Item — HN Reader

This is the purpose of the mixed economy in which most of us live. The government changes the rules of the game to try to align the profit motive with social good, because they are naturally not aligned.

You haven't said why worker cooperatives optimizing the benefit of their own workers wouldn't add up to more welfare if the entire economy was based around worker cooperatives.

in my opinion worker ownership of the means of production is just socialism, and that doesn't have a good historical track record.

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> good historical track record

Please cite some sources that are not communist countries. You know, “just socialism.”

You way want to also ignore the existence of Norway, much of Europe, and popular US federal programs too when you're doing this exercise.

Please list any countries are are "just socialist" not communist. If we're compared hypothetical systems vs actual real-world ones it's not exactly fair.

> existence of Norway

Which is certainly not a "socialist" countries, unless you define socialism in extremely broad and ambiguous terms at which point the word losses any meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy isn't socialism by any reasonable definition. Unless you think Bismarck was a socialist...

I'm more interested in hearing why the above post and the examples you've cited fixed the problems that others have encountered in the socialism space.

If this was a startup trying to make worker owned co-ops more attractive I'd see a blog post explaining how they fixed the problems everyone else was having. That, and explanations of how this scales to an entire society.

That's the standard of discussion for everything else on this site and it shouldn't disappear because the subject is socialism.

Exactly. Sick of people applying the catch-phrase "socialism" to everything to marginalize a method of community good.

"Every company should be owned by its employees" is the definition of socialism, which is social ownership of the means of production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

Specifically this is market socialism.

I don't give a fuck with the definition is. Its not helpful to this discussion, move on.

Our world is being destroyed by capitalism, maybe its time to try something else.

Your comment seems unnecessarily hostile

> Our world is being destroyed by capitalism, maybe its time to try something else.

Well.. same could be said about "democracy". Despite its many inherent flaws (and even a more non inherent ones) free market capitalism has been the main driving force behind human progress for hundreds of years.

I would argue capitalism just so happened to be our method of progress. It was more so humanities newfound like of education and reasoning that did it. Or, conversely, the decline of religion in the state marked when things started to look good for humanity. And then it's a pretty clear graph where less religion = more good from then on until now.

> I would argue capitalism just so happened to be our method of progress

Personally I strong believe that (free) competition was the actual real "force" behind it. It just happened that capitalism (however flawed) provided the best environment for incentivizing individual and groups to compete in a "productive" way, accumulating capital in a reasonably regulated and fair way, instead of treating the world a zero sum game (i.e. in premodern societies usually the only real option you had if you wanted to gain significant wealth besides inheriting it was taking it from other people through force or coercion). Stable legal, societal, economic environments (also things like patents, copyright etc.) created ways to reward innovation and other societally productive enterprises.

When I say "fair" I of course mean it in relative terms (and even then that limited "fairness" was almost exclusive restricted only to members of your own society). But it was a huge improvement over arbitrary despotism, societal and economic, instability and various misaligned incentives that preceded it (e.g. possibly why the Roman empire didn't really progress past the "proto-capitalist" stage).

IMHO Socialism and similar systems have a major flaw (besides the fact than they can't really exists without excessive coercion) in that they stifle competition and don't tend to incentive/reward behaviors leading to growth and innovation.

Not that monopolistic-corporations etc. are any more likely to behave any differently without strong incentives, or that non-profit/government funded/etc. organizations can't produce anything innovative or societally beneficial or are somehow inherently worse at that than profit seeking companies (often the opposite). However again they need incentives to not consume/waste all the resources they get without providing anything in return and the need to compete (or lose funding/end up privatized) with the private sector often (again in relative terms, compared to any alternative systems I can think off) provides those incentives.

> Sick of people applying the catch-phrase "socialism"

People claiming that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy is "socialism" are not any less silly.

Norway has more billionaires per capita than the USA.

It’s not socialist in any sense. It’s a diehard capitalist country with a lot of public services and welfare (funded by taxes generated under a capitalist system).