Free Market Socialism

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

I am a socialist, just to get that out there. However, I recognize the value in market forces and competition. I’d like to propose a system that captures the benefits of both (similar to Wonderer’s recent thread, except the exact opposite. . .that contradiction will be cleared up later), and actually justifies socialism in the maximization of competition.

I will take as a given that competition benefits society. I think that this can be shown in evolution and markets, but I do not intend to fully support that claim here.

The general idea is that certain social agreements, public goods, and regulation actually increase competition over the whole market. The easy example is anti-trust laws, which maintain competition by regulating to prevent one company from dominating a given market sector. More controversial examples are education and health-care. I would argue that these should be ensured to every citizen in a country because, though they remove or bias competition in one sector, they increase competition across the market as a whole. By ensuring that every citizen is well educated, the competition for inovation and intellectual input is increased, which improves competition in most industries, who’s overall efficiency can be improved by innovation. By ensuring that every citizen is heathy, it ensures that more of the populace is healthy at any given time, increasing the number of citizens available for any given position and increasing competition for that position.
The limits of the line of argument are not clear, but definitely includes the accepted social institutions of law enforcement and emergency services, roads, utilities, and could include public transportation, utilities (at least from the individual point of view; the government may want to encourage competition among suppliers by purchasing utilities from the best company), and access to technology such as the internet. The general principle becomes a system which provides for the necessities in order to encourage competition for the rest. That does begin to converge on Wonderer’s system, but government control would always need to offset by increased competition, keeping the maximum size of government from swelling to full-blown communism or even total socialism.

2

Your statement “competition benefits society” is so outrageiously vague as to put somewhere between begging the question and meaningless. Unless you define your terms you may as well carry on as most philosophers tend to do…

3

How much definition would you like? Competition, i.e. struggle to secure resources or rewards, or to otherwise gain superiority, is beneficial, i.e. positive, desirable, worth seeking, etc., for society, i.e. a group of a given species, in this case humans, who are inextricably linked by common space and resources, and, as a group, destiny.
I suppose the statement is a conjunction of the more defensible claims that efficiency is beneficial and competition generally encourages efficiency. I say generally, true, but then I’m presenting a socialist system, so that doesn’t cause a problem.

Do you disagree that competition is beneficial? or are you just play Wittgestein? Teasing out each others meaning is all a part of a discussion. Roll with it.

4

Healthy competition draws out the potential in us. The struggle also leaves a legacy of institutions and procedures that is mutual beneficial. A socialism is a natural byproduct of it.

5

But government control of education and health care does just the opposite of creating competition. That’s most apparent in education. The teacher’s unions are the ones fighting competition tooth and nail and, with their collective power, they’re succeeding. The government confiscates the money for schools, tells you where your child has to go, and increasingly over the years turns that education increasingly indoctrinational as well as substandard. And socialized health care is not the success story they attempt to portray themselves to be.

6

In America there is healthcare competition but it is certainly not all that it is cracked-up to be either. It is one of the areas of most inflation in America. And insurance companies can cut people off at their discretion. It is also a very bureaucratic procedure in America, with insurance companies shuffling a lot of paperwork in attempts to deny people healthcare. Where competition and the free market in healthcare is good is in that it encourages the invention of new technologies and medical procedures.

Whether competition in education would make things better, on an elementary level or on a mass scale, the jury is still out. Moreover, Charter Schools don’t seem to be the answer either because they are generally not accountable and many have gone bankrupt, leaving students in a lurch.

7

Granted, but only in the limited sectors of education and health. Ensuring for the education and health of all citizens increases competition in all other sectors, because it provides a healthy and intelligent work force and increases the number of people available for a position. I have no allegiance to the teacher’s union, or any union for that matter. But just because they’re bad doesn’t mean competition in education is good.
In medicine, social systems outperform competitive systems, and simultaneously cover all citizens. Universal coverage alone would likely be worth a small sacrifice in quality, but the quality of social healthcare is usually quite good (at least in the developed world).

