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Never mind- I found it easy enough- Participatory Economics. It's just communism. He's taken communism and called it something different. Are people really so incredibly STUPID to think that a system like that would work? Apparantly they are.

That should be an essay type question on the driver's liscence exam. The applicant would read about participatory economics and then be asked if he/she thought that sounded like a workable system. If they answer yes they fail and aren't allowed to vote until they're in their thirties.

It's actually kind of humorous to read through that bilge and try to imagine a factory run effectively where every morning the workers sit down and discuss for a few hours what needs to get done and who's going to be doing it.

It's not really what we think of as communism, but that's not necessarily good. When Lenin took the reins of power in 1916, I think he envisioned something similar to participatory economics - essentially, worker-managed factories. In fact, the more intelligent factory owners fled very quickly to the west, leaving nobody but workers!

So if it was possible to find a workers' paradise without management, well, it would have happened then, with the aid and encouragement of the state.

But it didn't; the economy collapsed, and the new Soviet government quickly went to repression so they could eke out something vaguely resembling bare survival.

That didn't work so great either, so they went to NEP. If NEP had been allowed to continue at its natural pace, Russia would have turned capitalist in a few years. Since that was not part of the plan, Stalin shot it down and the die was cast for the cruel and repressive system we think of as Communism.

Incidentally, I wanted to drop Mr Albert a line with questions, but noticed there was no email link anywhere on his web sites. I guess he doesn't like discussion of his ideas, which I suppose shouldn't be all that surprising.

Finally, Ayn Rand's account in Atlas Shrugged of a factory run in exactly this way was brutally realistic, and entirely plausible. Created out of brutal experience in the Soviet Union, of course. She doesn't have to imagine this stuff; she lived it.

D

"It's actually kind of humorous to read through that bilge and try to imagine a factory run effectively where every morning the workers sit down and discuss for a few hours what needs to get done and who's going to be doing it. "

Welcome to corporate America, LOL!