Your bucolic idealization is just that, history has always proved it wrong or is there any doubt that social inequity was a major contributing factor to the French Revolution. — Cavacava

What does being proven wrong by history mean? That it changes and disappears? Then history has proved everything wrong, and it will continue to prove everything wrong (in terms of social organisation that is).

People are people, basics human facts don't change, you wrote your own rebuttal.

People are people, basics human facts don't change, you wrote your own rebuttal. — Cavacava

One basic human fact is that people get bored. Another basic human fact is that people like arbitrariness and freedom, and detest being forced to do things. Your utopia of equality, etc. involves (1) maintaining the same regime forever, and (2) forcing people to fit in certain norms. So it will fail, it's against human nature.

My "Utopia" is democracy in which equality is striven for and not stiffed by a rich aristocracy. My "Utopia" is a just society under rules of law. What you have outlined is not, and cannot constitute a just society.

My "Utopia" is democracy in which equality is striven for and not stiffed by a rich aristocracy. — Cavacava

So whoever manipulates others the best ought to govern?

My "Utopia" is a just society under rules of law. — Cavacava

Will that justice be enforced? At least with a despot you have an enemy, you can go after him. But with the law, who can you go after? That's why the law was invented - nobody is responsible anymore - the law is blamed. The law orders the Nazi officer to yank the Jews out of their homes and to the gas chambers they go... So he knocks on the door "Sorry ma'am. It's the law, I'm forced to now yank you from your home and put you on this train. My apologies, I'm just obeying the law. If you want, you can file a complaint on the train later".

What you have outline is not, and cannot constitute a just society. — Cavacava

I agree, I never said it is just.

I like your post.

No democracy is perfect, their are always ways to improve it, such as modification of the way we treat inheritance. Nazism was socialization based so called blood ties, the ideology of the Fuhrer is much closer to what you are talking about, than what I am trying to discuss.

Will that justice be enforced? At least with a despot you have an enemy, you can go after him. But with the law, who can you go after? That's why the law was invented - nobody is responsible anymore - the law is blamed. The law orders the Nazi officer to yank the Jews out of their homes and to the gas chambers they go... So he knocks on the door "Sorry ma'am. It's the law, I'm forced to now yank you from your home and put you on this train. My apologies, I'm just obeying the law. If you want, you can file a complaint on the train later". — Agustino

What, exactly, are you intending to be for and against here? Why would you counterpose the Holocaust against law? The nazis made a sham of the law, replacing it with the rule of persons like Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, et al.

Why would you counterpose the Holocaust against law? The nazis made a sham of the law, replacing it with the rule of persons like Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, et al. — Bitter Crank

Exactly - so the law is actually only as good as the people behind it. That means that whether it's based on the law, or based on the dictates of a supreme leader, what matters the most is the wisdom of the people behind the system, not the system itself. I also draw attention to the fact that a tyrannical law is worse than a tyrannical dictator since it legitimises tyranny and makes it acceptable.

First you say that the law is only as good as the people behind it, then you say a tyrannical law is worse than tyrannical dictator, and that law legitimizes tyranny,,,

There never was a golden age of good law, good people, good rulers, good outcomes, of course. But still, most civilized countries manage to have fairly good law, reasonably good people, adequate rulers, and more or less satisfactory outcomes. The Nazi period in Germany was an extreme breakdown in the area of good law, good people... Other countries have had far less extreme breakdowns, but periodically just plain bad people get the upper hand, until they can be beaten back.

Good law represents a consensus by good people of what a good society should be like. The consensus of good law is important.

The nazis made a sham of the law, replacing it with the rule of persons like Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, et al. — Bitter Crank

On the contrary. Everything the Nazis did was strictly according to the law. Of course the law itself became corrupt. Perhaps that's what you meant. But that shows that even the "rule of law" can be problematic. We see such instances in the contemporary news from time to time.

Also I wanted to ask you about your remarks earlier ... are you a classical Marxist? Labor theory of value and all that?

