This is a thread for the people who don’t understand why people have the economic beliefs that others have.

First Thing’s First

It has nothing to do with which one is more good, ethically. It has nothing to do with which one makes people happiest. The people who have different beliefs than you aren’t better or worse. They just have different priorities of what should an economic system maximize for. Also the terms used below are based on US politics, so keep that in mind.

Analogy Time!

Imagine your school (assuming you’re a kid because you can’t grasp why other people think differently from you) is doing a bake sale, and whoever sells the most cookies wins. Maybe the school awards prizes, maybe it doesn’t, but ultimately the reason the school is doing it is as a fundraiser. For the analogy, think of the school as the system in which we live, the students as citizens, and teachers as the government. Which way should the school do it?

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No Intervention

In this scenario, everyone bakes cookies at home and brings them. This one could maximize outcomes for the school since the rich kids whose parents own bakeries or giant kitchens can make to their absolute hearts content. There is no cleaning requirements from teachers because they wouldn’t really have the authority here to make sure the house gets cleaned, or even know how messy it gets. The students will want their school, but more importantly want themselves to do well, so they make a ton of cookies and a ton of money.

This is the hefty majority libertarians/austrians are, as well as the view of some modern conservatives.

Safety interventions

This is basically the one above, but the teachers will make sure the cookies students are baking are safe for people to eat. They do this because they are worried that some of the more selfish students will start replacing ingredients with things that people may not be able to taste a difference in, but is cheaper and maybe dangerous to eat. This will maximize cookies and cashflow while still protecting people.

This would be where the rest of libertarians are and where many conservatives fall, and most Classical Liberals fall.

Creating a Baseline

In this scenrio, the school has said you can use the school’s kitchen if you need to. This one may not maximize output financially for the school (it could), but in theory should maximize cookie output since those who live in a home without a working kitchen can now produce cookies, but the school has to cover more costs than before. Maybe in this one so few people are in the kitchen, the teachers can clean up when the students go home for the day

This is where the rest of Classical Liberals and the rest of modern conservatives, and some modern liberals might fall. Government intervention to create some baseline that everyone should be allowed to start at. Minimize external disadvantages, but don’t touch external advantages.

Creating a Baseline (alt.)

In this scenario, the school has said you can use the school’s kitchen if you want to or need to. This one may not be maximizing cookie output or financial outputs in quite the same way as the ones before, but the students may enjoy it more because they’re allowed to spend time with friends after school, or a million other reasons, they would prefer to use the school’s kitchen. They also still should be producing a lot of cookies. Since there are more students now using the school kitchen, it is more energy and cost efficient since you can put more sets of cookies in the oven at a time, but it’s also leading to bigger messes. The teachers just say you have to clean up your own work station when you’re done. If you don’t you get negative consequences. They’ve also started to implement time slots for using the ovens so people can’t just steal all of the oven space

This is the view of the majority of modern liberals and some progressives. Not only does it allow people to reach a specific baseline, more people using government facilities makes them more efficient for each additional person who uses it. The tradeoff is the requirement to meet the standards that the school requires in regards to cleanliness and oven times.

Level Playing Field

In this, the school instead says you have to use the school’s kitchen so that everyone has the same shot. This isn’t a competition on who has the best at home kitchen, it’s a competition of who is the best cookie baker and salesman. Also the teachers are getting annoyed with how messy it is, so they step in and say people have to clean up the kitchen. They say that for every batch of cookies you make, you have to clean a certain amount of the kitchen, regardless of who made the mess. And if they see you making an additional mess compared to what they think is appropriate, you also have to clean extra. This should maximize productions while better being able to control for externalities since you can account for things you may not have been able to monitor students at home. Teachers can also see ingredients more clearly to have safer cookies.

This is more in line with the rest of modern liberals and the majority of progressives, where it isn’t just about lifting people up so everyone starts at some baseline, it is about having a level playing field where everyone starts from the same point. It also attempts to account for externalities like climate change messy kitchens by not tying it solely to the mess people produce since they know the majority of students will try and get away with cleaning less than they’re supposed to and the kitchen will eventually get extremely messy.

More Intervention

In this, instead of people making their own dough, everyone has to contribute to making a single big batch of dough. The thought process being that this is a sales competition, not a competition of who has the strongest arms to be able to stir the most dough. This way there’s a higher likelihood that more cookies are produced overall, but because some students might not be able to spend as much time making cookies because they’re mixing the dough, the teachers have decided to award points based on time spent making dough and cleaning. This way people will be incentivized to contribute to things that may not in this plan be the normal route to a prize. Hopefully the ones who are best at mixing and cleaning are the ones who are best at those tasks. This will allow the students who may not be good at some tasks be able to help the system while not eliminating themselves from the competition.

This is the rest of progressives and basically all socialists view. A top down way of being efficient at making cookies, even if you’re having to give out more incentives to motivate people to participate. This may be returning less money to the school since they’re giving more to the mixers and cleaners, but they think more cookies being made is more important.

Scratch the Competition

In this, the teachers have decided that pitting students against each other is not good for morale. We want people to make cookies but not at the expense of others. So the teachers sit down with the students and say that the school needs money, and so they’re hoping to do a bake sale, and want the students to help. The students will work together in the kitchen and the teachers hope that a desire to bake, and/or a desire to make their school better will en masse be strong enough to cover the needs of the school. The creative students will write recipes, the strong students will mix dough, the ones with quick hands will grab them out of the oven or clean, and the cunning ones will sell them. This should eliminate inefficiciency where necessary, and should also allow students to do the things they’re best at, meaning enough cookies will get made, but students don’t have to feel near as overworked. In the end, all of what’s left of what would have been spent on prizes is split as a pizza party.

This is what is left of socialists view and communists view. Complete top down allocation of tasks, removal of external incentives, and people contributing because they know what is best for society. They believe that enough people will contribute to maintain this system to overcome those who are not contributing, in such a way that the students here will still be working less overall than in the other systems, reaching the desired outcome of the school hitting fundraiser goals.

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Takeaways

To be clear, above are a lot of the different economic modes people propose to deal with cookie production and its externalities, but I did not talk about the downsides of any of them. They all have downsides. Some of them, the downside could be that the upside is just simply wrong. You may think that the communist cookie school will have too many slackers. You may think that the no intervention one will lead to people’s houses being so messy and students falling behind too much that they can’t contribute to future sales because they drop out of school. There are lots of reasons that these different systems might not work as ideally portrayed, but please for fucks sake stop saying that you don’t understand why people believe what they do. It’s easy to see why people believe what they do, they have different priorities from you, and think some things are better or more important than others.