"OK, so the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, and China until twenty years ago or so -- all were/are socialist countries, right? On the other hand, countries like Sweden or France were never socialist -- correct?"
Correct. Socialistic, sure, but not socialist.
"The expression 'public goods' has specific meaning in econospeak, I assume you're not using that but just talking about goods for public consumption"
No, I did not mean public goods in the economic definition. Perhaps I should have said "Public Good": production of things which the public deems to be uppercase-goods: education, positive social interaction, food, shelter....The list would vary, but yes: "Public Good"(s) for public consumption.
As for the rest, you still haven't separated out public/private ownership of the means of production (MoP) and capitalist/socialist operation of the MoP. And when I say "market economy", I mean organization of the MoP such that they respond to market information, i.e. supply and demand. State ownership, as in the USSR, doesn't respond to supply and demand information; it responds to central planning information. Planners in the USSR decided, with the necessarily-limited information they had, how much of whatever good would be produced. I'm not advocating for that.
As I said in response to another comment on this post, it seems to me you can divide economic organization along three axes: public/private ownership of MoP (i.e. w/ or w/o private property), capitalistic/socialistic operation of MoP (i.e. for profit or Public Good), and operation of MoP according to market/planned rules. Democracy plays an important role in making public ownership work, as demonstrated nicely by both China and the USSR, for different reasons.
China, provides an excellent example of what seems to me to be just about the worst of all of those options. It's major corporations are state, i.e. (nominally) public enterprises operated for profit according to goals set by provincial and national planning committees. However, because allocation of public ownership isn't a democratic process, the CCP sort of does whatever it wants with China's economy, keeping a large portion of the proceeds for itself and needing only to worry about fostering enough growth, for the general citizenry, to prevent itself from being overthrown. But, you at least have the profit motive for workers forcing them to be more productive, even though the system is utterly rigged against them.
The USSR was slightly better in one theoretical way, but worse in another in reality: state enterprises, operated for social good according to goals set by a central planning committee. This means you had the handicap of planning, and there was still the problem of public ownership being allocated undemocratically, but at least the MoP were supposedly being operated for the production of Public Good. However, there was was essentially no incentive for work: no democracy, thus no pressure from the public for the government to be efficient, and no incentive from the market for workers to be productive.
I'd say more about the importance of the democratization/publicization (however you'd like to put it) of the ownership of the MoP, but again, there's quite a bit more written in that post I linked to a few comments up.
I mean organization of the MoP such that they respond to market information, i.e. supply and demand.
Well, that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? How can you organize the means of production so that they will respond to market information without going capitalist?
China, provides an excellent example of what seems to me to be just about the worst of all of those options.
That's an interesting opinion. It's interesting because China's last 20 years represent a colossal success. This "worst of all" system pulled out of poverty many many more p...
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.