Economic calculation and why Socialism can never work. Ever.

Resources are only as finite as your imagination.

This is demonstrably false. This is a planet of finite resources.

Resources are allocated by having the people deciding where money flows, by a computer programme.

And this is where it all falls apart. This is the very crux of the economic calculation problem. No thing can track the real time changing wants and needs of a population. A persons list of priorities can change by the second. Even Trotsky recognised this.

"If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace – a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions – such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy. But, in reality, the bureaucracy errs frightfully in its estimate of its spiritual resources...The innumerable living participants in the economy, state and private, collective and individual, must serve notice of their needs and of their relative strength not only through the statistical determinations of plan commissions but by the direct pressure of supply and demand.“ -Trotsky, The Soviet Economy in Danger

The economic calculation problem is absolutely fascinating. When you understand it you will see that the economy functions a lot like the chaotic balance of the ecosystem. The dispirit wants and needs of all people pulling in every other direction. That is until people or a group of people try to control it/certain aspects of it. Understanding the implications of the economic calculation problem is paradigm shifting stuff, you would never look at the world the same way again.

Unfortunately the users of /r/lectures are so desperate to hold onto a particular world view that anything that threatens it, this rather straight forward talk for example is completely shut down. It is pretty clear this is not a subreddit for learning. It has become a circlejerk, where the idiotic rambling and sophistry of Richard Wolff 'lectures' are celebrated and anything else is ignored.

Think about that.

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