Dave Howery said:
I was more playing devil's advocate than anything. I believe in socialism, but central planning of the economy is one of the sections I'm deeply suspicious about, mainly because I think a government bureaucrat knows as little about actually making a product as an investor does. In my ideal economic system, workers would run each company collectively, voting on decisions among themselves and splitting the profit, and taking part in greater industry councils that would set standards and deal with other industries collectively. I find both central planning and capitalism to both be flawed logically, though I also find moral offense to capitalism (mainly in the authoritarian structure of the employer-employee relationship being incompatable with democracy, but I don't want to cause a flame war, so I'm not going to get into it).
Anyway, one could argue in a monopoly system under socialism, accountability could be delt with through representation rather than consumer choice. E.G., you vote for representitives of an industry's governing board who then alter business policy to more suit your needs. This isn't as far out as it seems. In capitalist countries like Germany, corporate boards are required to have at least some community representation on them.
As to R&D, I'll concede you're right, but only to a point. Capitalism allows scientific advances, yes, but it is biased towards those that make money. An easy way to see this is medicine. There is an inherent economic bias against cures and in favor of treatments, as developing a medication that costs hundreds of dollars a year to take is more lucrative than developing a vaccine that would cure the problem forever. Also, with the way patent laws are structured, it is literally not worth a company's time to look at a natural treatment unless they can synthesize it or genetically engineer it. There are a lot of useful advances the government-funded space program developed which would not have happened in a totally free market (as all space ventures lose money, but every dollar invested in space R&D is returned 10-fold in groundside applications).
As I said, I find incentive mostly a spurious argument. People could work in a society for recognition of personal accomplishment, a shorter workweek, any number of things besides more money. People work harder, it's true, when they see 'ownership' in an enterprise, which is why people in worker owned cooperatives generally are more committed than wage workers. But that ownership is a psychological state (something that companies themselves have tried hard to indoctrinate into people), and there is no reason to think that a planned economy could not also utilize it.