...are you a classical Marxist? — fishfry

This sounds a bit like the line of questioning in the House Unamerican Activities Committee..."Are you now, or were you ever a member of the Communist Party?"

I suppose so. I think Marx was right when he described the method by which wealth is extracted from workers -- surplus value. (Workers produce more value than they receive in wages. The difference between the wages they are paid and the value of the goods they produce is expropriated by the bourgeoisie owners. [Reality is more elaborate than that, but that's close enough for our purposes here.]

Marx died 30+ years before the Russian Revolution. What happened in Russia depended far more on Lenin and Stalin than it did on Marx. I suppose it depended on 300 years of Romanov despotism, too.

I have been a member of a Marxist political party. Our program was based on the work of Daniel DeLeon (1852 – 1914) and his American interpretation of Marxism. That is, in countries with a strong democratic tradition, workers should (must) use the tools of democracy to achieve a radical restructuring of society. This can be accomplished through industrial union organizing (not trade unionism), intensive political education, extensive political action, and elections. Revolution can be carried out peacefully within a democratic society.

Theoretically, DeLeon was right, but it turned out that the State, Capitol, and Corporations were quite capable of frustrating unions with radical social change in mind. The labor movement faced more concerted and continuous opposition in the United States than in most countries, maybe with the exception of Nazi Germany. The USSR and PRC just banned unionism outright.

The various American Marxist political parties -- from the Communist Party USA, Socialist Workers, Socialist Labor, on to the New Union Party and a few others -- have pretty much subsided. Unionism isn't at an all-time low but it is not far from it. Capitol is triumphant. Working people -- the vast majority of Americans (80% at least) -- have experienced a continual slide in wages and purchasing power since the mid 1970s. Automation, globalism, deskilling jobs, etc. have reshaped the world's workforce including us Americans. There are some winners, a lot of losers in all of the change.

Nothing that has happened, or is happening, invalidates Karl Marx's basic understanding of capitalism. Marx didn't claim that the victory of the working class was inevitable, only that extreme conflict was certain.

What do you, or I, or anyone want to see in a future society? What I'd like to see looks much more like Europe than China; more like Cuba than Central America; more like Vietnam than North Korea...

I'd like to see democratic socialism around the world, and the demise of capitalism. Does that mean the end of creative labor, entrepreneurial type work, a drab, gray world with flat cultures? Hell, no. It does mean that most people come much closer to having there basic+ needs met. Not "middle class" but more than enough to survive on.

This sounds a bit like the line of questioning in the House Unamerican Activities Committee..."Are you now, or were you ever a member of the Communist Party?" — Bitter Crank

Nothing pejorative intended. Just noted some of your previous comments.

I do agree that Marx identified many of the problems of late stage capitalism that we are experiencing now. I don't trust the almighty State. That's why I don't support income redistribution. In theory if the State taxed the rich to provide opportunity for the poor, that would be good. But if you look at the condition of the public schools in poor neighborhoods, you see that it's not working.

We no longer have a functioning system of capitalism. As many have observed, gains are privatized and losses socialized for the politically connected "too big to fail" institutions. The massive money printing by central banks in the past decade is causing massive asset bubbles while the infrastructure collapses and economic inequality worsens.

We need a revolution. I just don't think Marxism is it. But I'd agree with you that something's terribly wrong with our current system.

Totally agree, the poor people had access to higher quality automobiles back two thousand years ago when we didn't have Ferraris and Porsches yet.

The rich do get richer but the cake also gets bigger over time.

One of Marx's quotes from the Manifesto is that "The state is a committee to organize the affairs of the bourgeoisie." In other words, the state is the servant of the capitalists, or bourgeoisie. It serves their interests. This is more and less true at various times, but right now it is much more true.