8

Wax,
Sorry to rain on your attempt at holding a parade but your opening post is nonsense at best. You are looking to measure things that can not be measured. The only people who can DERIVE benefits are individuals. Society can not derive benefits. You may WANT to be able to determine whether competition is beneficial to society but you can not. You may as well be asking: How cold is that sound? or How loud is that porridge?

Unless you know what is good for every single member of society, there is no way to tell what is beneficial for society and what is not. Furthermore, what is “beneficial” for one person can not be added up to what is “not beneficial” to an other person to arrive at a “net benefit” for society.

Consider this: if you, Wax, were a lazy monarch, it might be “beneficial” to you to continue to live a life of sloth, taxing and bleeding the citizens of your kingdom. The end result of “competition” in society may not be desirable to you in the least but it may be “beneficial” to everybody else. How do you balance the competing (sorry, but you are going to have to accept the pun) interests? Answer: you can not. There is no way to conclude what benefits “society” as a whole because the concept of “beneficial” can not be applied. It is a non-concept.

Staunch monarchists would say that there is “value” to maintain a monarchy. They would support the subjugation of the citizens.
Consistent libertarians would dismiss the monarchy as simply violating the freedom of the citizens.

Beneficial to who???
Do you disagree that some people may prefer no competition and some people may prefer more competition?

9

You make a sound point, though I think the ‘‘How cold is that sound? or How loud is that porridge?’’ is a little more absurd.

I think a benefit to society is that which provides, actualizes and or makes available the accepted human rights to each member of the society.

10

1Samuel8,

You sound like a disgruntled individual who has been forced to be part of society.

Society is the network and support system individuals have formed in order to to realize and fulfill their personal interests. Neither can manage without the other. Competition is probably more beneficial to society as a whole than it is to the individual. Competition generally draws out the best and the brightest individuals to run the social order they have formed. Competition also regenerates the social order , which, left without competition, atrophies and decays. For instance, the social order of communism collapse because it denied and thwarted competition and thus was unable to regenerate itself because of lingering stale ideas.

Individuals, left on their own, tend to shun competition because it requires extra effort and work. We are by nature lazy. It is society, by bringing people together, that forces the issue of competition and makes it unavoidable. Some individuals might have a disdain for society because they feel it forces them to compete and be productive. A health competitive society pushes the envelope.

11

45 years of government controlled non-competition have only kept us on stead downhill slide. Unfortunately, one other aspect, discipline, has been driven downhill by government as well. It makes it harder to tell how much either has affected it, but the government is still at the bottom of both.

It’s more than a small sacrifice in quality when it costs lives. The fact that we don’t have universally affordable health care can also be laid at the feet of government when it mandates coverages that many or most people don’t want or need, like in vitro fertilization, preventable health care problems, pregnancy, marriage counsellings etc. etc. And stop using our hospital emergency facilities as aches and sniffles waiting rooms and ambulances as taxis. The reason health care costs are rising so fast is once again, everybody now, big government.

Again, if Canada’s socialized health care is so good, why are they coming south to get it.

12

1Samuel8:
Your comments are nonsense at best. Can nothing benefit a couple, or a family, or a tribe? Can nothing benefit a nation? Really? What redefinition or benefit are you using to claim that? There are multiple metrics that can be used to measure social benefit, my favorite being average quality of life. There’s nothing nonsensical about looking at social benefit.

The Paineful Truth,
Where do you get your information? Because that site links a number of conflicting studies about the quality of education in public versus private schools. Students in private schools score higher on average (1Samuel8, notice how I’m talking about a property of a population, even though for some individuals in the population the trend doesn’t hold) than those in public schools on independent tests, but that’s not necessarily true when you control for the fact that the students in privates schools are more likely to have wealthy, well-educated parents. When you control for that, the trend is less well defined to the point of being non-existent.
And what is this about costing lives? The average life expectancy (there it is again, 1S8) in plenty of countries with social medicine is higher than it is in the US. And rich people in the US go to traditional chinese medical healers and native american shamans when they have a disease with no other cure, does that mean that TMC is better than western medicine? Or that people act out of desperation when they are facing death?

