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Victoria Falls: A Post-Collapse American Nation Quest [Down With Victoria!]

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[X][IDEALS] Social Democrat: Centered around the idea that it is the state's responsibility to ensure a bare-minimum standard of living, the Social Democrats add to the New Capitalist agenda with a push for a government guarantee of adequate housing, food, and water to all citizens -- itself a fairly titanic task. It remains rooted in the fundamental ideal of private enterprise. The Social Democrats have some interest in the potential of democratized workplaces and are willing to support them in an experimental measure.
[X][IDEALS] Socialist: Having come to refer to a specific political movement rather than an entire branch of ideology, modern socialism is focused on giving the state the power to care for all citizens, and claims that the modern Social Democrat platform does not go far enough in pursuit of this. It also calls for a massive investment into healthcare in order to revitalize the field and make sure that there are enough medical professionals to go around (long-term, they want free healthcare, but there needs to be enough of it first). They also grant unions extensive privileges over private employers. They are fervently in favor of democratized workplaces, and openly campaign in favor of granting them special concessions.
[X][CRUSH] None. This is a democracy. If your ideology cannot make its case to the people in practice, it deserves to fail.
[X][POWER] You are a centralized federal state along the lines of the later United States.
[X][TEXT] The Constitution serves as a broad guide for the structure of this document, and many legal concepts integral to it carry through, but it is rewritten from the ground up to serve its new situation rather than simply amending it until it fits.
 
[X][IDEALS] Socialist: Having come to refer to a specific political movement rather than an entire branch of ideology, modern socialism is focused on giving the state the power to care for all citizens, and claims that the modern Social Democrat platform does not go far enough in pursuit of this. It also calls for a massive investment into healthcare in order to revitalize the field and make sure that there are enough medical professionals to go around (long-term, they want free healthcare, but there needs to be enough of it first). They also grant unions extensive privileges over private employers. They are fervently in favor of democratized workplaces, and openly campaign in favor of granting them special concessions.
[X][CRUSH] None. This is a democracy. If your ideology cannot make its case to the people in practice, it deserves to fail.
[X][POWER] You are a devolved unitary state with subordinate governments formed or dissolved by central governmental decrees according to need
[X][TEXT] The Constitution was utterly bereft of any kind of legal, political, or ethical merit and shall be cast into the trash heap of history where it belongs. We shall start anew from a blank slate.
[X][REVIEW] The new Constitution should be put to review and possible revision every thirty years.
 
[X][IDEALS] Socialist
[X]IDEALS] Communist
[X][POWER] You are a devolved unitary state with subordinate governments formed or dissolved by central governmental decrees according to need
[x][POWER] You are a centralized federal state along the lines of the later United States.

[x][CRUSH] None. This is a democracy. If your ideology cannot make its case to the people in practice, it deserves to fail.

[X][TEXT] The Constitution serves as a broad guide for the structure of this document, and many legal concepts integral to it carry through, but it is rewritten from the ground up to serve its new situation rather than simply amending it until it fits.

[x][REVIEW] The new Constitution should be put to review and possible revision every thirty years.
 
Antix_Shadows said:
here's what I want long term. Universal Healthcare, public R&D for pharmacudicals instead of private ones, Universal Education, Low Interest government Loans for people to form businesses, co-ops or not. An emphasis on science and technology. Equal rights. If we're going to be interventionist on the world stage, we only do it to help democracies survive and grow, and not to grow our own economy. I want a nation that isn't manipulated by special interest groups. I want corporations to have zero political power.
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I can agree to all of that except banning private pharma r&d since regardless of the cost it has produced many lifesaving drugs. Rather just limit the patent protections to like 2 years at most and fund with some kind of award system for approved new drugs.

LHB said:
There is this thing called economic inertia in the present day economy that explains how corporations maintain a commanding position before even going into the plethora of tax breaks, subsidies, legal protections and other supports that the corporate sector requires to stay dominant.

There's also conclusive research, along with the other stuff posted (and tellingly ignored by the QM along with the reasons Social Democracy even works), showing co-ops actually offer greater benefits and stability in war-torn and failed state situations than private sector corporations.
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And again, we have no evidence that coops can attract enough investment to grow an economy on a large scale since it is a riskier investment when the investor has no say in operations. Even successful coops in real life like Mondragon often rely on non-owner workers as well as their worker-owners to profit. Not to mention those studies that are cited are just a handful and not the consensus among economists. Also, we are not always going to be a war torn economy.
 