The state can be good, even now--defining the state as any level of government above the village level: county, metropolitan, state, federal government, international quasi-governmental organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or UN. Big states, like the Federal Government, can do a lot of good, or a lot of bad, just because of their size.

if you look at the condition of the public schools in poor neighborhoods, you see that it's not working. — fishfry

Indeed. Since you have a hard-on for the US Government, you will enjoy reading the book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of how our Government Segregated America -- published 2017. I was shocked to find that de jure (by law) segregation of housing and cities was Federal policy from at least 1935 when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established, and earlier, in other agencies. The rules were explicit: blacks and whites are not to live in the same communities (defined in detail to all white blocks, mixed blocks, and all black blocks).

The FHA rules were struck down in the 1960s by courts and Johnson's housing initiative, but it wasn't until the 1980s that things were really changed, Unfortunately for blacks, it was too late to benefit from the changes. Housing priced had risen out of reach of blacks. They were, to use the technical term, totally screwed,

The effect was enduring impoverishment of blacks, enduring advantages for whites. One of the latter day consequences of this now-abandoned, unconstitutional policy is that blacks and whites remain pretty rigidly segregated, and poverty is concentrated in black communities. Because schools are ultimately organized around housing patterns, the poorest schools receive the poorest children with the most disadvantages, and no surprise, they don't do well.

There isn't any easy or inexpensive way to undo the damage long-term segregation caused. I'm not sure we even know what to do that would be effective. At any rate, it was our government that did it. Was it Roosevelt's idea? Roosevelt was liberal, but the congress was controlled by southern segregationists who were very committed to maintaining segregation. The only way a housing program could be legislated and funded was by excluding blacks. (It wasn't just helping blacks and whites separately, it was more like not helping blacks at all.)

Similarly, most blacks in the south (domestic workers and agricultural workers--about 75-80% of the black workforce in the south) were excluded from Social Security until after WWII.

Anyway, the Color of Law is good -- punchy, well written, good documentation, well edited.

The rich do get richer but the cake also gets bigger over time. — BlueBanana

Unfortunately, the cake does not get bigger for everyone, and the share of the cake that the rich get increases faster than the expansion of the cake. See Piketty (économiste français).

In an fair [equal] society everyone would get the same amount of slices. — Purple Pond

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this assertion you make follows this line of logic; equality among society is good, therefore inequality among a society must be bad. I would COMPLETELY disagree with this. Everyone is different. Everyone has differing values, experiences, and perceptions that are all unique to their own individual existence on this Earth. Therefore, claiming everyone should be equal is preposterous! What good does being equal do? Where is the incentive to strive for a better life? Your sense of life purpose would greatly diminish.
What I believe this notion of equality is really getting at is the fundamental difference between the economic philosophies of socialism and capitalism. Both are not perfect, however capitalism is the best choice. In socialism you would want everyone to be equal like you're stating, so wealth is distributed as such. The only problem is is if I had $5 and gave 5 people each a $1 dollar bill the wealth would be distributed evenly, but where is the incentive for those 5 people to go make more?? In contrast, from a capitalist's perspective I would demand each person earn my $1 bills by providing me a service, product, etc. If one person is uninterested or unable to earn my $1 he should NOT get one. Capitalism creates incentive for growth. I WANT more rich people, I WANT big corporations, because guess what both of them do? They hire people!! I've held two jobs my entire life, and you can rest assured both of my bosses were nowhere close to poverty, and that's not a bad thing!
Nobody starts at the same place in life, but one's decisions will determine where they end up. This is the beauty of life. Nobody is the same.. We are all different. Inequality is beautiful, and should be embraced, not stifled with the thought of forced equality.

Money. There is a limited supply of money in the world (the money pie). When there are more rich people getting more money, somebody has to be getting less, namely the poor. — Purple Pond

This is totally flawed.
If Bill Gates earns more money today, how do I become poorer tomorrow? There is only less money in the world if I don't work hard, and choose not to take advantage of opportunities. There's no finite amount of dollar bills circulating around. I mean, it's not infinite, but it might as well be. In my opinion this is an example of a psychological case (I believe asserted by Ellis, but please don''t quote me on that) wherein one decides that outside forces are the cause of misfortune, or on the contrary one decides it is one's own self that dictates their destiny. The former leads to a highly neurotic life of self pity and victimization, whereas the latter leads to a highly industrious attitude, and a healthy desire for the betterment of self. The maddening part of all this is you get to choose!! You choose for yourself how you perceive the world. Will the world dictate your life, or will your life dictate your world?

