iCP2: They're throwing in the towel.

[ekianjo]

If my "opponent" can copy my product, I can't build a better product,

You cant just copy everything, and there are many other ways to protect your innovation without patents. For example, producing some components internally, securing key supplies (exclusivity clauses with suppliers), trade secrets, etc... Patents is just the worst way and the most feudal way to do it, really. 

And as WizardStan says, if you can't outpace the copycats then you are not really innovative in the first place.

 

[kasp]

If my "opponent" can copy my product, I can't build a better product,

You cant just copy everything, and there are many other ways to protect your innovation without patents. For example, producing some components internally, securing key supplies (exclusivity clauses with suppliers), trade secrets, etc... Patents is just the worst way and the most feudal way to do it, really. 

And as WizardStan says, if you can't outpace the copycats then you are not really innovative in the first place.

To be honest if I invented something really successful I would want that gravy train to last as long as possible.  Why innovate when you can gets piles of cash?

 

[_wb_]

One doesn't need to use Hitler, Stalin or Mao as examples of socialis governments gone bad. Cuba and Venezuela have huge problems due to central planning of the economy.

Or take China which went from a pure central planning model (poverty and starvation) to a market-oriented boom economy with a growing middle class and standard of living.. Or read up on the political and economic history of Hong Kong or SIngapore. Heck even Vietnam, where the communists won the war, has gone capitalist and has started the ladder up to prosperity.

Or compare East and West germany, an experiment with the same ethnic population under socialism versus capitalism.. which one of the two had to build a wall to prevent its people from fleeing? Or North and South Korea, anyone?

Our wanna-be Maos here suffer from ideogical filters that prevent them from seeing obvious historical reality. They think their prescription for "cutting up the pie" will lead to prosperity... just like central-planners since time immemorial.

The historical reality is that Soviet Russia had an enormous ideological impact on much of the 20th century. And even though it had been through a genuine socialist revolution in 1917, it had rather quickly degenerated into a bureaucratic authoritarian regime called Stalinism.

Like Trotsky explained in already in the 1920s, a bureaucratically planned economy does not work. In a sufficiently simple economy (small chains of dependencies etc) it can work to a certain extent and even be superior to capitalism for a while, but in the long term, Trotsky predicted (in the early 1930s!) that the Soviet Union would eventually collapse under its own weight unless his Left Opposition would succeed in its political revolution aimed at obtaining a true democracy: both politically (multiple parties) and economically (democratically planned economy). However, Stalin has brutally murdered anyone involved in the Left Opposition, including, eventually, Trotsky himself.

Anyway, while it lasted, Soviet Russia was very influential, the worst possible way. Lots of genuine revolutions, like the Spanish revolution in 1936, were led to failure because it was not in the interest of the Russian bureaucracy to disturb their own fragile power by having an example of a real socialist state (in particular, a democratic one) anywhere in the world. They rather helped install other dictatorial regimes modeled on their system (perhaps with some variants) -- those were easier to control than true socialist states. So revolution after revolution, all over the world, Soviet Russia was either instrumental in leading it to failure, or in bringing some dictatorial regime into power.

The most dramatic example of this phenomenon is probably Germany in the 1930s, where the Stalinists rather handed power over to the nazis than to risk getting a successful socialist revolution in their backyard -- they knew very well that if the latter were to happen, their days as privileged bureaucrats were numbered.

So yes, we have seen many "experiments with socialism" in the 20th century, but they all boil down to the same failed experiment -- this one failure (Stalinism) was so spectacular that its impact is still felt to this day. It is important to understand how and why it failed. But it would be wrong to conclude from one experiment (even if supplemented by a bunch of horribly biased experiments derived from that same experiment) that socialism inherently and inevitably leads to failure. There are specific conditions of Russia in the early 20th century that helped to enable Stalinism, like wide-spread illiteracy and extremely limited means of communication.

Anyway, I think a democratically planned economy would be superior to the capitalist market economy we have today. Alas, I cannot point to good examples of a democratically planned economy, because there are none so far.

Capitalism is a beautiful and elegant multi-agent optimization algorithm that is quite effective at computing a local optimum of a particular objective function that alas is not a function designed to maximize progress and minimize suffering.

 

[ekianjo]

To be honest if I invented something really successful I would want that gravy train to last as long as possible.  Why innovate when you can gets piles of cash?

