• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Provide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.

    Any government that has the power to grant these goods/services will have the power to take them away. Unless the public can directly own and administer the property through local councils and administrative bureaucracies, they are banking on the largesse of national socialist leadership to continue indefinitely.

    Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don’t make people depend on the market.

    All of that is predicated on a continuously expanding surplus of raw materials, advanced technologies, and an educated labor force.

    You can either import these as luxuries, in which case you’re operating an export-oriented economy predicated on the market price of your domestic surplus. That requires a bigger economy you’re effectively beholden to. Looks good in the moment, but over the course of centuries you just end up as a West African / Middle Eastern / East India Tea Company-controlled kingdom, wherein the bottlenecks of trade produce oligarchs of immense personal fortune.

    Or you produce domestically, in the Juche model, and live within the means provided by your real estate and your people. But that requires an economy that can plan and organize resources on the order of decades (if not centuries) and invests domestically rather than keeping an eye towards meeting the needs of foreign import markets. It won’t work as a capitalist system, because the capitalist demand for growth will push you back into the export-oriented model that foreigners exploit.

    “Free” markets follow the bubbles in credit and compel local economies to chase short term speculative bubbles at the expense of long term economic needs. Planned economies can build infrastructure in advance of future needs and plan social policy to curb economically regressive short-term profitable impulses with long term costs (opium consumption, coal/NGL power grids, cash crops that deplete arable land and water reserves like tobacco and pistachios).

    They aren’t durable. They produce rapid consolidations of wealth and political capital. And they create intergenerational risks that the current cohort of investors have little reason to acknowledge or prevent.