This bit of the lore annoys me, because Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island actually are all net exporters of electricity
The Victorians have had to rebuild a lot of (energy-inefficient) heavy industry in New England, and I suspect it consumes a good deal of power. Plus, y'know, struggling to maintain their infrastructure at the level it existed at before the Collapse, due to retro-tech.
True; private property in the sense of ownership of capital, businesses, factories, etc, cannot exist without a state (or at least some overarching authority or legal framework) who will whack someone on the head for trying to take someone else's stuff.
And yet if you go to anarchic places like Somalia, people have a pretty firm concept of "their property," and will tend to either resist having it taken from them, or appeal to some armed self-appointed authority who will.
Chicago MAY not have continuity of the city government, but there have clearly been entities trying to organize and structure and maintain the place. Basic law and order have not completely broken down into barbarism, or we wouldn't have been able to get together anyone with enough of a following to sign the Accords in the first place.
So gloating about how "technically there wasn't a government before, so this was terra nullius or whatever, so we don't have to care about the fact that you used to think these things were yours" isn't going to fly.
We're gonna need to be prepared to at least compensate people. Especially since there may well be people who legitimately did work hard to organize industrial and economic operations we really, really needed, and who haven't been screwing over their workforce or at least haven't been doing so any worse than the conditions themselves would have done without their actions.
Basic housing and food should be supplied by the state in a robust Social Democracy. As well as things like healthcare, water, education, information, and other necessities for life. The goal of the market is to make like better and to offer greater options, not to hold those things you need most hostage.
Being as how we're a post-apocalyptic city state facing overwhelming military threats, we're probably not going to be able to afford to supply much beyond water and if we're lucky food rations. A lot of GDP is going to have to be plowed back into infrastructure or military hardware.
Sweet merciful buddha.
There are legitimate communists in the thread. You would think the damn things track record alone would stamp out the ideology but here we are...
Okay, I'm going to step past the insults and point something out here.
No, it is not as simple as saying "USSR, therefore obviously no form of socialism can ever work and capitalism rocks, checkmate!" That's like saying "Rome was big on roads, and Rome fell, therefore roads suck."
The Soviets had a lot of issues that a communist/socialist/whatever state
does not have to have. The biggest one was a bunch of arrogant jackasses who came up with the doctrine of a "vanguard party" to justify not having to consult the peasants or anyone other than themselves when it came time to make decisions. This was key to why the Bolshevik government became so utterly autocratic, and how Stalin was able to turn it into a murderous engine for repressing and crushing people he didn't like within the USSR's economy.
After the USSR was founded, subsequent communist states were founded with direct help from the USSR, which was generally trying to integrate them into its international network/empire. Which meant they worked very hard to create 'communist' countries in their own image, that is to say, dictatorships.
Any communist who says "okay, in future,
no dictatorships" and sticks to that rule is likely to avoid almost all the problems that brought down the USSR and the other Soviet bloc nations in the Cold War.