Yeah, that's why patents are still surviving to this day. But for the society as a whole, they prevent smaller players from entering the market and create rents.

Again, patents could be MORE acceptable if they were relatively short (a couple of years), but 20 years is way too long for most of the products considered - software is especially not adapted to that kind of long rent model. 

 

[ekianjo]

alas is not a function designed to maximize progress and minimize suffering.

Care to explain how a "democratic-driven socialist" (I'm inclined to call that an utopia because, as I said before, Socialism in its essence has a tendency to concentrate powers and therefore lead in one way or another to dictatorship, but let's suppose for the sake of the argument that it would not) system would do better ?  

 

[Klumpen]

To be honest if I invented something really successful I would want that gravy train to last as long as possible.  Why innovate when you can gets piles of cash?

Yeah, that's why patents are still surviving to this day. But for the society as a whole, they prevent smaller players from entering the market and create rents.

Again, patents could be MORE acceptable if they were relatively short (a couple of years), but 20 years is way too long for most of the products considered - software is especially not adapted to that kind of long rent model. 

20 years? We have to pay every year for our patented drum tuning system and in many countries separate.

What do you mean with 20 years?

 

[Klumpen]

alas is not a function designed to maximize progress and minimize suffering.

Care to explain how a "democratic-driven socialist" (I'm inclined to call that an utopia because, as I said before, Socialism in its essence has a tendency to concentrate powers and therefore lead in one way or another to dictatorship, but let's suppose for the sake of the argument that it would not) system would do better ?  

Surprisingly, I have to aggree with Ekianjo here.

Classic socialistic systems need someone to control that it actually stays social and the ones in control are outside of the system in a way and use it.

To be a bit libertarian:

Every state system is oppression, no matter what final outcome is planned or what it's named.

Ethical and otherwise highly educated humans in an anarchy would be the way to go but that's as unrealistic as all your state systems, so I just go with

"make the best out of everything and always take rules and laws as guidelines and don't think they are more important than the creatures they are made for."

Good will and freedom are the only important things, if this would be more present, we could be happy in any system or without any. It really doesn't matter what theory you are clinging to, it's all oppression of someone in a way.

 

[ekianjo]

for 20 years see


http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent

 

[_wb_]

alas is not a function designed to maximize progress and minimize suffering.

Care to explain how a "democratic-driven socialist" (I'm inclined to call that an utopia because, as I said before, Socialism in its essence has a tendency to concentrate powers and therefore lead in one way or another to dictatorship, but let's suppose for the sake of the argument that it would not) system would do better ?  

A democratically planned economy would be less wasteful, and its priorities would be determined by actual needs, not by profitability.

I'm a computer scientist, so I tend to see economy as an optimization problem and economical systems as algorithms to attempt to solve the problem.

A democratically planned economy could be capable of finding an optimum in the multi-dimensional search space determined by the various stakeholders, taking into account aspects like ecology/environment that easily succumb to tragedies of the common in systems based exclusively on local optimization (e.g. the anarchy of the free market or the anarchistic dream of local cooperative communes without any global organization).

In our current capitalist system we have to rely on crude methods to try to take the important social and ecological issues into account: e.g. legislation to prohibit regions of the search space that are considered undesirable (usually this kind of legislation ends up being too little, too late), or attempts to re-shape the search space by providing financial incentives to try to steer the "captains of industry" in more desirable directions. However, this all corresponds to projecting a multi-dimensional search space onto something as one-dimensional as a monetary bottom-line. Furthermore, the optimization algorithm is nothing more than some kind of multi-agent hill-climbing based expectation-maximization algorithm, a type of simplistic greedy search that does indeed converge to a local optimum, but since we don't have the luxury of random restarts and the terrain is not smooth at all, it is quite unlikely that we get anywhere close to a global optimum in this way. Not to mention that the projection into a one-dimensional objective function is not perfect at all -- "more profitable" does not at all correspond to "better for society".

So in summary, to answer your question: a democratically planned economy would do better than a (regulated or free) market approach because it permits global optimization of an optimization problem defined by society as a whole, whereas any market approach only permits local optimization of an optimization problem that can only partially and indirectly be defined by society.

 

[klapse]

One doesn't need to use Hitler, Stalin or Mao ....

