individuals voice should carry the same weight regardless of how much wealth they have acquired in the past. The quality of an idea should be determined by the quality of the idea alone and not based upon how much Capital there person wielding it has.