Time. A disadvantaged person's time is worth much less than a privileged person. Therefore the poor have to work longer hours and get less pay (less of the pie). — Purple Pond

Again, I believe this is flawed.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Oprah, Bill gates and Tome Cruise are all successful (privileged) people. What got them their success? Is their time more magical than my own? Of course not. What separates these people is HOW they spend their time. Success in this sense, all comes down to productivity. How efficiently and effectively you complete various tasks will determine your relative success over time. I guarantee you all these people I've mentioned have worked 100x more productively in one day than I do in one week. That is why I'm not on their level.

Side note: some people begin life's journey as poor, and end up becoming some of the greatest success stories (Oprah Winfrey)
Others begin life as rich and choose to make bad decisions, and throw it all away.
Why is this? Struggle creates the prize. A caterpillar must struggle in the cocoon before it can develop wings and one day fly. The butterfly who is let go at a premature stage (as i found out as a child) cannot fly. There is purpose in life's struggle. Embrace inequality for it is just one form of struggle.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this assertion you make follows this line of logic; equality among society is good, therefore inequality among a society must be bad. I would COMPLETELY disagree with this. Everyone is different.. — Austin Owens

I may have badly worded my OP but that's not what I believe at all. I don't think we should live in an equal society, nor am I saying that some inequality is necessarily bad.

If Bill Gates earns more money today, how do I become poorer tomorrow? There is only less money in the world if I don't work hard, and choose not to take advantage of opportunities. There's no finite amount of dollar bills circulating around. I mean, it's not infinite, but it might as well be. — Austin Owens

i disagree. What happens when the economy is bad? People start saving and they don't spend it. This is where you feel the effects money not in circulation. If every rich person kept a lot of their money in banks and never spend it, believe me, it would hurt you financially. So yes, if bill gates gets richer the rest of society get's that much poorer.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Oprah, Bill gates and Tome Cruise are all successful (privileged) people. What got them their success? Is their time more magical than my own? Of course not. What separates these people is HOW they spend their time. — Austin Owens

No we don't. Most of us have to spend a good chunk of the day working just to makes ends meet. And who do we work for? Richer people. We're essentially giving them our time. All the while the super-rich practically don't have to spend a minute working. They could just live off their investments. Not to mention all the people spending their time working for them. They have surplus time.

Side note: some people begin life's journey as poor, and end up becoming some of the greatest success stories (Oprah Winfrey) — Austin Owens

These stories are often publicized and are rare. The reality is that social mobility doesn't usually happen. The rich stay rich, and poor stay poor.

I may have badly worded my OP but that's not what I believe at all. I don't think we should live in an equal society, nor am I saying that some inequality is necessarily bad. — Purple Pond

Glad we agree there!

i disagree. What happens when the economy is bad? People start saving and they don't spend it. This is where you feel the effects money not in circulation. If every rich person kept a lot of their money in banks and never spend it, believe me, it would hurt you financially. So yes, if bill gates gets richer the rest of society get's that much poorer. — Purple Pond

I disagree. The 1% of wealth in this country does not move the economy when it's up OR down. The middle class does. For example, a rich person buys 3 or 4 pairs of jeans at a time. That's it for at least a few years. The middle class as a collective purchases hundreds of thousands of pairs. Which one moves the economy? When the middle class has no incentive to spend is when we have a problem. But hey, If more rich people would employ them, they'd have more mulla! See where my affection for the rich comes from?

