User blog comment:Centrist16/SOMETHING EVERYONE MUST KNOW/@comment-3398633-20150809140026/@comment-3398633-20150811031829

I'm not going to reply to the whole comment, because it feels like we're going in a circle, but I'll reply to a few of the major parts.

"The profit is from the owner stealing part of the labour that the employee did. That should belong to the worker, because people are entitled to the full product of their labour." -- Then people won't build businesses if they know the money their company is making is being forcibly taken from them and given to people who's actual labor isn't worth the money they make. There is no real incentive to go through all of the work of building and managing a business. If the government starts creating jobs, that is a centrally-planned, and history has shown time and time again that centrally-planned economies don't work.

"You can own without managing, if you have prior money. Even if you are doing labour through managing, how is your work worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if someone else's honest work is worth less than a million?" -- Because my labor is directly linked to whether or not the tens of thousands of people and products I'm managing keep their jobs and sell. What I do can sink or save an entire corporation on a daily basis. Me getting millions of dollars is an incentive for me to sacrifice my family life and free time to prevent an entire multi-billion dollar corporation from going belly up overnight.

"Well, I'm a high school student planning to be an engineer. There are plenty of scientists, etc. who were socialist. Albert Einstein, for example." -- Albert Einstein was a physicist, not an economist. I'd trust him with my homework, not with my wallet. Also, your age tells me a lot about your worldview. I've seen how businesses are managed and the work that goes into maintaining them day in and day out. I assure you that as you mature, so too will your views. And as you study, hopefully economics in the future, you'll see and understand that socialism simply cannot work in real world applications.

"No, only some of them. It's not a tenet, just a model. Paris Commune was decentralized, as was Revolutionary Catalonia. Current co-ops are often examples of market socialism." -- The Paris Commune ran its economy according to anarchist, not socialist, ideals, and the workers wanted a more "just", not socialist, way of running the economy. An anarchist economy is by nature decentralized. Revolutionary Catalonia was controlled by anarchists, not socialists, and none of its leaders knew how to manage the economy. Albert Pérez-Baró, one of the members of the party that came to power in Catalonia even said "the workers returned to work and found themselves without responsible management" and "lacking training in economic matters, the union leaders, with more good will than success, began to issue directives that spread confusion." They didn't know what they were doing. Nuff said.

"Because they claimed to be socialist in order to legitimize their regimes. Even if you admit they're socialist, that's just one model (central planning). We have three other models to try. They weren't really trying to become communist. There never has been a communist state. Our goods come from capitalism because it's the system we have currently. They could just as easily come from socialism." -- The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, according to countless economists and political historians, were socialist states. Period. The things we have could have never been in plentiful supply under socialism, because in every major socialist state, there was always a shortage of supplies. Look at Venezuela, a socialist state according to every creditable and respectable foreign observor and local resident. There is hyperinflation and shortage of basic goods because of Venezuela's socialist economic model. And mind you, Venezuela follows a decentralized socialist economic system, and it still hasn't worked.

"Again. They claimed to be socialist/communist in order to legitimize their regimes. I think the Holodomor, Great Leap Forward, etc. were all horrific. But they didn't occur under socialist states. They were a result of incompetent and/or malicious governing. And again, even if you admit they were socialist, that's just one failed model (central planning), and we have three others to try." -- You're still making excuses for them. Saying that "oh they really weren't socialist because they didn't follow all of the socialist ideals" is tantamount to saying that I'm not black because I don't listen to rap, a genre of music that was created by black people as a part of black culture (I hate that term "black culture"). No, I'm still black. The same applies to socialism. All of those states followed most of the ideals of socialism, and they committed their atrocities to further their socialist goals of achieving communism. Just because they weren't following all of the socialist ideals doesn't make them any less socialist. They still followed and instituted socialist ideals and policies where they could.