They think their prescription for "cutting up the pie" will lead to prosperity... just like central-planners since time immemorial.

The historical reality is that Soviet Russia had an enormous ideological impact on much of the 20th century. And even though it had been through a genuine socialist revolution in 1917, it had rather quickly degenerated into a bureaucratic authoritarian regime called Stalinism.

Like Trotsky explained in already in the 1920s, a bureaucratically planned economy does not work. In a sufficiently simple economy (small chains of dependencies etc) it can work to a certain extent and even be superior to capitalism for a while, but in the long term, Trotsky predicted (in the early 1930s!) that the Soviet Union would eventually collapse under its own weight unless his Left Opposition would succeed in its political revolution aimed at obtaining a true democracy: both politically (multiple parties) and economically (democratically planned economy). However, Stalin has brutally murdered anyone involved in the Left Opposition, including, eventually, Trotsky himself.

Thanks for the lesson on Trotsky! Very interesting. From wikipedia:

Leon Trotsky believed that central planners, regardless of their intellectual capacity, operated without the input and participation of the millions of people who participate in the economy, and would therefore be unable to respond to local conditions quickly enough to effectively coordinate all economic activity.[23 Writings 1932-33, P.96, Leon Trotsky.

It may be on the surface surprising that Trotsky agreed with (and possibly read about) Ludwig von Mises' demolishment of central planning in the "Socialist Calculation Debate" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate, culmanating in his book Planned Chaos. [This book was published in 1947. The title comes from Mises's description of the reality of central planning and socialism, whether of the Russian or German pattern. This important work was written decades after Mises's original essay on economic calculation and includes the broadest and boldest attack on all forms of state control.

I think we need to distingish between _wb_'s use of the term "Socialism" to describe his preferred, untried government and the more common public use of the term to describe nations labeling themselves socialist since the early 20th century.

It is understandable that _wb_ does not want to associate socialist dictatorships with socialism. It is not so surprising dictatorships are led by villians, since It is not surprising that power hungry gangster type people fight to gain control of any centralized power capable of expropriation of citizens. Those states include those with the worst human rights abuses in history. By contrast, in countries more representative of respect for property rights (those rights beginning with ownership of your body) and limited government powers we saw dramatic increases in public (consumer) prosperity in the 20th century. This despite many left-leaning economists and sociologists consistently praising the Soviets and claiming that their model would overtake the west in "production". (citation needed)

I think, _wb_, that you are understandably advocating a socialist system, but without thuggish leaders.  But even democratic driven socialst governments create a nexus of power - the power to "redistribute the pie" (overtly, in the name of various social goals, covertly for political interest). This pie is a big prize for thuggish gangs of people in any country. Even if the power is broadened to thousands of local government offices, each becomes a fiefdom with force of law, with its own princes and favored class (the bureaucrats). Giving such branch offices the power to confiscate property is somehow not going to be a focal point for corruption?

Thanks also for the interesting idea that the USSR didnt want "democratic-driven socialist" experiments in europe. Hadn't considered it before.

I have a lot of sympathy for not wanting to mix the ideal "socialism" with socialism as practiced.  By my same standards, I would have to admit that people apply the label "capitalistic" to nations which are far from free-market societies.  I would prefer something like "interventionist capitalism" to describe them. Like _wb_ I don't see any society currently implementing my preferred form of governments (minarchist, anarcho-capitalist), but I become more and more skeptical that they are realistic in the face of the real world politics of power.

Capitalism is a beautiful and elegant multi-agent optimization algorithm that is quite effective at computing a local optimum of a particular objective function that alas is not a function designed to maximize progress and minimize suffering.

Why is it so hard to see that what the consumer wants is basically what gets produced?

Progress? There have been centuries of progress (increasing worker safety, productivity) enjoyed by the more-or-less market based economies. There is a continuous flood of progress in new innovations, and design and manufacturing process improvements - can the state do this so well?

Suffering? The market provides me a large variety of places to live-in, food to satiate my hunger and television to reduce my boredom, and medicines and doctors (though limited by law) to reduce suffering.

Thanks for the discussion. Im now curious about what power Trotsky wanted the state to sieze and what not, and in what form.

Edit his complete text is written in "The Soviet Economy in Danger"

If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace – a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions – such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal...