No we don't. Most of us have to spend a good chunk of the day working just to makes ends meat. And who do we work for? Richer people. We're essentially giving them our time. All the while the super-rich practically don't have to spend a minute working. They could just live off their investments. Not to mention all the people spending their time working for them. They have surplus time. — Purple Pond

We don't have the same 24 hours? We can at least agree on that as a stand alone statement.
I hear what you're saying. I think you don't take into account the struggles that the rich dealt with to become rich. It's my personal opinion that if you took all the wealth in the world and redistributed it evenly in a decade the same people that were once rich will be rich again. Why? They know how to save and spend their bloody money!
Also, have you ever seen a wealthy person work? (of course I mean one that has created and or maintains their wealth through labor... their will always be the few that live off old money) They work their tails off!! Most rich people could run circles around me with their work ethic. Productivity = success

Does wealth cause happiness? Does being poor mean you will have a horrible life?
What is poor? Technically speaking on a global scale if you live in America with running water and a roof over your head you are the 1% of wealth in the world.
Rich and poor are relative terms. At the end of the day I choose to be thankful for what I have, not envious of what I do not.

The 1% of wealth in this country does not move the economy when it's up OR down. The middle class does. — Austin Owens

Then why do conservatives want tax breaks for the rich? We're always hearing how giving the rich more money to spend and invest will boost the economy. Here's a whole article arguing for just that. https://www.forbes.com/2010/10/27/taxes-wealthy-economy-opinions-contributors-alex-brill-chad-hill.html#45b823f862a0

On the contrary. Everything the Nazis did was strictly according to the law. Of course the law itself became corrupt. Perhaps that's what you meant. But that shows that even the "rule of law" can be problematic. We see such instances in the contemporary news from time to time. — fishfry

The "law" is really an automatisation of justice, much like Bitcoin would be an automatisation of payment systems. If you look at human history the trend is to go from less automatisation to more automatisation. But there is a problem that is often forgotten with moving from less automatisation to more. The more automatisation there is, the more inescapable control there exists, and the less freedom in the real sense of the term. In other words, people are more and more removed from the decision-making process. And the way the system is setup is that those who control what the laws are can always blame the law for the oppression of their brethren - ie, we're just following the law. They no longer have to assume full responsibility.

Labor theory of value and all that? — fishfry

I was recently working on a mini-project now that I'm on holiday. Developing (programming) a centrally controlled economic system that would allocate resources fairly across the economy and writing a paper for it. There is a relationship between the labor-theory of value and perfect competition under capitalism.

In perfect competition, there are no profits for anyone. That means that price/unit = cost/unit. All costs can be quantified in units of labor-time. Raw materials are also quantified in terms of the time it takes for them to be obtained. So all costs of a firm, not just direct labor, can be quantified in units of labour time. That means that in perfect competition, prices can be quantified in units of labor-time.

If we think fundamentally, what is an economy? It is the allocation of time for the fulfilment of needs. We have a limited pool of time in the economy and infinite needs. Needs are of two categories - essential (we die without them), and wants.

If the economy is formed of one person stuck on an island, then he will need to decide what needs he has, and then prioritise those needs, and then use his time to start fulfilling them one by one (as many as he can). The same idea follows in a group.

So money is really a shadow of time - it is time that is essential. Now, labour-theory of value has a short-coming. It cannot decide how much 1 hour of taxi-driving is worth compared to 1 hour of engineering. Why not? Because it cannot decide which one we need more of - taxi driving or engineering.


(Now, this isn't exactly true. If a centrally planned economy has an exterior - other external economies that it doesn't control - then it can quantify all internal opportunity costs in terms of the prices goods can be traded at externally, and it would work. The problem really comes when there is only ONE centrally planned economy, with no exterior. Imagine your company owned all the resources and all the economy of the entire world - how would you decide what gets produced first, in what quantity, at what price, etc?)

A subjective theory of value is required for that, and to determine it, we only need to make use of the demand curve. How much some participant X is willing to pay for some good Y is a quantification of his subjective need. And the demand curve shows us how much each participant is willing to pay.

