I don’t have time to write my own thoughts on this subject right now, but I know I’ll speak on it eventually. In the meantime, I’ll post it now… mostly for my own reference, possibly to spark insight and discussion.

Communism, and to a lesser extent socialism, can be seen as starting with the assumption the economy is a zero-sum game, and they end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on that front as in their zeal to make sure capital/wealth is evenly distributed, they destroy the mechanisms of capital/wealth creation. Actually, they end up with a negative-sum game. I’m not defending any particular instantiation of capitalism at this time, I’m just saying you damn well need to understand why it does what it does if you want to understand how economies work.

From Jerf’s post to Study Claims Offshoring Doesn’t Cost US Jobs on Slashdot.

My brother Scott writes about the telephone monopoly in our home province of Saskatchewan:

The crown corporation formulated to give its customers the best service possible clearly wasn’t and now has been thrown into the world of competition.

Monopolies are based on the idea that a few people can manage a market better than multiple competing companies (at least when they’re not outright graft). The problem is that history and theory have shown that this is not the case almost all of the time. Markets are far too complex to be managed (that is, understood) by a few brains. The Wisdom of Crowds talks about this extensively. Distributed Knowledge + Self Interest usually gives better results.

Saskatchewan has been a socialist type of place for a very long time; any industry of significance (agriculture, mining, energy, telecom, insurance, medical, education) is run by a government-controlled entity (crown corporation). Alberta, the neighboring province and my current home, has a more liberal inclination, especially in the past decade or two. Alberta has had much higher prosperity than its prairie sibling for a very long time. I don’t think that you can attribute that exclusively to oil (of which Saskatchewan also has plenty); a lot of it is owed to the entrepreneurial environment that Alberta has, and which (by and large) Saskatchewan doesn’t.