@Putin, did JEccles say harmony? I thought he was describing a constant struggle... not harmonious at all.

"The government doesn't check the market, because the market owns the government. Inevitably capital can always extort concessions from government."

These are two very different statements. Pick one.

I did not reference harmony, but to think harmony will ever happen in humanity is a fallacy. This forum presents that argument entirely. Humans will never think the same things, believe the same way will work, or have the same background to draw those conclusions from. That's why you have to have a mixture of all to make it work the best. While you might think your ideology is perfect, it's because you think that the governmental system will be run exactly as you want that it will work. You base the ideology you follow off your own perceptions, possibly missing how some others would perceive the problem. (I find this to be true when looking at the diplomacy board. How I perceive one situation and how to attack it may be way different than the person I am opposing. It's all about the vantage point and "experiences" that form my opinion through the game.)

Ultimately if you think there is one specific way to solve a governing system that governs millions of different people with hundreds of ethnicities, different religions, and different values, then the system you are thinking of doesn't factor in humanity.

I fail to see the difference. State attempts to regulate the market for its own purposes come to nothing. Who runs the leading regulatory agencies in the world? Agents of capital. Mario Draghi runs the ECB, he worked for Goldman Sachs. Jack Lew runs the US Treasury, he worked for Citigroup. Geithner, the former head of Treasury, was so beloved by Citigroup they offered him the job of running it.They don't call it the revolving door for nothing. Even when their own agents aren't calling the shots their massive lobbying arms and armies of lawyers descend on regulatory agencies like locusts and neuter it that way. This is exactly what happened to financial regulation in the United States.

If you're going to harp about the semantics of harmony fine. I should therefore say balance. If you think there is an effective power balance can be achieved between government and the market, you would be engaging in wishful thinking. Furthermore the political concept of "checks and balances" is directly responsible for grinding policy making to a halt. Under such a framework it is always easier to obstruct policy than implement it.

I'm not arguing with you Putin, because it's been clearly shown that you aren't here to think about other people's opinions, and trying to convince you of anything would be a waste of my time. I'm simply pointing out that we don't live in a world of absolutes, where a system to the extreme left or extreme right will ever realistically work. On paper they both could in their own right work, but not in real life.

spyman: The problem of information and the problem of incentives.

putin33: No the problem you neglect to mention is uneven development.

I acknowledge the problem of uneven development.

Now what do you think of the two problems I raised. Are these real factors or not.
How about the problem of incentives?

Is there a lack of incentive in communist in countries, consequently resulting in lower productivity? Or is this a myth?

Take the claims in this passage:
http://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/04/20/why-did-communism-fail-3-incentives/

"The lack of incentives was system wide. Employees had little incentive to work hard as they would be paid the same regardless. While egalitarianism has many merits, under Communism it was taken to an extreme. There was too little difference in pay between professions to encourage workers to improve their skills and work harder. As there was no unemployment, there was no threat of firing, so people were guaranteed a job no matter how badly they worked (if at all). With neither a credible threat nor promise of reward to motivate staff, productivity in Communist countries stagnated.

This problem affected management too. Under Communism managers were not incentivised to be economically efficient, but to fulfil the plan. This meant there was a huge emphasis on quantity even if the quality was very poor. Managers often resorted to lying to meet unrealistic quotas. They suffered from perverse incentives that placed fulfilling political goals ahead of efficiency. Firms in general had little incentive to be efficient or control costs. They could easily access credit and further state funding to cover their costs. Financial losses meant little to managers as there was no chance of the firm going bankrupt. No matter what the difficulties, the state would pay to bail the business out. The state guarantee of a job has meant everyone must be employed even if they add little to the factory."

Were any of the issues raised above real? Or is it all propaganda against communism? Examples such as list above are to found in plenty of Economics 101 type text books.

If it was a real problem, has modern socialist theory come up with ways to address these problems?

"I'm not arguing with you Putin, because it's been clearly shown that you aren't here to think about other people's opinions, and trying to convince you of anything would be a waste of my time."

So instead you're just going to appeal to how supposedly effective your mainstream views are because, gee, they're mainstream. Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?

" I'm simply pointing out that we don't live in a world of absolutes, where a system to the extreme left or extreme right will ever realistically work. On paper they both could in their own right work, but not in real life."

You're living in the wrong time period to be claiming centrist politics "work" in "real life". We're witnessing a global collapse of authority and legitimacy of mainstream centrist political parties because they have failed utterly to in both preventing and remedying the crisis of capital. Appealing to how mainstream your political views are might have worked at one point, it doesn't work anymore.

The critique of incentives, Spyman, is not based on any actual examination of how socialist countries actually paid people. It's a straw man argument based on the myth that everyone was paid equally regardless of the work they did. Prior to the 1960s, the Soviet Union, to use the best example, relied on a wage policy called a piece rate system and production quotas. This meant that workers were paid based on how much they produced and were paid extra for overfulfilling quotas. They also had thousands of different pay scales.Considering the amount of savings the USSR was able to extract from its labor force especially during the earliest decades of socialism when rapid industrialization took place it is a bit ludicrous to claim that incentives for productivity were too low.