13

You should do some research on neoliberalism. The Clinton’s are, for example, market socialists of the type you’ve just described.

The problem is, what is the role of the private corporation in this system?

14

Yes but you fail to understand a few things:

  1. you, as an outsider, have extremely limited (if not absolutely no) knowledge of what that “nothing” may be
  2. you, as an outsider, have extremely limited (if not absolutely no) knowledge of what that “benefit” may be
  3. that “benefit” can not be measured nor compared to the “benefit” of outside couples or families or tribes
  4. each individual within that couple or family or tribe may have different opinions

You are trying to measure things that can not be measured. That is nonsense.
Furthermore, you are making policy prescriptions based on your conclusions. The chances of every single member of every single couple or family or tribe agreeing with your various policy prescriptions is exceedingly slim. Thus, you will invariably create conflict. That is an inherent flaw of socialism or any other state institution.

No, it does not. Nevertheless, the quality of an education is nothing but a subjective valuation. Nobody holds a monopoly on that judgement.
Did it ever occur to you that some parents just expect “school” to baby-sit their kids? and some kids do not want to go to school? As such, any “poor” quality school is a success.

Since quality of education is an immeasurable construction, just let people choose the provider of education themselves to the best of their ability. Do not make those decisions for them.

I notice is that you are able to see that your definition of a “population” deliberately dismisses the individual reality of the members of that population. Very bizarre.

15

What is competition ? People trying to do something better than other people. Better can mean with lower costs, with fewer resources, with greater profit for those doing the thing better. The point is that there are not so many things that can be done. Things to do have peaked.

You can manufacture products, but it seems that in the end most competition consists in simply finding the lowest paying labor market worldwide and producing things there. It was once thought that robots would completely dominate manufacturing, but robots are no longer fashionable, they cost much more than third world slaves, and they don’t know how to work very well. So that “innovation” and “improvement” has gone down the drain.

You can furnish “services” like health care and become “competitive”. But in this case “competition” means hiking the price of medicine, doctors, hospitals and visits every year. So everyone pays more for something that in other times was mostly free and cost much less. The very fact that the only way that private health care companies and insurance companies and hospitals have to compete is to hike the prices gives me a feeling that they are actually becoming “less competitive” each year and are simply trying to hose people ultimately.

Competition is a big fat lie, a fairy tale, it is just something the winners and rich and hugely profiting corporations brainwash people into thinking, to justify their total theft of money from the poor.

How much competition can any sector in economy achieve ? how many possible improvements can be obtained anyways ? After so many decades of PHDs, scientists, competition etc. Most manufacturing is still a third world sweatshop, what was once free is free no more and getting more expensive by the year and disappearing like health care, Science and Technology have peaked meaning that all the possible improvements that could be made have been made, nothing is left anymore.

So what is there to compete about, how is person A going to show that he is better than person B ? This whole idea of a person being better than another is a bunch of crap, most groups of people in similar circumstances reach a similar level of skills and that is the end of the story, the rest is pure luck, is a poker game, is just arbitrary and forced inequality that is looked upon as person A being better than person B.

There is nothing that is beneficial to society as a whole because ultimately you just get winners and losers, the losers always outnumbering the winners by a thousand to one.

16

The problem with most of these theories, debates and ideas is that everyone and every position and idea is mostly wrong. Everybody is wrong and almost no one is right.

If you say competition is false then what incentive would a society have to do anything at all ? So that society would just disintegrate and fall asleep since it is competition and the drive to improve oneself and show it off ultimately that drives most people.

