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Originally Posted by DanaC
Your description of how communism/socialism works is too simplistic. It does not take into account exploitation by an employer-class, of an employee-class. That is what socialism seeks to redress.
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DanaC, if I were your social sciences teacher I would give that paper a failing grade. Socialism, whether it overtly says so or not, merely replaces an employer-class with the official class, and the exploitation merrily continues otherwise unchanged -- if anything, worse, with Throne and Mammon conjoined, and paying in fiat currency too. Ask anyone with a memory of day to day Soviet life.
You'd protest immediately "But we'd make laws to prevent exploitation!" Oh sure, you could and would. Make laws by the bushel, regulations and policies by the tome until the shelf is full and appendixes, revisions, and addenda are stacking up on the floor at the shelf's end, all to hedge about the actions of the official-employers... and in the process, quietly kill flexibility, creativity and initiative, hardly aware that that is what you're doing in an attempt to craft omnicompetent policy.
This is known as central planning and it actively prevents economic performance. For an exact parallel, see "work rules" -- a body of regulation that prevents work being done. This is why the Soviet Union fell, you know; the belief that Gosplan was something necessary sucked all the vitamins out of the economy, engendered distortions so severe it was rather a wonder the production of Kalashnikovs and missiles wasn't affected. Maybe it was, and we just don't know for sure. State Socialism did not have an economy so much as it had a Frankenstein's monster galvanized into something like motion at every Five Year Plan.
This is why my lifelong advice to any socialist is: dump socialism. Start with a clean sheet and base it all on the individual -- absolutely nothing happens until some individual does something. I'd further tell them there is no such thing as the Collective: the nearest you can come is individual people moving in close coordination towards a desired goal, and you can only expect this to be a temporary thing.
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It's not about someone being terribly hard working and all those people who aren't as hard working or inventive, wanting to take away the fruits of his hard work.
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Then it would seem to be about absolutely nothing at all, if you are to be believed. Since big-S Socialism never raised altars to Nothing ("Is Nothing sacred?"), but instead encouraged worship of other things, like Party, I don't see any reason to accept this statement as true either.
The State that flatly refuses to rob Peter to pay Paul, even if it would appreciate the full support of Paul, is a State (in a state) of very little corruption. The usual way a state suffers creeping decay or a collapse of its economy is through some party or another voting itself the treasury or some portion thereof. Forcible seizure of the treasury is also a corrupting option.