Which is why that investment has to come from a body with low expectations of profits, which automatically falls to government, because a private entity isn't gonna do it. Also, saving peoples lives with medicine shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise.
 
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[X][IDEALS] New Capitalist: Aims to restore the old system with badly-needed revisions to address some of the obvious flaws. Among other things, it mandates a living minimum wage tied to government-collected measures, writes into foundational law the de-personhood of anybody who is not, in fact, an actual person, and institutes broad protections for employees against their employers (protected right to unionize, protections for whistleblowers, pension laws for companies, etc.). The New Capitalists do not give a single shit about democratized workplaces, positively or negatively, as long as they pay their taxes.
[X][IDEALS] Social Democrat: Centered around the idea that it is the state's responsibility to ensure a bare-minimum standard of living, the Social Democrats add to the New Capitalist agenda with a push for a government guarantee of adequate housing, food, and water to all citizens -- itself a fairly titanic task. It remains rooted in the fundamental ideal of private enterprise. The Social Democrats have some interest in the potential of democratized workplaces and are willing to support them in an experimental measure.

[X][CRUSH] None. This is a democracy. If your ideology cannot make its case to the people in practice, it deserves to fail.

[X][POWER] You are a devolved unitary state with subordinate governments formed or dissolved by central governmental decrees according to need.

[X][TEXT] The Constitution serves as a broad guide for the structure of this document, and many legal concepts integral to it carry through, but it is rewritten from the ground up to serve its new situation rather than simply amending it until it fits.

[X][REVIEW] The new Constitution should be put to review and possible revision every thirty years.
 
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Antix_Shadows said:
Which is why that investment has to come from a body with low expectations of profits, which automatically falls to government, because a private entity isn't gonna do it. Also, saving peoples lives with medicine shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise.
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Low profits also means low economic growth and low prosperity, and inability to compete economically with other nations. It's not a practical choice, just ideological. Also, I see no problem with people profiting from developing life saving medications so long as everyone who needs those medications is getting them.
 
Timewinders said:
Low profits also means low economic growth and low prosperity, and inability to compete economically with other nations. It's not a practical choice, just ideological. Also, I see no problem with people profiting from developing life saving medications so long as everyone who needs those medications is getting them.
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How do you enforce that they release drugs that could save lives but aren't profitable? I've met a number of people who have worked in the industry and created a cure for something, only for the corporation to shelve it because a legit cure to something makes them less money than a treatment does.
 
Timewinders said:
Then you should be supporting research on coops before blindly advocating for them.
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All the research that exists shows they work well and have many benefits. The only question is what constrains them from expanding, and the most likely reasons for that tend to be extrinsic factors like people not knowing its a thing, or states having laws that limit cooperative formation to like 5 types of business all related to farming.
 
Antix_Shadows said:
How do you enforce that they release drugs that could save lives but aren't profitable? I've met a number of people who have worked in the industry and created a cure for something, only for the corporation to shelve it because a legit cure to something makes them less money than a treatment does.
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Hence why the partents should be very limited. The companies would make more from the government award assuming it was large enough than from the direct sales of the drug and afterward generics would take over. So an expensive cure would provide more profit in that short patent window than a moderately expensive long term therapy which they would only be profiting from for 2 years.
 
Flectarn said:
All the research that exists shows they work well and have many benefits. The only question is what constrains them from expanding, and the most likely reasons for that tend to be extrinsic factors like people not knowing its a thing, or states having laws that limit cooperative formation to like 5 types of business all related to farming.
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Or it's because no one wants to risk their savings investing in a company that the shareholders have no say in.
 
Timewinders said:
Hence why the partents should be very limited. The companies would make more from the government award assuming it was large enough than from the direct sales of the drug and afterward generics would take over. So an expensive cure would provide more profit in that short patent window than a moderately expensive long term therapy which they would only be profiting from for 2 years.
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How do you suggest stopping a situation like Insulin in the USA where the only three companies that make it, sell it at ridiculous prices, and the patent is public?

How do we stop situations like the Housing Crisis in California IRL from happening in a capitalist situation?
 
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Opifex-Plebian said:
There's no such thing as a non-political way to run a economy
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At the end of the month, every scrap of money in the country is collected together and distributed so that each person recieves a completely random amount of money. Dispassionate and fair. Impossible to game. The perfect system.
 
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Flectarn said:
There isn't really a consensus opinion on coops amongst economists, because only a handful study them.
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It doesn't help that since literally nobody except maybe the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has actually tried a co-operative based economy, there's little incentive to study the matter and not really much data to work with.