 

[ekianjo]

and its priorities would be determined by actual needs, not by profitability.

The problem is that there are always more needs than resources available to take care of all needs, and you need a system to make priorities. So if it's not decisions made by businesses and consumers and markets, who decides where money gets invested, and how would the decision process work, and how do you ensure we do not fall back into the gross mistakes of planned economies like in China and Russia before ? 

I also very much doubt that "democracy" leads to better choices when deciding what to produce - because the way it's usually implemented is no more no less than the dictatorship of the majority. Take that model in a restaurant with a group, asking them to decide democratically on one stuff to eat as a group, and you get pasta every single day. Democracy actually go for the lowest common denominator in society, which is far from being appropriate when it comes to creating products for people who actually have different needs and wishes.

Free markets actually work very well in that situation: you don't create products out of nothing, you create them because there are actual people who are going to buy them (through identification of needs, opportunity discovery, market research, etc...), and if you are successful, of course you profit, but part of the profits get re-invested into the company. 

Profit maximization is not at all the strategy of all companies on the market. Look at Amazon, a capitalist company by excellence - they have close to zero profits, and have done so for many years. It's not that they are losing money, they are actually making a LOT of money on their services, but the heavily re-invest their profits into infrastructure, services, research, etc... and they are effectively disrupting the market very, very fast. No government or democratic organization would have been able to deliver what they have delivered in the past 15 years. 

 

[klapse]

The optimization algorithm is nothing more than some kind of multi-agent hill-climbing based expectation-maximization algorithm, a type of simplistic greedy search that does indeed converge to a local optimum, but since we don't have the luxury of random restarts and the terrain is not smooth at all, it is quite unlikely that we get anywhere close to a global optimum in this way. Not to mention that the projection into a one-dimensional objective function is not perfect at all -- "more profitable" does not at all correspond to "better for society"

1) The optimum outcome is based on millions of wants or preferences that you cannot survey accurately enough. See the Economic Calculation Debate. You can claim "ah but I am using a big computer" but you cannot measure actual wants and preferences of individuals unless you give them a set of alternatives and relative prices of each. EDIT: And acually letting them purchase with their own money.

2) How is setting these dials and preferences - the input factors for your algorithm - be immune from the kind of lobbyism we see today in lawmaking?

3) What if "landing in the optimum" means taking a path with high political cost? How will your democratic decisionmakers be free from the kind of "quick fix" decisions that lead to landing in a local maximum EDIT: without the *will* necessary to move through local minima?

4) Your "streamlining for efficiency" is codespeak for "reduce the diversity of market offerings", isn't it? How will you decide how many different kinds of internet tablets to produce? What happens if your tablet producing factory sucks and delivers bad quality?

ADDENDUM: Hayek said: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” The linked essay goes into some detail about the intracies of planning, political and market feedback loops etc, with respect to financial regulation.

EDIT2: More Hayekian greatness: If the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort… then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force.

 

[ekianjo]

1) The optimum outcome is based on millions of wants or preferences that you cannot survey accurately enough. See the Economic Calculation Debate. You can claim "ah but I am using a big computer" but you cannot measure actual wants and preferences of individuals unless you give them a set of alternatives and relative prices of each.   2) How is setting these dials and preferences - the input factors for your algorithm - be immune from the kind of lobbyism we see today in lawmaking?   3) What if "landing in the optimum" means taking a path with high political cost? How will your democratic decisionmakers be free from the kind of "quick fix" decisions that lead to landing in a local maximum without the *will* necessary?   4) Your "streamlining for efficiency" is codespeak for "reduce the diversity of market offerings", isn't it? How will you decide how many different kinds of internet tablets to produce?

I'll add:

5. How will you prevent people from leaving your country, because they want more choice and prefer capitalistic system rather than planned economy ? While you are going to tell me it's not applicable, but all governments with planned economies have so far solved that problem by closing their borders and arresting citizens wanted to leave the country (and killing them in work camps for the worst ones).

 

[ekianjo]

Not to mention that the projection into a one-dimensional objective function is not perfect at all -- "more profitable" does not at all correspond to "better for society".

