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    #26
    Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post

    Britain 1939-1945
    Yeh, was gonna write "post ww2" but then there was still some planning hanging on after the war.

    Generally, mixed economies were the thing, though.

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      #27
      Originally posted by Nocturnal Submission View Post

      Yup. I'd go as far to say that CAP overproduction (I'm sure that we all remember the "wine lakes" and "butter mountains") was the first big issue to generate anti-EEC sentiment in the UK. Didn't agricultural subsidies account for three-quarters of EEC spending at one point?
      Subsidised all the wrong (rich) people, encouraged people to grow certain crops (like rape) and to "set aside" land (get paid for not using it). And there were indeed lakes and mountains of food destroyed.

      Just a quick Google brings up this, I could look for proper academic stuff but I've been doing that all afternoon (on other subjects).

      https://www.theguardian.com/environm...farm-subsidies

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        #28
        My understanding is that centrally planned economies didn't work because its just too hard to do that much planning, essentially, and because nobody, including "The People," can be trusted with that much power.

        So I'm afraid we're just stuck with some kind of "mixed" system. Which makes sense, really. People want some opportunity to do a bit better than they've been doing by being clever or working hard or whatever, and that does, to some extent help innovation and improve material conditions for everyone, but everyone also also wants/needs some security that it's not all going to turn to total shit when something inevitably goes wrong.

        Another way of looking at it is that we are all the same in some ways and all need some of the same things - food, water, shelter, toilets, education, health care, etc. - But we're all different too and don't all want to have to think the same things or read the same things or listen to the same things, etc. And in order for any of us to have a decent standard of living, we do all need to chip in as best we can, but just asking everyone to do that with posters and rousing songs leads to the classic "free rider" problems and "tragedy of the commons" etc.

        Ok, give me my econ phd now. I've solved it.

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          #29
          The Internet could make a planned economy work a lot better. It could make Stafford Beer‘s vision a reality.

          imagine publicly owned Google and Amazon

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            #30
            Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
            My understanding is that centrally planned economies didn't work because its just too hard to do that much planning, essentially, and because nobody, including "The People," can be trusted with that much power.
            ''The People'' = patrician ML vanguard. The public no more ran or owned anything more than they do under the most kleptocratic forms of capitalism.

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              #31
              That's how I understand it. If nothing else, the people who are best at running revolutions are probably not the best people to leave in charge of the day to day.

              Every so often we hear proposals that amount to "Just let the experts run everything based on science!" And there are sorta left-wing and right-wing versions of that. But in either case, that class just becomes its own interest group and will run things for its own interests. There was even a Simpsons about that.

              Because cold hard logic can't always tell us what we ought to value and prioritize, and besides, anyone who has ever spent much time around a university or teaching hospital, to cite just two examples, knows that even extremely smart people are not immune to the same petty egocentricity and myopia that the rest of us are. They may even be especially susceptible to those flaws.

              Someday, perhaps, we could create a dispassionate, benevolent AI that could run everything for us. I've read/seen some sci fi that imagines that. But that raises other issues, needless to say.

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                #32
                Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post

                Britain 1939-1945. Probably the closest anyone has come to actually doing it.
                Actually now that I think about it, it was mostly run by a canadian, max Aitken, or lord beaverbrook. Work on this started in 1935 or 1936. One of the many massive advantages that the UK had over Germany in WWII was a massive class of administrators and planners, but also the recognition at every level of government that this was important. The Nazis didn't understand any of this.

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                  #33
                  Originally posted by Mr Delicieux View Post
                  I, while growing up in a western democracy in the UK, seem to recall my mum, sister and me having to pretend we were religious in the early 90's in order to get food from the local church.
                  The same UK currently chock-a-f*ckin-block with food banks that have been springing up these past 10-15 years.
                  See this example you give here highlights the core of the problem. The problem here isn't capitalism. The problem here is a society that would sooner let their neighbours starve than redistribute income more equitably. Why have a targeted system to reduce income inequality, by increasing tax on higher earners, and transferring it to people lower down on the income distribution, when you can have charity. It's really characteristically English. And it's so weird to see.

                  It's not like this in most other countries, they all have their own flavour of weirdness, and their own way of visiting misery on themselves. The English way is peculiarly self destructive in the service of greed, and sadism. Essentially, The UK govt is too small relative to the size of the economy, to support the sort of modern economy that didn't spend the last decade reliant on a property bubble centred around london, and shopping on credit to generate feeble amounts of economic growth. This Graph is kind of instructive.





