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To: Blood of Tyrants
Heinlein knew full well that a commune that was larger than an extended family in a single household would quickly fall apart from jealousies and absoluted HATED the idea of an extended, forced government socialistic programs.

There is some interesting recent work in mathematics that essentially proves that socialism does not scale beyond a finite and rather small number of agents (e.g. humans) in terms of efficiency and utility. For a small number of agents, socialism is the more optimal form, but doesn't scale. Libertarianism highly optimal in the general case and scales very well, but can be outperformed in small population cases (under certain parametric assumptions that apply to things like families). The population limit for humans in which the socialist model is optimal appears to be on the order of 50 people plus or minus a couple dozen i.e. an extended family or tribe.

Think of it as two separate utility functions as a function of population. At some point, the functions intersect. For small populations the socialism equivalent model is more efficient, but degrades rapidly such that the libertarian model exhibits much higher general efficiency primarily due to the rapid decay in efficiency of the socialist function. I've elided the mathematics (which are esoteric), but it is a fairly straightforward proof in the broader topic of algorithmic information theory. Socialism beyond the family group isn't just stupid, it is provably stupid. People need to understand its limitations.

52 posted on 10/31/2004 10:05:11 PM PST by tortoise (All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.)
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To: tortoise

Socialism is the result of the work of very limited minds. It can easily be proven logically and emotionally with simple anecdotes as to why it cannot work in large populations that do not have a close familial relationship.


121 posted on 11/01/2004 7:23:35 AM PST by Blood of Tyrants (God is not a Republican. But Satan is definitely a Democrat.)
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