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From: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Health Care, Wonderful Market for
Message-ID: <787@psivax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Oct-85 16:23:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: psivax.787
Posted: Thu Oct 10 16:23:50 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 14-Oct-85 05:36:55 EDT
References: <204@gargoyle.UUCP> <10516@ucbvax.ARPA>
Reply-To: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
Lines: 35
Summary: 

In article <10516@ucbvax.ARPA> mcgeer@ucbvax.UUCP (Rick McGeer) writes:
>
>Damn right.  An economy is either competitive or command.  Feudalism and
>socialism are both command economies, which means that the goodies are
>passed out to political favourites.  If it quacks like a duck...
>>
	You seem to be confusing the economy of modern "communist"
nations with a true socialist economy. Properly speaking socialism is
based on *community* ownership of recources, and is not necessarily a
"command" economy at all. In fact it may well be totally democratic(in
the old sense of every member voting on every issue). Actually, the
only truly successful socialist entities I know of are small,
democratic communities. They exist right here in the US, as well as in
Israel(If my memory serves me right). They do *not* exist in any major
communist nation. It is interesting to note that the word "communist"
and the word "community" are closely related.
	In Russia the recources are "owned" by the *state*, not the
community, so I would call thier economy a *statist* economy. The same
is true of the other major "communist" nations. Statism and socialism
are not at all the same thing.
	Even feudalism is not exactly a command economy. It is based
on a hierarchy of authority and rights. No one really "owns" anything,
but everyone(ideally) has *rights* to some portion of the *production*
from some resource, and every resource is assigned to some person or
set of persons for management purposes. Higher levels have no control
over the use to which the production is put by the person recieving
it, they recipient is even entirely free to sell it, and often did.
The result is sort of a mixture of authoritarian and free-market and
even socialist economies.
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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