We can obtain values that are directly comparable to each other by referencing how much each participant is willing to pay as a percentage of his income or total money. So if I'm willing to pay 90% of my income for good A, and you're willing to pay only 10%, then I need it more than you, even if that 90% may mean $50, and for you 10% may mean $500 in absolute value. That's the very communist version - the more capitalist one is by price, regardless of income or wealth, but we will privilege those who have more money. So call this price, how much each is willing to pay, as subjective price. The former price (the one obtained from labour-theory) will be known as cost of production.

Now, only the goods where subjective price >= cost of production will be produced.

Under this system nobody would own factories, and other means of production. Everyone would submit orders for all products to a central computer. An order consists of the quantity desired, the type of product, and the price/unit one is willing to pay. Participants compete on price - those willing to pay the most will get their orders executed first (the only exception would be everything labelled as essential goods, which will always be sold at the cost of production). This guarantees maximum efficiency of circulation.

How will people be rewarded? Well, we start from the fact that $1 = 1 hour labour-time. Money is all digital, the central computer keeps track of how much money is in the wallet of each participant in the economy, and it can do this, because it processes all orders and has all information. So that's the base salary so to speak. However, since non-essential goods are transacted at subjective price, that means that it is possible for some goods to make a lot more than the labour that went into them. Say good A made $500 in one day, and it took 10 hours to produce the quantity of good A that made $500. That means that good A made $50/hour labourtime. So the production of good A is worth x50 the production of the standard good at the base rate.

The workers who worked those 10 hours, will receive ALL the income after raw materials, etc. have been paid. So that will be how one worker can earn more than another - based on how needed he is, where money is used to quantify the need for him (based on the worth of the products he produces).

Goods will get produced based on price. Those that people are willing to pay most per unit will be produced first.

I have more on this, but any thoughts so far?

Interestingly enough, my question in the OP has been asked before, and there are some good answers. .

Here are sources for both sides of the argument from the Guardian, and from Forbes.

My 25c : Wealth does not exactly create poverty. Power might do. But Greed IS good as a driving force, The possibility to explore and exploit other parts of the world was a driving force behind the technical revolution starting off in the 17th century norhern Europe.

And still, "risk capital" tries to go after things that seem fruitful, ideas from bright people.

And I am a Socialist. In the eyes of most US people at least. But I can see that the Communism created even more poverty than the US did in Latin America during the cold war days.

Karl Popper in his critique of Marx has the clue. The National States. That will moderate the more brutal capitalism with regulation and taxes. In my home country we actually had a revolution. But a slooow one. From 1917 up to the 60´s. Where the trade unions and the social democrats gradually gained more power. In good discussions with the big capitalist families (eg. the Wallenbergs). What we ended up with, Peaking in the 80's was a mixed economy where capitalism was ok, but you had high taxes on eg. inheritance and a lot of regulations. Universities are free of charge. So intelligent kids from humble backgrounds are allowed to rise.

THe situation has become more fuzzy now, with the introduction of Globalisation, with low salary countries coming into play, making the national states and the trade unions toothless. My guess is that this is what sent President Trump to power.

What one would like to arrive at, I think, is NOT a socialism of the equal-for-everyone type. But a TRUE social liberalist world whith something of the Fair Race that Rawls talks about, where people really do what Plato is dreaming of in The Republic, where silver children of gold parents sends those kids to silver lives while gold children of silver parents gets gold lives. And that for the whole world. But as long as people talks about the IQ of Sub-Sahara people, I am sceptical.
Actually, I am a father myself risen to the gold position. And I do not give my teenage kids gold lives for free. Since I am from a Silver background. They have to fight for it. I cannot understand parents that spoil their kids, making them omnipotent while observing that their kids are really mediocre.

Wealth does not give poverty, but richness for all reqiuires institutions stronger than the rich people. As with all questions regarding humans, a compromise is normally the best solution.