                  Don't pay any heed to the Irish figures, they're wildly distorted by our ridiculous GDP figures. A comparable figure for us is Govt Revenue of 41.6% of Modified GNI, and expenditure of 40.9%. (Which is too low, but the direct result of our insistence as a country to split the extra tax money generated by economic growth between tax cuts and spending rises, which means that govt expenditure grows more slowly than the economy so the share shrinks over time, and while that puts us at the lower end of the spectrum, our real economy generally grows between 5 and 7%, so public expenditure grows at that rate in absolute terms.)

                  But essentially The UK collects far too little in tax, to a) invest enough in the economy to generate economic growth b) it doesn't collect enough tax from the upper end of the income spectrum and redistribute it to the lower end to avoid relatively high income inequality c) it doesn't collect enough money, to spend enough, to reduce the cost of living for most people in a number of key ways. (Free state provided Child care being the most obvious example, But also You have to fail to spend enough on housing for a hell of a long time, in order to create the housing shortage, that has rents and house prices where they are right now.

                  The UK doesn't need to abandon capitalism. The UK needs to increase the Govt share of the economy from about 41%, to the european average of 45%, or the Eurozone average of 47%.(a figure distorted by France) If the UK had a govt share of the economy of 47%, it would be a radically different place, and better in a wide variety of ways.

                  Aside from the Brexit Fiasco, the thing that turned me off Corbyn's labour, was that they showed no comprehension of this, hawhid no idea of the link between inequality of income (which is the root cause of foodbanks) and the importance of higher taxation on higher earners and redistributing it to lower earners. Instead they forgot to include a reversal of social welfare cuts in the first version of their 2017 manifesto, which is what you would have needed to get things back to where they were in 2015, never mind improving them. I appreciate that promising tax rises, and giving money to the undeserving poor would not be electorally successful, but it did make literally all talk of this being a Labour party lead by the left to be little more than sad masturabatory posturing. It's one thing to say that austerity is bad, and to say it repeatedly, preaching to the converted, but there was literally no fucking plan to do anything about it aside from saying it was bad.

                  It was even worse in 2019 where labour went into the election promising not to raise income tax on people earning up to ?80,0000. I mean fuck me. If ever you wanted to see a surrender to the thatcherite orthodoxy it was that pledge. It's even worse than Brown's pledge to keep to the Conservative's spending plans for the first three years of the 1997 labour govt. That's how fucking bad this is. Economically speaking Angela Merkel is far to the left of John McDonnell, even more depressingly, so was Gordon Brown. That is a depressing sentence to write. Instead of people looking to other countries and seeing what they are doing right and doing differently, we instead got guff about transforming capitalism, and then you got all those attention seeking weirdoes at novara shiting on about communism and socialism, where people were going to ignore what is happening around the world now, in favour of resurrecting unreheated, poorly understood, hand wavy bollocks. And then even without challenging any of the major issues facing the UK, Corbyn managed to be painted as a dangerous marxist, even though his two major promises were to allow property rich old people to retain their accumulated wealth, rather than pay for their alzheimers care, because young people were going to pay for it out of their taxes, and by foregoing spending on them, and the second main economic tent pole of corbynism was not to raise income tax on anyone other than the top 3% of tax payers.That's not marxism. Not by a long shot.

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                    #34
                    Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                    That's how I understand it. If nothing else, the people who are best at running revolutions are probably not the best people to leave in charge of the day to day.

                    Every so often we hear proposals that amount to "Just let the experts run everything based on science!" And there are sorta left-wing and right-wing versions of that. But in either case, that class just becomes its own interest group and will run things for its own interests. There was even a Simpsons about that.

                    Because cold hard logic can't always tell us what we ought to value and prioritize, and besides, anyone who has ever spent much time around a university or teaching hospital, to cite just two examples, knows that even extremely smart people are not immune to the same petty egocentricity and myopia that the rest of us are. They may even be especially susceptible to those flaws.

                    Someday, perhaps, we could create a dispassionate, benevolent AI that could run everything for us. I've read/seen some sci fi that imagines that. But that raises other issues, needless to say.
                    The Simpsons is good, true. But I recommend reading other economic texts as well.

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