First off, in defense of socialist regimes, while some select socialist societies did face deficits, sometimes famines even, this came as a result of aggressive and experimental policies (something we now know shouldn’t be done) and poor reporting (something we now have the technology to avoid), all while for most of their history socialist societies did not have issues supplying people with variety of food and necessities.

innovation requires experimentation. The benefit of a capitalism is that this can happen without catastrophic failure. Sure a company can go under because of an idiot CEO betting it all on something stupid, but that’s just one company.

You’re always going to have bad leaders. Elon Musk can completely screw up Twitter, but we’ll be fine. Imagine a guy like that in charge of a socialist country.

It’s difficult to predict how innovations will impact a society. In the Soviet Union they decided only the party leadership needed telephones. But in a capitalist society where people can use their money how they want and markets adapt to it, most of the population got telephones. People were able to choose for themselves how to best allocate resources. Having that decided at the top means you have a group that could get things wrong and society doesn’t develop to it’s fullest potential.

Avoiding experimentation because it doesn’t work in a socialist society is just demanding stagnation because this “ideal” society isn’t robust enough to handle change very well.

Large organizations always have problems with the leadership being disconnected and making poor decisions. Right now we’ve allowed corporations to get too large and this is a problem. The solution is trust-busting not replacing the handful of too-large organization with a single large organization.

Replacing a bunch of dumbass CEOs and their dumbass boards of directors with a single dumbass Premier and their dumbass Politburo doesn’t solve anything. People are going to be dumbasses and a society can’t handle that without people starving then it’s not a good society no matter how ideal it may be on paper.

It’s doubtful we’d be having this conversation right now if we had a socialist society. Would developing all the technology and running communication cables needed for the internet to work been considered a need by the politburo of a socialist society? They’d probably just have internet just for themselves so the rest of us could focus on working harder. Running cables everywhere might not be considered to be a worthwhile use of resources.

Sure I understand politics. At election time, I read the party platforms and check polling. That way I can can strategically vote based on the candidate that has the highest probability of enacting policies that I want. Though sometimes I vote to prevent a candidate that’s regressive. Repeat for every election.

Sometimes I’ll write to my representative. Sometimes I’ll go to party meetings, do some phone banking.

Progress is slow, but when you actually care about the issues you can achieve progress by voting in as many elections as it takes to get there.

Next month the bus route I take will only charge one fare instead of two. It’s a whole stupid thing, don’t even ask.

Given that it tends to be the working class that takes the bus, this helps the working class in a small way. If everyone put effort into making small local changes we could achieve even more.

So yeah fixing bus fares doesn’t sound like much, but I think it’s far more help to the working class where I live than internet socialists have ever done. Too busy dreaming about some future socialist revolution that will solve all problems to make things better now. In fact I think that future revolution thing is mostly just an excuse to not make an effort to improve things now.

Do you even vote?

Opportunity costs. Time I spend on endless dialectics or whatever is time I’m spending making an effort to actually improve things.

Less time spent on figuring out where an issue fits into a made up framework means more time spent actually thinking about the issue and doing something about it.

I see you’re not aware of the coastline paradox.

At any rate, even in a capitalist system where people don’t always get to live where they want we’ve had to destroy a lot of ecosystems to make room for houses. So no, it’s not feasible for everyone to live where they want to live, and attempting to do that isn’t even a good thing to try even if it were possible.

Besides people don’t want to live in Greenland. They want to live in Malibu Beach, or on the French Riviera. For people that don’t like the beach, maybe they’ll want to live on a vineyard, or maybe in the Swiss Alps for the skiing. There will always be desirable locations to live and not everyone is going to be able to live in a dream house there. Most people will have to live in an apartment building that has a view of other apartment buildings. It’s just a physical reality of the world that 8 billion people aren’t all going to have a beautiful view. It’s also a reality that some people will. Some apartment building will be facing the ocean or a park or the mountains or whatever. But most aren’t. Living in 3 dimensional spaces means things can never be 100% fair.

The real problem is that the resources are poorly distributed.

I agree. The fact that things can never be perfectly fair doesn’t mean we can’t do better in resource distribution. But to accomplish this, we need to somehow measure the value of resources… but that leads us to the concept of property, doesn’t it?