Here, though, I want to help you avoid getting stuck
in a dead end conversation
that goes nowhere.
The problem of a person who tries to explain inflations
by saying it's caused by their being too much money
always gets stuck when someone points out to him or her, “Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
The only way you get an inflation if the businesses raise their prices.
You've told me there's more money.
You've got to tell me the rest of the story.”
Well, I'm here to.
You can't tell me the Soviet Union is a planned economy
because I can show you all the markets they used.
And you can't tell me the United States is a market society.
Because I can show you all the planning done led
by the corporate sector, which you think of as the leadership,
as it is in many ways, of American capitalism.
Don't make use of a dichotomy
that isn't there and never was.
It was an ideological battle.
The United States and the Soviet Union were at opposite ends of
a political fight.
And when that happens, you tend to demonize the other side.
To simplify
and to forget that we all have strengths and weaknesses.
And then locate all the strength on your side and all the weaknesses
on the other.
It may be understandable,
but in an adult it's childish as well.
Well then where does that leave us with the dangling question?
If planning versus markets isn't how you distinguish
capitalism from socialism because they're both combinations
in various proportions,
then let me offer you what is a much better alternative
way of thinking about this, because the differences get clear.
In a capitalist
society, and I owe this to Karl Marx,
who's the first one I know, who figured this out.
In a capitalist society,
a tiny group of people, the owner, the partners,
the board of directors in the corporation
make all the basic decisions
what to produce, how to produce, where to produce,
and what to do with the output or the revenue if you sell the output.
They make all those decisions.
The vast majority of people in any business are excluded
from those decisions.
They have to live with the results,
but they don't participate just like they don't participate
in selling the price of whatever it is they help to produce.
They don't make the basic decisions the rest of those decisions either.
That's the uniqueness of capitalism.
The alternative that socialists
originally, like Marx, had in their mind
was a radically different organization
of the workplace, whether it's a factory, an office or a store.
It's a democratic community.
One person, one vote.
All the basic decisions what to produce, how to produce, where to produce
and what to do with the revenue you get are decided
democratically one person, one vote by majority vote.
It is a radically different way of organizing an enterprise.
It's the equivalent inside the enterprise
of getting rid of the king to run the whole society and instead
saying everybody has a vote to decide on who the elected representatives will be.
Whoa.
That decision made about the larger society has now,
the socialists tell us, to be made inside the workplace.
Then you'll have a socialism
and a capitalism that nobody will confuse.