Rural socialism

I live in a very rural area.  It’s about fifteen miles from where I live to where I work, and my preferred route has about ten miles of back roads where I’m more likely to see deer than cars, with the final five miles on a main road.  Where I live is also very red.  I believe 80% of my county voted for Trump in 2020, which was a few points higher than in 2016.  I don’t see as many Trump flags as I used to, but I don’t know if they’ve finally been taken down or were just put away because of winter weather. 

Anyway, a few months ago as I was going to work, I wondered how many people actually live on these back roads.  And it’s hard to say because there are numerous little roads going off into the woods and I don’t know if there’s one house back there or ten.  There are also numerous camps in the area and when you just see glimpses of a building through the trees as you drive by it’s hard to say if that’s a camp or a house.  To make things easy, I’ll just say that there’s 100 people living along those ten miles.  There’s probably about the same on the five miles of main road, but that does bring you in to the business side of town, not the residential side.

Since these are Pennsylvania back roads, they’re … okay.  I’ve driven on worse, I’ve driven on better.  But I was wondering how much it costs to pave these roads.  Now, I started looking online, but it seemed every site I found gave different numbers, from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a million.  The high end were for actually building roads, but even just simply repaving an existing road is expensive, especially since these roads wind around and over hills.  Without finding an actual bill – or driving an expert along the roads so they can calculate how much it would cost – there’s no firm way for me to know how much it would cost to repave these back roads.  For simplicity sake, we’ll take a low end of $100,000.  Oh, that’s per mile.  So for the ten miles of these back roads, that would be $1,000,000.  Of course, maybe we only repave it every decade, so that means the 100 of us who live along these roads need to come up with $100,000 every year, or $1,000 each.

That’s just for these roads I said are my preferred route.  When the weather gets bad, I take another route which is five miles of back roads and ten miles of main road.  I don’t normally take this route because it brings me to the other side of town which I then have to go through.  So that $1,000 a year is just for the decadal repaving of this one ten mile section of road and doesn’t include stuff like plowing in the winter or any other maintenance.

So how do these roads get paved?  Well, the government takes taxes from heavily populated areas and redistributes it so that us rural folk aren’t left with the whole bill.  Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my neighbors used these roads to go to some “Taxation is theft!” rally where they scream that the tyrannical government never did anything for them.

I think it’s time for a Twenty-First Century economic theory

Roughly speaking, there are two big economic theories in the world today: capitalism and socialism.  A lot of people spend a lot of time talking about the successes and failures of each.  Nobody really cares about my opinion, but it is that both are failing ideologies. 

Now some will be screaming “How has capitalism failed?” Well, let me ask a question.  Let’s say there is a company named WidgetCo that makes widgets.  These widgets are so wondrous that everyone wants one, and WidgetCo makes a lot of money selling them.  But they make their widgets so well that they almost never breakdown, and soon everyone who wants a widget has one, and WidgetCo goes out of business, leaving room for DoohickeyCo to enter the market with their groundbreaking doohickey.  Now, in the ideal of Capital C Capitalism, is WidgetCo a success?  I’d say yes.  They made a healthy profit off their widgets, how is that a failure?  But is that how things work in the real world?  In the real world, WidgetCo would make less quality widgets that breakdown, and then they’d stop making parts, or stop giving tech support, all to force people into buying the – basically the same but with some cosmetic changes – Widget2.  Then, since they have all the money, they corner the market on thingumabobs to prevent DoohickeyCo from making their doohickeys.  Is that the ideal of capitalism?  I’d say that’s more Capital G Capitalism (for greed).  An argument I’ve had for why the current system isn’t the greatest is that I never realized the point of capitalism was to create a plutocracy. 

Now, since I’ve had some valid criticism of capitalism as practiced, some will just yell, “That’s just because you’re a dirty socialist.” Wouldn’t those people be surprised to learn that I think socialism is failing as well.  I think Capital S Socialism is pretty good.  The problem comes with the implementation.  Say you start with the radical socialist idea that nobody should starve.  So you start with all the numbers from 2015, of where the people are, where the food is grown, how it’s transported and distributed, etc.  You crunch all the numbers and run simulations, and by 2017 you have the perfect system … on paper.  You then need to actually put it into place, which miraculously only takes until 2019.  But the end result is that in 2019 you have the perfect system in place to feed everyone … in 2015.  And then 2020 happens.  I think a lot of the horror stories told of socialism are a result, not of Capital S Socialism, but Capital B Socialism, for bureaucracy.  Just as with power WidgetCo can turn monopolistic, any socialist system can turn bureaucratic and then be unable – or unwilling – to change when the situation changes.

Here’s an idea for a better world.  Everyone gets 1000 Credits a month.  One bedroom apartments are capped at 500 Credits a month, and a month’s worth of groceries can be 100 Credits, if you get the generic cereal, for example.  Basic and emergency medical care is covered, but a lot of elective stuff isn’t.  To pay for all of this free stuff, all able people have to do X hours of community service each year.  You could either work for a few hours a week, or eight hours a day for a couple of weeks in January and be good for the year.  If you want a bigger apartment, or a car, or whatever, you need to get a job to earn extra money.  Some will cry that people need to contribute to society and they’ll point to some kid playing video games and just call them a slacker.  I wonder what those people think of these assholes who play golf all the time while the money their parents made makes more money.  Are they contributing to society?

I think my better world idea would be great.  I have no idea how such a system would be implemented, and know it would probably only work for a decade or two before technological advance would crack it apart.  It’s only a matter of time before autonomous vehicles will drive around checking for potholes.  When a pothole is detected, another autonomous vehicle will show up, block off traffic, and fix it.  And these autonomous vehicles will be built in automated factories, which will be supplied from automated mines.  In this system, does someone need to own all these vehicles?  Would we still need to pay taxes to pay for this system?  And this won’t just be for roads.  There will be robots building solar power stations, houses, picking food, transporting it all, etc. 

Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, died in 1790.  Karl Marx, often seen as the socialist poster boy, died in 1883.  Even if you think their ideas were perfect – they weren’t – they were Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century ideas.  We live in the Twenty-first.  Shouldn’t there be a new economic system that takes automation and bitcoin into account?  It doesn’t even have to be completely new.  I’d say this new system should be about 40% Capital S Socialism, 30% Capital C Capitalism, and 30% something new.  What do you think?