{"id":28353,"date":"2015-10-23T01:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-10-23T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28353"},"modified":"2015-10-13T22:21:21","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T02:21:21","slug":"qotd-ever-wonder-why-on-earth-anyone-thought-socialism-would-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/23\/qotd-ever-wonder-why-on-earth-anyone-thought-socialism-would-work\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: &#8220;Ever wonder why on earth anyone thought socialism would work?&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>No, seriously: Ever wonder why? \u201cFrom each according to his ability, to each according to his need\u201d sounds very fine, but by the time socialism rolled around, this idea had been tried, and fallen apart, in multiple communes. Moreover, sponging, shirking relatives had been observed in families from the dawn of history. The universal desire to work less than needed had long been countered by some variant on the biblical rule that \u201che who does not work, does not eat.\u201d Why, then, did people want to throw out the profit motive and have the government run everything?<\/p>\n<p>Conservatives and libertarians who ask themselves this question generally assume that socialists must have been na\u00efve pointy-heads who didn\u2019t understand that socialism would run into incentive problems. And of course, as in any sizeable movement, there were just such na\u00efve pointy-heads. Even if I&#8217;m no expert on the history of socialist thought, the reading I have done suggests that the movement itself was not actually this na\u00efve; there were people who understood that, as economists like to say, \u201cincentives matter.\u201d They thought that socialist economies would perform better despite the incentive problem because of various efficiencies: streamlining overhead, creating massive economies of scale, eliminating \u201cwasteful competition,\u201d and the many-splendored production enhancements possible through \u201cscientific planning.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In hindsight, this sounds ridiculous, because we know that socialized economies failed on a massive, almost unprecedented scale. Scientific planning proved inferior to the invisible hand of the market, scale turned out to have diseconomies as well as economies, and administrative overhead was not, to put it lightly, reduced. But before socialism was tried, this all seemed plausible.<\/p>\n<p>Megan McArdle, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloombergview.com\/articles\/2014-10-20\/will-ebola-be-good-for-the-cdc\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Will Ebola Be Good for the CDC?&#8221;, <em>Bloomberg View<\/em><\/a>, 2014-10-20.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, seriously: Ever wonder why? \u201cFrom each according to his ability, to each according to his need\u201d sounds very fine, but by the time socialism rolled around, this idea had been tried, and fallen apart, in multiple communes. Moreover, sponging, shirking relatives had been observed in families from the dawn of history. The universal desire [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,53,41],"tags":[712,968,755,76],"class_list":["post-28353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-centralplanning","tag-family","tag-incentives","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7nj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28353"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28357,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28353\/revisions\/28357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}