| Sqrl said: As for the classical view of communism you mention, you pretty much hit on why it sucks...you're forced and threatened to do things. However when you compare this to Walmart employees it is really just nonsense. The communist worker is forced into that position where they have to work with no possibility to move up, the walmart employee put themselves in that position and had other options. In your final paragraph you're advocating workers owning a share of the product they make, the problem with this of course is that you're not asking the workers to invest in an equavalent share of the company. Almost anyone can invest in the company they work for in the US and thus purchase the rights to a share of the profits their work produces. Additionally companies can implement such structures in their own business to increase efficiency (and many do). Keeping it on a business by business decision rather than a government mandate allows the idea to be fluid and responsive to changes in the market and competitiveness rather than rigid and unresponsive (as all legislation is). |
Concerning the Wal-Mart employee, capitalism does dictate how they operate in the same sense that communism dictates how a collective farmer works. My point here is that in both systems is that personal incentives can lead to people to be more or less efficient. If the Wal-Mart employee has a chance for meaningful advancement he can be more efficient, if he gets a has a commision for sales he can be more efficient, if he is involved in profit sharing he can be more efficient. The driving function is personal incentive, and it doesnt matter what name it goes by, whatever system provides more personal incentive will be more productive.
In each system you will have 'un-driven' people who did not advance themselves and end up working at Wal-Mart. Still, that person is influenced by personal incentive. Put a person in Wal-Mart without much supervision and he will barely work, but take that same person and only pay them for how much they personally work and they instantly become more productive. Think of the old time coal mining days when miners put their stamp on carts of coal they personally produced which was much more productive than just paying them to go into a mine for a day.
Concerning the above quote.
The form of ideological forms of communism I mentioned does not force people into positions. Just as in capitalism, workers are free to choose their profession and they have opportunities for advancement. The only difference here is that advancement would be decided by the workforce instead of by the ownership, much in the same way labor unions elect a leader. You could argue that this can be inefficient since the workforce may not be as knowledgable of the business as the ownership, but I would argue that ownerhip's tendency for favoritism and inheritence also leads to inefficiency.
Furthermore, in the ideological form of communism I mentioned, workers invest a lot more into their company than they do in a capitaliost system. When workers own the production, say 100 workers own a cement factory, they invest everything into that factory. If the factory in not profitable, every worker will lose money. Compare that a typical captialist system, say where those 100 workers having a garuanteed salary of $50,000 a year with some of their retirement in stock options, they actually have less invested with the welfare of the business.
