Of course, the most "utopian" of economic ideas presented is free market capitalism, which is characterized by an air of extreme unreality, due to its lack of practical applications outside of the textbook. Socialism is merely practical in that it produces efficiency gains that actually existing capitalism is unable to generate, due to its minimization of information asymmetries and their related problems, for instance.
Free market approaches are less Utopian than socialist ones because they directly infer human nature.
Socialism ignores the consequences of this.
No matter which system you operate under information asymmetries always exist.
Capitalism recognizes this.
You're clearly unfamiliar with the tumultuous political climate of Latin America, I'd say. You can point to no historical record of public apathy whilst democratic management of political and economic structure is being stripped from them, since the perpetuation of power is a natural human inclination, and those who have power over the means of production will naturally wish to perpetuate it, be they authoritarian dictators or libertarian collectives. Or can you point to a situation in which there was decentralized public control of political and economic structure, and it was willingly surrendered to an authoritarian state?
I understand clearly how the culture of Latin America operates.
What you do not understand is that under state sponsored and mandated education systems, the state domesticates the population at large with extreme non violence programs.
The Latin Americans as a whole are already on this path.
There are examples in antiquity and even modern times of revolt but that was before the introduction of state sponsored and mandated education systems which promote extreme non violence to authoritarianism.
There's no basis for this claim. Capitalism has the tendency to promote inefficient outcomes due to its ignorance of imperfect information and social opportunity costs in an economic system. Socialism's egalitarian elements prevent such ignorance and thereby generate efficiency gains, as is the case with autogestion (workers' self-management), for instance.
Humans by nature do inefficient things all the time, it will be no different under a socialist regime.
That is not an accurate description of the nature of worker-owned enterprises, as indicated by empirical evidence rather than ideological dogma. I'd recommend that you have a look at the work of researchers Logue and Yates in Cooperatives, Worker-Owned Enterprises, Productivity and the International Labor Organization. As noted by the abstract:
That is all well and good but they are
short term examples.
You don't measure the success of a program over the short term because nearly all the results will be positive.
With the human mind diminished returns follow over the long term.
Hence, you have clearly committed insufficient analysis to the role of worker ownership and management in efficiency increases.
And you have failed to apply the role of global goods and services in this regard.
No industry is permanent to a nation it can not permanent anchor a job to a specific area ever.
Given the non-existence of the "free market" that you fallaciously depict, private entities of all varieties typically lack the efficiency-increasing qualities of socialism and worker management.
A single owner has more at stake to regulating and promoting efficiency than does a collective.
As a collective grows the less efficient it gets, that is the beauty of capitalism, it recognizes this and openly understands that in the end corporations and all private entities will fail giving rise to new and smaller private businesses.
Inefficiencies can be minimized, as is the case with a socialist economy. Regardless, you haven't addressed the point of my assessment, which is that the state functions as a necessary stabilizing agent in a capitalist economy, as with government protection of infant industries serving as a means for greater long-term capitalist expansion.
The state is not supposed to serve as a stabilizing agent. It exists to promote Justice among individuals.
Stability can not be guaranteed by any state.
That is a flagrantly inaccurate analysis that is again dependent on a utopian conception of political economy. Considering my frequent assessment that "capitalism is an economic system in which the private ownership of the means of production and consequent hierarchical subordination of labor under capital enables the extraction of surplus value from the working class in the production process through the use of wage labor and subsequent utilization in the circulation process in order to perpetuate a vicious cycle of capital accumulation," the subordination of workers under an employer is itself anti-democratic and coercive.
Hierarchies are destined to exist for quite some time as humans develop differently from each other assuming different qualities that others don't develop.
What happens when one of the collective members starts to accumulate more capital than the others?
What if they can buy out another member?
As I've noted, since the means of production are privately owned, large components of the public have no alternative but to subordinate themselves under an employer. The best way to illustrate this form of authoritarianism is to use the "robbery analogy." If a person were to be violently tackled by an assailant and have his/her valuables torn out of his/her pockets, we would accurately call this a robbery. Now, if the assailant were to instead point a gun at the victim and demand that the valuables be surrendered, we would still call this a robbery, as coercion was used to gain the valuables, if not outright physical violence. The fact that the victim technically "consented" to surrender his/her valuables is not pertinent, since it was consent yielded while under duress.
That is completely false.
They can form a new entity to compete with the old one but they have to offer greater efficiency and innovation.
No one is being forced to work for a lesser organization, it is not coercion.
The former example represents the direct tyranny of statism, often blunt, direct, and brutal, whereas the latter represents the more subtle tyranny of capitalism, specifically wage labor, in which a person technically "consents" to work for an employer, but does this only because he/she has no other alternative for sustenance.
And your example represents the tyranny of democracy, the tyranny of mob rule.
One in your example is forced to be a member of a collective when they may have no desire to do so, they are forced to do so because of your restrictive economic policies.
Your own ideas and conceptions are utopian. Since you fail to realize this through an explanation of structural framework, can you point to any single case in Venezuela, in which socialism has effectively existed for about six years, in which a powerful group of individuals from the financial class or any other similarly powerful class hijacked a cooperative or federations of cooperatives?
I have read your explanation and it is completely short sighted.
You measure gains in the span of years, I measure it in the span of decades.
Ultimately, there aren't economically unsound elements of Bolivarian socialism to the same extent that they exist in capitalism, which is why Bolivarian socialism has had the effect of promoting economic growth and development to a far greater degree than capitalism ever did, ever can, or ever will.
There are no perfect economic situations anywhere.
Capitalism has a greater chance of furthering human evolution than does collectivist socialism.
You haven't "shot through" anything except your initial semblance of credibility. You're simply hostile to empirical evidence. That's fine if it's acceptable to you, but it doesn't equip you for serious economic analysis.
I'm not hostile to empirical evidence, I'm hostile to people who cite short term gains to illustrate success.
I can pull up tons of examples that over the short term something is a success or failure, just as you have.
Whether you believe it or not we have very similar ideologies.
It is how we get there that is different.
I personally think the most free and efficient model of human success was in the Indian tribal communities.