{"id":1691,"date":"2010-03-18T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2010-03-18T16:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theamateurfinancier.com\/?p=1691"},"modified":"2010-03-23T09:56:26","modified_gmt":"2010-03-23T13:56:26","slug":"is-socialism-feasible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/is-socialism-feasible\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Socialism Feasible?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been following Financial Samurai’s<\/span><\/a> review of Capitalism: A Love Story<\/em><\/span><\/a>, the newest documentary from Michael Moore.\u00a0 The post itself is pretty impressive (although I haven’t seen the film yet, I’ve heard quite a bit about it through the grapevine), but even more fascinating is the discussion that has ensued following it.\u00a0 FS had the foresight to not only ask about the movie itself (which, to judge from the comments, he might be the only person in the blog-o-verse to have seen), but about the relative value of capitalism, itself.<\/p>\n

As you might expect from a crowd consisting mostly of personal finance bloggers (or at least, those who willing read and comment on personal finance blogs), the responses were primarily in favor of capitalism, and opposed to Mr. Moore’s conclusion that capitalism was horribly flawed.\u00a0 But the conversation about the film, capitalism, and biggest alternative, socialism, got me thinking: is socialism even workable as an economic system?<\/p>\n

Before we start looking closer at socialism and socialist societies, we should probably define the term.\u00a0 Nowadays, it seems that it gets tossed around quite a bit, usually as an pejorative to describe the possible health care reforms.\u00a0 But that’s hardly an objective definition.\u00a0 Instead, let’s check the online reference of choice for word definitions, Dictionary.com<\/span><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Socialism<\/strong>: a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, rather than private or corporate ownership of companies, utilities, and other services, the community as a whole (usually in the form of the government) owns everything.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s generally viewed as a more moderate form of communism, not completely eliminating private property and private ownership, but nationalizing most of the corporations and other large businesses.\u00a0 A complete list<\/span><\/a> of the (British) Socialist Party’s goals should shed more more light on what the socialists seek to accomplish.<\/p>\n

Going through their goals, there seems to be a lot to like; maximum 35-hour workweek, free education from preschool to university, ensuring full employment: what’s not good about this?\u00a0 It almost makes me want to run out to the nearest Socialist party meeting and sign right up; it sounds like a working class paradise.<\/p>\n

The Problem with Socialism<\/h2>\n

If you start to read through the list of goals (actually, according to their own words, ‘Our Demands’), though, some things start to stand out as being troublesome, if not impossible to actually implement:<\/p>\n