User blog comment:Centrist16/SOMETHING EVERYONE MUST KNOW/@comment-3398633-20150809140026/@comment-1045231-20150811144303

"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." -- Under the current system, money is being forcibly taken from the employees to fill the pockets of the employer. The value of people's labor is equal to what they produce. Say if someone makes a ___ on a ___ assembly line. Their compensation should be equal to the value of the ___s they made, not a fraction of it, where in capitalism a fraction is going to the employer. For managers, they are doing work, but it's not worth tens of millions of dollars (to pay for them, the price of the ___s are increased proportional to their labor). Also, people will build cooperatives because now they know their money isn't being forcibly taken from them and giving to an 'owner'.

"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." -- I can see that being worth 2x or even 5x a typical wage. But how is it possibly worth 1000x a typical wage? It doesn't justify theft of the labor value of the workers. And again, you can own without managing, and get billions without doing anything if you have prior money.

"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." -- There are tons of Marxian economists (Marx, to start :P). I don't consider managing to be an unworthy job. But it's not fair that they gets 100x+ what a normal worker makes. They're not doing even comparable to enough work to be worth that much. It can and has worked in real world applications, such as Mondragon, a highly successful worker cooperative.

"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." -- Anarcho-socialism is absolutely a form of socialism. Socialist economies just have to have workplace democracy and social ownership of the means of production, which both of those achieved. That's not an excuse to maintain our heavily flawed current system. People can learn how to manage.

"The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, according to countless economists and political historians, were socialist states. Period. They all had quotas and goods shortages on a routinue basis, and things only got worse as the state economies began to crumble in on themselves. The things we have could have never been in plentiful supply under socialism, there was always a shortage of supplies at all levels of society under socialism. 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. Socialism has had more than a century to iron out the kinks, and they failed each and every time." -- They lacked workplace democracy, and their "social ownership of the MoP" was just the state owning it, where the state was controlled by a bureaucratic class and not democratic. Therefore, NOT socialist. Again, they claimed to be socialist to legitimize their regimes. Venezuela: I think they're much more of a social democracy than being actually socialist. However, I'm not knowledgeable about them.

"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." -- No. They lacked workplace democracy and their social ownership of the MoP was just state ownership, where the state was controlled by a bureaucratic class and not democratic. Thus, NOT socialist. Again, they claimed to be socialist to legitimize their regimes. Rather, this is like calling a white person black because they listen to rap and "identify as black".