I wanted to add that lots of companies are not JUST driven by profit - but being profitable is a way for them to achieve their goals in society. Take Google. They are already extremely wealthy and Page could stop working tomorrow if he wanted and live extremely well until he reaches 200 years old if he could live that long. But he is still motivated to drive further innovation and ultimately change the world. That's what drives him, not just making more money. And Google is famous for spending a lot of money for their employees in terms of faciities and services (free, healthy food), and if they were just into profit maximization they would not even think about doing that in the first place.

Just the Google example, but there are many examples out there of companies striving to change the statu quo and go beyond profits.

 

[_wb_]

Capitalism is a beautiful and elegant multi-agent optimization algorithm that is quite effective at computing a local optimum of a particular objective function that alas is not a function designed to maximize progress and minimize suffering.

Why is it so hard to see that what the consumer wants is basically what gets produced?

Yes, supply will adapt to demand. But "demand" is not the same as actual needs. There can be only demand if there is purchasing power. The demand for even basic things like food and medicine is very low when people don't have money. And the entire point of marketing is to artificially create demand where there is no need, in other words: make people think they need something when they really don't.

I think, _wb_, that you are understandably advocating a socialist system, but without thuggish leaders.  But even democratic driven socialst governments create a nexus of power - the power to "redistribute the pie" (overtly, in the name of various social goals, covertly for political interest). This pie is a big prize for thuggish gangs of people in any country. Even if the power is broadened to thousands of local government offices, each becomes a fiefdom with force of law, with its own princes and favored class (the bureaucrats). Giving such branch offices the power to confiscate property is somehow not going to be a focal point for corruption?

The problem is that there are always more needs than resources available to take care of all needs, and you need a system to make priorities. So if it's not decisions made by businesses and consumers and markets, who decides where money gets invested, and how would the decision process work, and how do you ensure we do not fall back into the gross mistakes of planned economies like in China and Russia before ?

These are crucial questions indeed. How to avoid corruption, how to avoid degeneration and power grabs. I don't think it is possible to avoid this only by means of statutes and procedures; it will be necessary to obtain and maintain a general political awareness and participation. However, this would be a good starting point in my opinion:

- all political and socio-economical matters are decided by representatives at the appropriate scale (e.g. local / regional / national / international)

- all representatives are democratically elected

- no representative should earn more than the people he represents, no privileges of any kind can be allowed because it undermines the representativity of a representative if there are any perks associated to the job: privileges inevitably modify the interests of those who receive them

- all representatives are held accountable at all times for their actions as a representative; at any point in time, those who elected the representative can revoke the mandate and trigger a new election.

 

[_wb_]

The optimization algorithm is nothing more than some kind of multi-agent hill-climbing based expectation-maximization algorithm, a type of simplistic greedy search that does indeed converge to a local optimum, but since we don't have the luxury of random restarts and the terrain is not smooth at all, it is quite unlikely that we get anywhere close to a global optimum in this way. Not to mention that the projection into a one-dimensional objective function is not perfect at all -- "more profitable" does not at all correspond to "better for society"

1) The optimum outcome is based on millions of wants or preferences that you cannot survey accurately enough. See the Economic Calculation Debate. You can claim "ah but I am using a big computer" but you cannot measure actual wants and preferences of individuals unless you give them a set of alternatives and relative prices of each. EDIT: And acually letting them purchase with their own money.

2) How is setting these dials and preferences - the input factors for your algorithm - be immune from the kind of lobbyism we see today in lawmaking?

3) What if "landing in the optimum" means taking a path with high political cost? How will your democratic decisionmakers be free from the kind of "quick fix" decisions that lead to landing in a local maximum EDIT: without the *will* necessary to move through local minima?

4) Your "streamlining for efficiency" is codespeak for "reduce the diversity of market offerings", isn't it? How will you decide how many different kinds of internet tablets to produce? What happens if your tablet producing factory sucks and delivers bad quality?

1) A bottom-up system with layers of representatives, possibly aided by modern technology (it is now possible in theory to organize things like a world-wide poll without much overhead), with some market elements where appropriate: there can still be some form of currency and some form of payment for goods can still be required.

2) I have given some suggestions about that in my previous post.

