Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2
Given that every single citizen of Centrum is a government employee, how can be it anything other than a command economy? They have abandoned the concept of "private enterprise" entirely.
It's true that Centrum is in no way motivated by Marxist ideas or anything analogous to them. They haven't even a theoretical idea that the state could or should "wither away" or that the workers are entitled to anything beyond incentives for those who perform well. Nonetheless they are a culture that has abandoned capitalism and has a centrally planned economy.
|
If the economic planning is honest, rational and efficient it might not technically be a command economy. As usually used "command economy" implies wages, prices and supplies of workers and goods set by the fiat of the central government operating on some non-economic rational about what these should be rather than what will actually work.
Having such a thing actually work without extreme ultra-tech levels of data gathering and analysis might say od things about the underpinnings of reality on such a line. I certainly think having Gernsback's (much less intrusively) planned economy work as well as it does implies weird social science.
If you need an actual label for Centrum I think it may be more like Corporatism than anything else in our timeline. The semi-mythical "Japan Inc" might be the clearest example of that. Fascism (as a meaningful classification rather than an insult) is a sub-category of Corporatism that adds extreme natonalism and militarism.
Centrum is also of course Totalitarian as it permits no other social institutions than itself. Centrum's monolithic combination of political, economic and social power is quite extreme in most ways. Persons in search of "Centrum light" can decide that its' vices are all mitigated by the virtues of honesty and rationality.
Having it all work as well as it is supposed to s still werd.