In other news, fire leads to ash demonstrating the self defeating nature of fire, and how the proper way to keep the campsite warm is a big pile of ash, the only question being whether one wants to burn wood to obtain it, or simply dump a wheelbarrow full and then blame the lack of warmth on counter-revolutionary saboteurs.
Grinding the bones of billionaires is hard menial work that I reckon will keep us warm for a long ass while.
Whoa
My problem with this is that in practice the working majority in many centralized economies didn't own shit. If they did, it wouldn't have been possible to replace the systems in the Eastern bloc even though most people preferred them. The centralized systems allowed few people to take private ownership and pocket the profits of the economies' entire industrial bases leaving the majority with nothing.
And that's the happy case when the centralized system took good care of its people by sharing enough of their surplus with them. There are of course the ones that don't do that and use their populations as slave labor, even renting it out to other countries.
So I'm thinking that the sustainable alternative isn't a centralized economy but a mix where the decentralized part is worker-owned. At least that's my best guess at this point in time. And you have to have a real democratic political system. Without that, the upper layers of the centralized part are just as untouchable and can afford to be unaccountable as the upper layers of the capitalist monopolies today.
Are we just gonna ignore the fact that the whole critique of centralization is that its inefficient, ineffective, and unresponsive to peoples needs?
Like as capitalism is becoming more monopolistic, its becoming increasingly bad at delivering goods that people actually want and just becomes better at supressing and controling them. You know the same critisism thats pointed at autoritarian communism.
I don't think this is the W you think it is.
That isn't the critique of monopolies. It's well established that vertical integration and size can achieve efficiencies that are impossible at smaller scales. The critique is that once few entities have cornered a market, they can extract profit that's needed for the rest of the economy to function well. A corollary is that they don't do what people need then them to do because it isn't as profitable. If you remove profit as the variable to optimize for, the whole equation changes and you can end up with the efficiencies while serving the needs of your customers.
Monopolies in econ 101 are called inefficient because they generate excess profits. Inefficiency refers to profits that are extracted. Not inefficiency in the colloquial sense of the word.
Vertical integation and scale are not inherently monopolistic. Some monopolies formed because they exploited these advantages, but there are competative industries today where several vertically integrated companies compete.
Monopolies in econ 101 are not called inefficient because they extract profit. They're inefficient because they don't respond to market forces. Since they control all supply, they can disregard demand.
Yeah we are because that critique is not based in reality, and people who still believe it can be safely ignored because they're opining on a subject they have no clue about.
Your comment does not promote actual discussion and I'd like you to do better, please.
Your comment is only refuting an argument and then supporting that refutal with an ad hominem attack, rather than actually providing a supporting argument.
I as a layman would also actually like to know why you believe that the critique of centralization is 'not based in reality'.
My prior understanding is that any time you obfuscate the management of a project from the workers of the project - regardless of the method of obfuscation (layers of management, distance, language barriers, subterfuge) or the project type - you inevitably end up with out-of-touch individuals directing.
Please tell me why this is an out of touch understanding of why centralization is an issue.
Out of curiosity, do you think the USSR collapsed because all its own citizens thought the government was doing too good a job?
China introduced private corperations and capital because they increased efficiency and production.
Are you saying every government whose ever tried tons of central planning just messed up or randomly decided to scale it back just for funsies?
