[DugwayDuke]

You make some very good points about the lack of agreement with the Democratic Socialist movement.

I participated in some online debates with some who called themselves democratic socialists. Once pressed they can admit to some bizarre theories.

The folks I debated argued that socialism did not succeed because it had never been tried. They claimed that every country that called itself socialistic wasn't really since they were dominated by an elite that governed for their own interests rather than the interests of the people. Their utopia would, of course, be different.

They sidestepped one of your objections, the lack of a useful algorthm, by postulating a government that would place the questions of allocating resources to a vote. If for example, a town had unemployed workers, then that town would vote on the type of capital investments to put these unemployed to work, ie, build a shoe factory or a communal farm. At this point they began to get bizarre admitting that most people really wouldn't want to be concerned with subjects such as this so they probably would prefer letting an elite make these types of decisions.

The most bizarre of their theories was that by a correct allocation of resources to real needs, no one would need to work more than 20 or so hours per week. They accomplished this by riding the world of capitalism and marketing since they felt that these only made the workers think they needed some things. That once this artificially created desires were purged from the world, most folks would be quite happy living in a high rise apartment building where the typical family lived in only a few hundred square feet. No need for cars either since we would all ride mass transit to our government appointed jobs.

The bottom line is that the government would tell what you wanted, when you wanted it, and how much of it you wanted. The education system would be geared to convincing you that living on less was best. While they maintained that all of this would be achieved democratically, they also maintained that there would be, at least temporarily, the need for force just in case your education wasn't truely effective in convincing you that the plans of the elites were notthe best.

[dheretic]

They cannot leave economic management up to popular vote and they know it. It is a diversion tactic. "See, I'm more democratic than you." They don't realize just how few people in the world really want to be responsible for the enormous responsibility of managing an entire economy. The only way to manage an entire economy is to develop an algorithm that is fool-proof and not dependent on certain factors such as state of the economy prior to socialization, what the economy specializes in (most economies are big producers of only a few things) and what the labor market is like. Without such an algorithm plus realtime access to every bit of information imaginable about productivity, a regulatory agency could not regulate with anything resembling efficiency. Simply put, even an industrial economy is too complicated for people to manage by debate. It has to be subjected to realtime simulation with something like a quantum computer. You would have to write reporting software that could simulate every possible scenario and find the best looking scenario that is most likely to occur based on current levels of productivity, flow of resources and the state of the labor force. The problem of why Socialism cannot work is glaringly obvious to anyone in college that is a Computer Science major. I've for the hell of it tried to postulate such an algorithm and the logistics are literally impossible. You'd never get the data you'd need fast enough to make it work. That's why when liberal arts majors saying it can work I point to Russia and say, "and thus is the result of Socialism, thy economy collapses into a singularity and consumes everything in society."