But of course, one dreams of a world where everyone does what he or she is most apt to do, and everyone works together. And produces the same results as capitalism. But maybe it is impossible.

No, Austin. Money does not buy happiness-- but money can buy things that significantly improve your quality of life. You are most likely going to be more happy if you can adequately support yourself and your family; if you can afford food, utilities, healthcare, education, transportation, etc.
Take a look at this. And this.
Arguing that we shouldn't be concerned just because we might be comparatively privileged is simply ridiculous. And by the way, having a home and access to water utilities would actually put you in at least the top ~47% globally.

The "law" is really an automatisation of justice, much like Bitcoin would be an automatisation of payment systems. If you look at human history the trend is to go from less automatisation to more automatisation. But there is a problem that is often forgotten with moving from less automatisation to more. The more automatisation there is, the more inescapable control there exists, and the less freedom in the real sense of the term. — Agustino

That fits nicely with some thoughts I have.

The risk isn't computers acting like people. The risk is people acting like computers.

Every time you're trying to explain your particular situation to a bureaucrat and they stonewall you with "policy," that's a system that's operating like an algorithm, to the detriment of the human in particular and humanity in general.

Every time a cop shoots an unarmed civilian in a bad shoot and the chief says, "Our officer followed departmental procedures," well DUH, your procedures need to be changed then. You need to train cops not to shoot the wrong people. It's literally impossible to foresee every situation. You have to train people to have a heart, not a flow chart.

Our worry about AI is misplaced. We need to start looking at the way we treat each other. No computer could be any worse to us than we already are.

Everyone would submit orders for all products to a central computer. — Agustino

Well see now I'm confused. To me this is a recipe for failure. You have to let the system make decisions organically from the bottom up. Top down control has been a bloody awful failure in China and the Soviet Union and Venezuela and Cuba. I don't understand how one could advocate for this and still hope to have a human society.

I think what I'm saying is that making society run by rules is totalitarianism when our current techno-society does it; and it's totalitarian when Marxist idealists imagine you could ever run a world like this.

Top down doesn't work. You want to empower from the bottom up. You want to program humanity into your system. And the only way to program humanity is to not program humanity at all.

That fits nicely with some thoughts I have.

The risk isn't computers acting like people. The risk is people acting like computers.

Every time you're trying to explain your particular situation to a bureaucrat and they stonewall you with "policy," that's a system that's operating like an algorithm, to the detriment of the human in particular and humanity in general.

Every time a cop shoots an unarmed civilian in a bad shoot and the chief says, "Our officer followed departmental procedures," well DUH, your procedures need to be changed then. You need to train cops not to shoot the wrong people. It's literally impossible to foresee every situation. You have to train people to have a heart, not a flow chart.

Our worry about AI is misplaced. We need to start looking at the way we treat each other. No computer could be any worse to us than we already are. — fishfry

Yes. Recently I have had quite some trouble with my local banker for exactly this reason. Nobody is willing to take responsibility, they all blame the procedures, shrug their shoulders, and say there's nothing they can do. Or one decision-maker sends you to another decision-maker who sends you back to the first decision-maker >:O .

You have to let the system make decisions organically from the bottom up. Top down control has been a bloody awful failure in China and the Soviet Union and Venezuela and Cuba. I don't understand how one could advocate for this and still hope to have a human society. — fishfry

It's not top-down. It is true that the computer decides what gets produced, but it decides so based on the quantified will of the people. If there are two orders, for product A and product B, and there aren't enough resources to produce both, then the one with the higher price will get produced first. So if someone is willing to pay more for A, that is a suggestion that relative to B, A is worth more.

Money. There is a limited supply of money in the world (the money pie). When there are more rich people getting more money, somebody has to be getting less, namely the poor. — Purple Pond

This is not necessarily the case. In recent times the money supply has been so restricted that banks were talking about negative interest.
But sovereign bodies have the right to create (out of thin air) as much money as they think the economy needs. So effectively there is no limit to the amount of money.