Devon Eriksen@Devon_Eriksen_
Many people, even self-described conservatives, think socialism would work if human nature were different.
No. Socialism cannot work, even in a hypothetical society of selfless genius saints.
Why not?
Because socialism centralizes economic choices. How much lumber do we produce? How much wheat? What should the hourly wage of a garbage collector be? How much should insulin cost? How about bread?
Socialists think that if you elect the right people, they will make these decisions intelligently and altruistically, and everything will be great.
But it doesn't matter how smart and benevolent you are... you can't make a good decision without the right information. The Socialist Central Planning Committee, however wise or benevolent, doesn't know what's wanted, or what's available, because that information is conveyed in prices, and accurate pricing is the very thing that socialist governments wipe away with the bureaucratic pen.
Capitalist networks are decentralized. They distribute decision making to where the information is.
A man selling metal doesn't know anything about desks, or lumber. He doesn't know how many desks people want, or whether they should be made out of oak, or folded metal.
But he does know how much it costs him to smelt iron ore into steel, and roll it into sheets. So he sets a price, and others decide whether, and how much, to buy.
That price contains the information others need to decide whether steel is plentiful, and should be folded into anything you can make out of sheet metal, or is scarce, and should be saved for things that can only be done with steel, and furniture should be made out of oak, or pine, instead.
Socialism works, or rather doesn't, by using the threat of force to set the prices of things, or take money from one person and give it to another.
But every time this happens, critical data on supply or demand is erased... data that you need to make decisions.
Individual prices are a decision, a guess at where supply and demand cross paths. But since free markets reward those who guess correctly, or copy a correct guess, aggregate prices are data on supply and demand.
For a socialist central planning committee to order the manufacture of the correct number of cars, or to correctly set the price of a car, they need to know a thousand thousand thousand things about steel and aluminium, welders and assembly robots, rubber and glass and lithium batteries and copper wire, which they must gather, along with trillions of other pieces of data, from literally everyone in their entire civilization.
Tesla only needs to know how much people charge them for the stuff they need.
At every transaction in a captialist society, vital data is compressed into its most compact and useful form, then passed along to the adjacent step, where abundant brainpower is waiting to make decisions with it.
Any defective node in the web that fails to make good decisions receives swift and automatic feedback, and either heeds that feedback or goes out of business, to be replaced by someone who will.
Yes, in a capitalist system, there are many undesirable results. But capitalism doesn't create these results. It discovers them. They are inevitable consequences of the state of technology, and will persist until something is invented that changes the terrain.
In socialism, no such solution is possible, because all the inherent problems you need to solve with progress are hidden from view by the far worse problems you created for yourself by separating the place where decisions are made from the place where information is known.
