This is not a "gotcha! checkmate idiots!" post, I'm genuinely curious what you think about this. This is the forum for asking questions right?
I have very niche interests. I like specifically shaped plushies of a specific franchise called fumos. I like data hoarding so I like being able to buy a 16TB hard drive and just dump whatever the fuck I find on the internet on it. I like commissioning gay furry porn. I can think of many other niche things. A specific brand of cheese I like, a specific brand of shoes that don't hurt my feet, specific kinds of fashion I like to wear, etc etc etc.
I like being able to do these things despite them not really appealing to a huge majority mass of people. And I understand why I can do that in capitalism: because it's a market everyone can sell stuff in and people (theoretically) chose what to buy, instead of it being chose for them. Thus, it's viable and sometimes even optimal to find a niche to appeal to rather than to make something general and for everyone. That's why it's profitable to make fumos.
Under a planned economy, how exactly can this work, though? An overseeing body will care about an overarching goal, and therefore things that are not useful to achieve that goal will be pushed back or completely discarded. Put yourself in the lens of some top-of-the-hierarchy bureaucrat: why bother making something like fumos? It's a luxury no one truly needs. It's a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. Why bother with 16tb hard drives for personal computers? Most people don't need more than 1tb or 2tb. Better to just give those to state companies that need them for servers and such. Giving them to data hoarders is again, a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. You can just save (what you deem) important things in a central archive.
I know I am talking purely about luxuries, but these things can be severe too. Why bother finding treatments for illneses that affect only very small percentages of the population? Why bother with clothes that can fit specific body shapes that are not found in the vast majority of people without hurting them? Why make game controllers shaped for the minute proportion of people that don't have five fingers?
Actually why make games in the first place, even? Wouldn't it be counter productive? That shit can lead to addiction and workers slacking off, meaning less productivity. From the point of view of The Administration it's only a waste of time. It furthers the goal more if there's no games. Why fund them?
I understand this kind of thing sort of happened in the USSR, there being very few brands of things to pick from, all the economy being spent on the army instead of things that made people happy, etc. I'm no historian so I'm not going to dwell on it specifically too much though.
I don't want to live in a world where everything is only made if it fits The One General Purpose. I guess the reply to this would be "fine, some things can be independent", but what is allowed to be independent and what isn't? How is that decided? How can we be sure it's enough?
For the record, I don't think niche things can only exist with a profit incentive. But I do think they can't exist without an incentive at all. If the body that controls all the funding and resources has no incentive, even if people out of the kindness and passion in their hearts want to do these things, if the government says "no, that's useless", there's nothing they can do.
I also don't think the solution to this can be "well just make sure The Administrators do allow these things", systematically they have an incentive to never do it, and a system that depends on a dice roll for nice people over and over and over is not a system I'd ever trust
Anyway thanks for reading. I mean no ill harm this is an actual question. o/
[pictured: a fumo]
In a socialist economy, production is geared towards fulfilling a social need instead of for profit or because some powerful asshole thought it was a good idea. Social need is not just survival need, so luxury goods are a form of social need. Virtually every single culture and society has some form of artistry and decoration. Very few people throughout history wants to live in some shitty drab setting. The concept of makeup and jewelry was independently discovered in virtually every single human society. This speaks to a human need that goes beyond mere survival. Stuff like wheelchairs also fulfill a social need even if the majority of people aren't in wheelchairs. Imagine someone trying to argue HIV medicine or glasses don't fulfill a social need because the majority of people don't have AIDS or don't need glasses. That would be a ridiculous thing to say.
In terms of the actual organization, most likely the central government would be in charge of raw material and the intermediates that require specialized equipment to manufacture while local cooperatives that are more sensitive to the particular social needs of the local community would do the actual manufacturing. Distribution can be shared between the two levels. Central government distribution is far more wide-reaching but is subject to whatever regulations the central government want to tack on. I could see a healthy situation where various artisan goods of particular artistic designs have purposefully limited distribution, which incentivizes people to actually visit the state/province/city in order to purchase the good.
For stuff like Funko pops, maybe local cooperatives are the ones that actually produce the Funko pops while the central government is the one that manufactures molds for the Funko pops, thus controlling the design of Funko pops (so no Hitler Funko pops) as well as control how much plastic pellets each cooperative could use per month on Funko pops. Funko pops wearing tradition clothing of the local cooperatives would have limited distribution which facilitates tourism because tourists outside the region or country are incentivized to visit in order to buy that particular Funko pop.
There's no difference in the number of powerful assholes in the market or the socialist economy, only a difference in their goals, I think. It's not about what should be right, because regardless it all ends up to the buraucrat with The Plan. The higher you are in the hierarchy the more brutal you are, by how much abstract everything else becomes
that's the thing I can totally imagine an all powerful economy overseer immagining that! When you're managing at such a high level, it's extremely easy to detach and dehumanize, and think in terms of raw numbers and extreme utilitarianism
That's actually a really good idea! I like that