3) Good point. I think the crucial element is that people have to be sufficiently interested in politics to distinguish a populist "quick-fix" proposal from a proposal that is better in the long term but requires some temporary discomfort. If a representative can explain the long-term agenda he or she should have no problem convincing his electorate. Obviously when you look at current society, populists can gather lots of votes because people are not sufficiently interested in politics to be well-informed (also, commercial mass media are not exactly helping with that), or they simply don't have the time for that. One of the reasons for their politically apathy is the lack of impact their votes have on their reality (since most aspects of society are not under democratic control at all). In a socialist system, a reduced working week would give people enough time, and an enhanced democracy (in which their opinion actually matters) would give them enough reason to care.

4) I don't think I said "streamlining for efficiency", at least that doesn't sound like me. Anyway, I don't think there would be a reduction of diversity under (real/democratic) socialism, to the contrary. The main difference is that it would be the subject of democratic debate where and what kind of diversity would be encouraged in what sectors. I don't think we need hundreds of differently branded versions of the same fever-reducing chemical molecule, but in most cases, more diversity than what we have now would be nice, e.g. when I look at the market of (fast-food) restaurant chains, high-budget movies, or Pandora-like devices.

5. How will you prevent people from leaving your country, because they want more choice and prefer capitalistic system rather than planned economy ? While you are going to tell me it's not applicable, but all governments with planned economies have so far solved that problem by closing their borders and arresting citizens wanted to leave the country (and killing them in work camps for the worst ones).

Closed borders is also quite typical for capitalism nowadays. You're perhaps free to leave your country, but you're generally not free to enter another one.

Anyway, I am opposed to any kind of closed borders. People should have the right to live in whatever country they want.

I don't think people leaving would be a major problem for any genuine socialist country -- there would be little reason to want to leave. Except of course for former capitalists -- let's say the richest 0.01% -- they would probably attempt to flee and take their capital with them. I would offer them to stay in their luxurious houses and have a nice further life, but their capital (i.e. the factories they own etc) would still have to be expropriated. "You can keep the Cadillac and the swimming pool, but not the companies you used to own."  If they prefer to live elsewhere (e.g. to try to become a capitalist again in some other non-socialist country), that's fine too. No hard feelings.

 

[rohezal]

If you can't even imagine a world in which you can build a better product than your competition then perhaps you don't deserve to be in business

I am not sure if I was not clear enough. I will try to write it in bold:

If my "opponent" can copy my product, I can't build a better product, if we have the same amount of money and I have to pay research costs.


If my "opponent" can produce the excatly same product, my product is not better. If he producing it by copying my product he can produce it cheaper. You have realy big problems with smartphones and tablet in europe and the usa because of copyright laws. Apple vs Samsung.

 

[WizardStan]

Oh you have been quite clear. Perhaps I have not been clear. I will try to write it in bold as well.

If my "opponent" can copy my product, I can't build a better product, if we have the same amount of money and I have to pay research costs.

If you cannot even imagine a world in which you can build a better product than your competition then perhaps you don't deserve to be in business.I don't know how else I can make this clear. If you think that money is your only resource, that there is no way to take advantage of a head start, that copying a product automatically makes it equally as good as the original, then you are doing a major disservice to yourself, your employees, and society and it is my opinion that you don't deserve government protection for your lack of ability.

Also, as I said, you've changed the question, adding more restrictions after the fact. You asked just "how?": the answer is simply "build the better product". You didn't say anything about whether you had the same resources or not. Even if two companies have the same amount of money, they still don't have equal resources.

 

[ekianjo]

I don't think people leaving would be a major problem for any genuine socialist country -- there would be little reason to want to leave. Except of course for former capitalists -- let's say the richest 0.01% -- they would probably attempt to flee and take their capital with them.

Hehe. It's not just the super rich people who are going to leave, because once you don't get as much choice in terms of goods, when food price increase, the manufactured cars become crappy, a lot of people will want to go to better places. Look at Eastern Germany. Tons of people and especially the poorer ones wanted to leave, because of the better opportunities out there.

And lets not forget the people who will be excluded because they dont like socialism, and lets bet these people will want to leave as well. 

Oh, and expropriation of manufacturing plants is just called plainy Stealing. It's not because it's a government that does it that it makes it right.

 

[Klumpen]

The problem is that there are always more needs than resources available to take care of all needs.

No. The problem is, that the term "needs" is very freely interpreted because of simple greed.

What people earn is very seldomly what they deserve, it's very often way too much or way too less, even if seen in a strictly national perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K9rDEYxGzao?feature=oembed

...it was still okay to be modest.