From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!houxm!houxa!houxi!hou5d!hou5a!hou5e!mat Newsgroups: net.politics Title: Re: What IS wrong with socialism Article-I.D.: hou5e.234 Posted: Sun Feb 20 20:32:39 1983 Received: Mon Feb 21 04:03:47 1983 References: spanky.214 Kenneth Almquist cites Social Security and the right of unions to strike as two socialist policies which are good and which are not tyrranical. Regarding S.S. all you have to do is look at back articles on this group and in net.misc . Regarding the right of a union to strike, I would contend that the stucture of labor organizations in this nation is indeed tyrranical. Most unions have the power to cripple a whole industry, or a whole municipality. They can take the investments of hundreds of stockholders, or the well--beeing of millions of residents and use these as hostages with which to bargsin. Now if you are abandoning private property, investments don't amount to buffalo chip. So what is the problem? The fundamental problem is this: Under capitalism, If I choose to use some of my earned wealth (read that my labor, or my time) to build or purchase some other means of production, then I can do so, and what I have built or bought is MINE. I have that freedom. If I have ability, perserverence, and luck, then I have got the right to build a new niche in the economic system. This is forbidden under socialism. That prohibition is both immoral (slavery and confiscation) and foolhardy, because if what I am doing is not harmful to the society (and it presuambly isn'T, or it would be illegal, and we are, I hope talking about remaining within the law) and is is profitable, someone else will benefit. If this activity is useful to many, it may grow and be imitated. This is how an economy grows. Without growth, and improvement in productivity and the rest, an economy will almost inevitably stagnate and die. Look at what happens to protected industries around the world. Socialism assumes that committees and beaurocrats can do a better job of managing an enterprise than someone on the spot who has something to gain by doing it well. Both socialism and big labor are guilty of the following: Arguing over who's going to get what part of yesterday's economic pie (chart) instead of baking today's (bigger) pie or gathering the materials and the know--how to build tommorrows economic pie. We in the computer sciences should look at the most successful and most complex machine of all time: the telephone system. Because it is distributed, and not wedded to control by a central node, it is almost immune to large scale, massive failure. It is probably the most complex system ever built by man, and it performs with extraordinary reliability. It can do this because the system's parts are reasonably autonomous, even though they are highly integrated. How about an end run around the whole socialist/capitalist question -- a corporate structure wherein employees, over time, gain stock in the organization, and one in which the stockholder's meeting takes on the appearence of the New England town meeting. This invalidates the premise of socialism that ``the worker NO LONGER'' owns the means of production. He DOES own the means of production. A tough labor union won't help him, because money that lands in his pocket as a salaried worker isn't available to him as a stockholder -- and if the wage demand of a labor organization were to drive the corporation bankrupt, he would lose the value of his stock in the firm. Yes, there are some companies with this much participation. Read the LAST chapter of ``A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney'' Mark (The Capitalist) Terribile -hou5e!mat