Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Piketty

[Brian Bartholomew (bartholomew.brian]

There's a reasonable chance you can assemble 100 people with a
usefully large amount of shared aims.  But you cannot get 350 million
people to have a usefully large amount of shared aims.  This is why
cohos work and governments don't:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

> 4. Liberals have failed because they have not paid (enough)
> attention to fiscal policy. They have focused on social values
> instead of the economy that supports or defeats those social
> values. Behind all injustice is a fiscal structure that feeds it.

The fiscal structure reveals humans don't all produce the same amount
of wealth.  Confounding the fiscal redistribution policy behind the
fiscal structure, is the problem that humans don't all value things
the same.  Redistribution by central planning doesn't work at the
group size you want it to work at.  For groups larger than an extended
family, the only known solution is a marketplace price system to
collect all the various opinions about who values what how much.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate
        
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Calculation_in_the_Socialist_Commonwealth
        
https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth/html

Brian