During the Sixth Five Year Plan in the 1960s, the USSR changed the system away from piece work and reduced the number of pay scales. They did so for a reason that is rather ironic considering the critique here - wages were too low and inequality of wages was too high!

I don't deny the Soviet economic system had its share of problems, but lack of incentives due to wage equality was not one of them.

"This problem affected management too. Under Communism managers were not incentivised to be economically efficient, but to fulfil the plan. This meant there was a huge emphasis on quantity even if the quality was very poor. Managers often resorted to lying to meet unrealistic quotas. They suffered from perverse incentives that placed fulfilling political goals ahead of efficiency. Firms in general had little incentive to be efficient or control costs"

This critique has more validity and was a concern of Soviet planners. As I mentioned before, in the 50s and 60s they changed the incentive structure. One of the changes was to only pay quota fulfillment bonuses if the produced work was defect free. They also encouraged workers not to overfulfill quotas so that labor costs would be reduced. They also created labor brigades to coordinate better along different aspects of the production chain, so that production isn't increased without thinking about how that effects enterprise performance.

Capitalism is not mainstream, Putin. The media's favorite presidential candidate is Bernie Sanders.

"Prior to the 1960s, the Soviet Union, to use the best example, relied on a wage policy called a piece rate system and production quotas. This meant that workers were paid based on how much they produced and were paid extra for overfulfilling quotas. They also had thousands of different pay scales.Considering the amount of savings the USSR was able to extract from its labor force especially during the earliest decades of socialism when rapid industrialization took place it is a bit ludicrous to claim that incentives for productivity were too low.

During the Sixth Five Year Plan in the 1960s, the USSR changed the system away from piece work and reduced the number of pay scales. They did so for a reason that is rather ironic considering the critique here - wages were too low and inequality of wages was too high! "

It seems to me that the USSR was not practicing true communism until the 6th 5-year plan then. The earlier period was a command economy with a mix of capitalism and socialism.

The media would like to see Hillary Clinton become president.
The media's favorite presidential candidate is Donald Trump.
Given how the election has been covered thus far, I frankly don't see how anyone could conclude otherwise.

Hillary is the status quo candidate as far as the media is concerned, and therefore inevitable; pretty much everything on the Democratic side of the race has been focused on Hillary or 'threats' to Hillary's candidacy. For every Twitter twentysomething who's #feelingthebern, there's a thinkpiece on CNN or MSNBC talking about how Hillary's an experienced and progressive candidate who will Get Things Done, unlike that nutcase socialist from Vermont who promises a revolution he can't deliver. The NYT sponsored Hillary, not Sanders or any Republican. WaPo can't stop writing editorials about how crazy and/or fictional Sanders' campaign is. It's pretty damn clear who the media's ultimately gunning for, the Economist's bizarre fascination with a Bloomberg third-party run aside.

In the meantime, Trump is a gold mine for journalists in the era of sensational sound-bite "news". Whether the media brought Trump's candidacy to the fore by training a gazillion spotlights on him, or simply reacted to the rabid anti-establishment fervor over Trump, it's still the case that they've lovingly covered all his bullshit while giving fuck-all coverage to the other R candidates.

(This isn't about who I support for President, btw, just my view of how the media coverage has looked to this point.)

"Capitalism is not mainstream".

What a goldmine of an opinion.

Lethologica, mainstream media has covered Trump only to say that he is a racist bigot with horrible hairstyle and a foreign relations disaster. Anyways, I wasn't talking about mainstream media. I was talking about the mainstream opinion. From my personal experience (youtube comments, peers, and webdiplomacy), Bernie Sanders is far more popular than Clinton, who is supposedly corrupted by money.

wjessop: How often do you hear about those awful Wall Street businessmen and that slogan of the top 1% controlling xx% of the wealth?

leon:
Naturally the media doesn't want to see Trump become president, so they'll happily make him look awful. But they *love* his candidacy. I made a deliberate distinction there.

You said, "The media's favorite presidential candidate is Bernie Sanders." This is objectively wrong. If you had instead said "An agglomerate of certain Youtube commenters, my peers, and a small section of the Webdip community prefers Sanders to Clinton," I would be inclined to agree with you; but that is not a representative sample of either 'mainstream opinion' or 'the media'. Indeed, it's a sample one would *expect* to heavily favor Sanders, especially since I hear you're a high school student, ergo your peer group is generally young as well. Your personal experience is your own, and it's legitimate, but it's not something you can simply extrapolate across the rest of the country.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/capitalism-will-eat-democracy-unless-we-speak-up-yanis-varoufakis/