But if everyone is more or less equal, then that drive is vain, or just an illusion of being better. But society would collapse, so you need both equality and inequalty.

The fact is most theories, ideas and philosophical constructions are incorrect and are correct only in a very narrow range of circumstances and only in a very narrow range of conditions, conditions which are usually impossible to measure and distinguish.

In the end we are mostly all wrong on everything no matter how much we try to analyze and incorporate it in a theory. That is why politics is almost always a failure to almost everyone.

17

On the plus side, most of the people presenting these theories, debates and ideas are not the people who have an entrepreneurial spirit. The world will continue to turn.

You have just contradicted yourself.
If things to do have peaked, it would be impossible to find a lower paying labor market – but lower paying labor markets are constantly being found.

???
A long time ago, I used to write my letters with a quill. Then, some innovators gone and put the pen manufacturers out of business by creating a typewriter. Now… what is this, I hear?!? They call it what?? A computer!?!
I do not need to compute nothing! I have my accountant do all the computing!

Kids with their iPods plugged into their ears are just going to fry their brains!

18

You talk to me like you know me before telling me how little I know of others. That seems strange. . .
Anyway, your points are red herring. I don’t need to know what a family or tribe or couple that I’m not a part of thinks, because my point, which you seem to have implicitly conceded, is that there are things that benefit these relationships, even when not all members agree. And if I need to be inside the relationship to understand what will benefit it, great! I’m a member of the social relationship, so I can know what will benefit society (whether or not I do know is, of course, the topic at hand).

I’m sorry, but you can’t back up that claim. You are claiming that I cannot measure things that are routinely measured. I think you’re confusing complex measurement with no measurement at all. These measurements, as with any measurement that tries to take stock of something as large as a given society, is complex, and there will always be people that defy the averages. That doesn’t mean the measurement is wrong, just that it is complex.

Yes, actually, it does. Here’s the quote that shows that, yes, it actually does “link a number of conflicting studies about the quality of education in public versus private schools”:

So, yes, 1Samuel8, yes, it does. You should be a litte more careful when you imply that I’m either lying or an idiot about links that I post.
As for what parents want, parents don’t own their children, and parents aren’t the only ones affected by their success or failure. Here, people aren’t interested in the provider of their own education, they are interested in the provider of someone else’s (the child’s) education.
Furthermore, all a school can do is offer the best possible education. If the parents don’t enforce or encourage their child’s engagement in that education, there’s little that can be done.
And even furthermore, socializing education does not necessarily entail the state standardizing all school and there being no choice. The state can issue vouchers, can fund charter schools, can do a number of things to encourage market forces, while ensuring that the populace is educated, because that’s good for society.

1Samuel8, you seem really caught up in this ‘individuals’ thing. But individuals aren’t the whole picture, and a program hasn’t failed if it hasn’t succeed for every singe individual. Statements like “the life expectancy in England is greater than it is here”, even though there are eight year olds that die in England. When I’m talking about improving society, I mean averages, trends, the vast majority. It’s naive to expect anything to hold for every single man woman and child.

19

Wrong. I do not concede that at all. That is the very thing I dispute and all of the nonsense you quoted and linked completely represent your same attitude: members of a group who do not agree do not matter, we will just go on our merry way calculating fabricated numbers as if the other members do not exist.

Just wait until The Great Calculator dismisses you when you disagree with everybody else.

All of those are nonsense because if you peel them apart and understand their assumptions, at their very core, they justify trading YOUR welfare for MINE if in fact it is “calculated” to benefit society as a whole.

20

So, you’re a solipsist then? or should we trade “YOUR [freedom] for MINE”. What’s the difference? When you’re dealing with social policy, you are going to have to compare one person’s X with another’s. But that doesn’t mean “yours” vs. “mine”; it could mean, and ideally should mean, person A’s vs person B’s. Your argument doesn’t hold if you aren’t comparing someone for whom you have a priviledged perspective (you) with someone for whom you don’t (me).