The SFRY actually provides an interesting case study in "stuff we wanna avoid" if we go for the "socialist" option. It had perpetually high unemployment and debt, partially because it retained things like soft budget constraints despite transitioning to a market framework, and oftentimes maintained state control of firms in actuality by enforcing party control over the election of managers. Then, Tito died, and the economy immediately began to suffer from the sudden divergences in policy made by most of the republics, and then when the government went for austerity to try and rectify the debt problem, the economy just crashed and burned, before privatization and the Yugoslav wars obliterated the remains.

The lesson here should be that those co-operatives were more of a half-way house version of a state controlled economy in a theoretically market based framework rather than either a proper state planned economy or a market based one, and that caused.... issues.
 
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Flectarn said:
I don't think you understand who the shareholders in a coopertive are
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Im referring to coops that try to get outside funding by offering nonvoting shares.

Antix_Shadows said:
How do you suggest stopping a situation like Insulin in the USA where the only three companies that make it, sell it at ridiculous prices, and the patent is public?

How do we stop situations like the Housing Crisis in California IRL from happening in a capitalist situation?
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Housing in California is due to NIMBYs blocking construction of apartment housing. Bills like the recent one allowing for more apartments to be built next to bus stops get voted down in favor of rent controls which make the supply situation worse. That's a failure of zoning regulation, not capitalism.

As far as insulin goes, it has to be expected that as a biologic agent it's not that simple to produce. Even with price controls the production process is not simple and cheap since it cant be made through typical chemical synthesis processes. In any case, as ling as the government is providing healthcare as the sole buyer it can just negotiate lower prices, and none of the costs would have to go to the consumer out of pocket.
 
Lazer Raptor said:
It doesn't help that since literally nobody except maybe the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has actually tried a co-operative based economy, there's little incentive to study the matter and not really much data to work with.

The SFRY actually provides an interesting case study in "stuff we wanna avoid" if we go for the "socialist" option. It had perpetually high unemployment and debt, partially because it retained things like soft budget constraints despite transitioning to a market framework, and oftentimes maintained state control of firms in actuality by enforcing party control over the election of managers. Then, Tito died, and the economy immediately began to suffer from the sudden divergences in policy made by most of the republics, and then when the government went for austerity to try and rectify the debt problem, the economy just crashed and burned, before privatization and the Yugoslav wars obliterated the remains.
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Yugoslavia also suffered from being highly dependent on serving as a point of passage between East and West blocs thanks to their unique position of not being truly in either while having feelers in both. When the Cold War thawed and then ended completely that East-West trade stopped needing Yugoslavia, leading to total implosion.

Which also kinda reinforces the whole, "we should be really careful with trade policy" thing that's been a big part of this argument. We really don't want to be in a position where external factors can crash our fragile economy.
 
Lazer Raptor said:
It doesn't help that since literally nobody except maybe the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has actually tried a co-operative based economy, there's little incentive to study the matter and not really much data to work with.

The SFRY actually provides an interesting case study in "stuff we wanna avoid" if we go for the "socialist" option. It had perpetually high unemployment and debt, partially because it retained things like soft budget constraints despite transitioning to a market framework, and oftentimes maintained state control of firms in actuality by enforcing party control over the election of managers. Then, Tito died, and the economy immediately began to suffer from the sudden divergences in policy made by most of the republics, and then when the government went for austerity to try and rectify the debt problem, the economy just crashed and burned, before privatization and the Yugoslav wars obliterated the remains.
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The other big problem SFRY had was balancing the economic interests of its industrial and agrairan regions.
 
Antix_Shadows said:
Which is why that investment has to come from a body with low expectations of profits, which automatically falls to government, because a private entity isn't gonna do it. Also, saving peoples lives with medicine shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise.
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You can also have Credut Unions acting as the banks for Co-op Federations.

Credit Unions are great. I love the one I'm in.
 
LHB said:
Yugoslavia also suffered from being highly dependent on serving as a point of passage between East and West blocs thanks to their unique position of not being truly in either while having feelers in both. When the Cold War thawed and then ended completely that East-West trade stopped needing Yugoslavia, leading to total implosion.

Which also kinda reinforces the whole, "we should be really careful with trade policy" thing that's been a big part of this argument. We really don't want to be in a position where external factors can crash our fragile economy.
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Right! That debt was mainly to western creditors, and underlies that we should be careful about foreign capital no matter what, as a little country with a relatively small economy.
Flectarn said:
The other big problem SFRY had was balancing the economic interests of its industrial and agrairan regions.
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That too! Wasn't there an imbalance towards the cities that led to overcrowding in most towns?
 
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