This response corresponds to the conversation taking place on Bryan's Blog, found here:
http://bacton.blogspot.com/2010/03/do-not-forget-we-are-talking-about.html
To catch you up on things, currently me and Bryan are talking about how to perfect a socialist utopian society. As a response to his post, I felt that there may be some things to add to my original argument, these are my revisions to the plan:
For starters, this conversation we had was very basic and in the birth of its coming to completion. I think that the equal wages with freedom to spend it on what interests you is still a very valid argument, it just needs some help with other potential circumstances to encompass the things that you think would be wrong with it.
With respect to the jobs situation, equal wages has to be rephrased a little bit. The real solution to that statement would be that jobs would pay differently based on how much you have to do / contribute to society. Rather than saying that everyone gets equal wages, it would be a statement of everyone gets appropriate wage caps based on their contribution to society.
Another important part to this conflict is that of the self being frustrated with this system. What you had mentioned is that the normal person would notice that they don't need to do as much work as expected and still make the same money. This is a very true statement, and thus my solution to it is that there must be a form of punishment (whether to the wages you make or the job itself) for not complying with the job that you are participating in. This would work very similarly to firing someone from the job that they are clearly not adequate for, expecting that the person who will now not have any wage coming in will find a different job that they will actually participate in.
This leads to the next interesting issue of running out, and or wasting away the wage money that you are expected to use appropriately. My solution to this brings the whole argument to a level of finally making sense. For if you have been fired from your job, and or you have been wasting your wages away to the point that you can no longer survive without government help, then you are sent to jail. This would have to be a slightly different kind of jail than what we have now though. It would have to be more of a rehabilitation to society program; where you take these people who have wasted their money away and have them do community service without pay until they make up for what they have done wrong. Once they have proven to be humbled by this means of service, they are sent back out to try again with the expectation that they can now appreciate their wages.
This concept of the jail would also make up for the people trying to take advantage of the system. For you can go back to jail as many times as you want, but it would be more efficient to keep your job and try and save your money for what you want; rather than a means of taking advantage of others.
This concept of the jail system would also take the blame on the government out of the people's eyes, because it is a standardized system that would work efficiently without bias to any one person who ends up there.
What do you think of the revisions?
Saturday, April 3, 2010
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I think that your revisions are good, but I still think that you are forgetting about the fact that we are talking about humans. Much of your theory depends on the human ability to follow a set of strict rules that prohibits individuality, which is not something humans are not good at doing.
ReplyDeleteI understand your idea to pay people differently on how much they do or contribute to society, but I think that this solution has problems. Who is going to decide how much a worker should be paid, and do you really think every worker would be satisfied with this process? It seems to me like this would not solve the problem of workers being angry because another job receives more money than theirs does. Deciding whether one job should earn more money than another, when each job is totally different is not a simple process, nor do I expect every worker to agree with the decisions made. Also, if people were paid for how much they contributed to society, then it seems like this is getting away from the main idea of a socialist community; it does not seem like anyone should be paid more than someone else because that would provide people with the ability to have more material possessions than their neighbor; paying people different wages sound more like a mixed economy, rather than a socialist one.
As far as workers not being satisfied with their jobs, I do not feel that the punishment you outlined would be a perfect solution. I do think your idea makes sense, but my problem relates to deciding which people should be punished. I feel that some people may not put in their best work at their job, while others put in effort but they still get punished; it seems like this type of punishment will create many unhappy workers. Even if the punishment did work, I do not see how a person would not just slack off at their new job; these people who were punished could not be left unemployed because a socialist society wants everyone to work. Also, if they were forced to a job with no pay, then I doubt they would want to work to their full potential.
All of these ideas lead up to your finally point, which is to create a rehabilitation type of jail for people who do not want to comply with the governments rules. I think this is absolutely your best point because it fixes most of the issues I have raised so far. If people complained about how much they were being paid, and therefore did not work to their full potential, then they could be sent to this type of jail. I think that having this type of facility would fix most of the problems within a socialist community because it could teach them to follow the rules of the community. Furthermore, if this rehabilitation center taught the idea of caring about the whole of the society more than the individual then I think it would help the people of the society function correctly under the socialist standards.
I do think a socialist type system could have a chance to work if a rehabilitation type jail like you pointed out was created, but I feel that the long term outlook on this type of system would not work. Unless there was an overall awakening in the human consciousness, I do not think humans could handle not living in a society where the whole is more important then the individual.
I agree that this society on the whole would very little to no chance becoming a reality, because it would just be to damn hard to make it happen with what we already have. Unless this set of ideals was brought to another country, one that is in need of developing a society structure then I don't see it ever realistically happening.
ReplyDeleteI have to say though, that I stick with the argument that if the jail conditions were set properly, then the other issues that have been arrised would pretty much fall into place within the society itself, and hopefully not be to much of a problem. The entire existence of this society set up is based on the success of the rehab jail concept, because otherwise, there would be to much fault and anger directed all over the place for the same wrong reasons that there are now in our society.