This type of organization doesn't work for complex, large societies (i.e. with millions of people). That's because complex societies need decentralized decision making to function, since they are much more complex than anything that a single individual or a committee of individuals can possibly design. That's because the individual mind is limited. The market works by coordinating the knowledge of millions of individual minds. Socialism cannot do that by definition, and it is needed for any complex social order to arise.
If that was true, oligopolies wouldn't ever form. Yet they do. Heck, the government manages to make the military, police and other services work- the question is how well compared to the alternatives, not if it is possible. The USSR showed you could run the farms top down... but you really shouldn't try to do so because productivity drops and people starve.
Inequality of incomes is not a property of "capitalism" in itself.
You need to concentrate capital to have the system work. Capital procedes to accumulate more income, snowballing and increasing inequality.
Nor equality is a defining property of socialism (with some layman call by communism), you can have unequal incomes defined by a central planning board.
Yes, but so far nations that have embraced command economies also generally have been communist, which does favor equality. You can get unequal distribution in command economies with different ideologies (like the Incans).
You can theoretically have equality of incomes in capitalism, just assume that all individuals are equal (with the same creative and intellectual capacities and same means of developing them, the same emotional characteristics and the same preferences) and equal income levels will arise. Obviously that's never going to happen.
No, even with that perfect setup, information will be imperfect and distribution of workers for the required jobs will vary. Unless education costs and time required is zero, some positions will be saturated, other will have too few and wages will be changed to cover this.
Additionally, that doesn't cover the fact that capitalists will earn more than wage laborers. If everyone owns equal capital, it could work, but than you have worker syndicalism, not capitalism.
Obviously, in a society where income has no relation to the amount of work that an individual makes, individuals wouldn't work much, if at all.
The problem is not just fixed salaries, but guarenteed employment. If you have to worry about being tossed into the street for not working hard enough it inspires you to work harder, especially if there are people in the street who will replace you if your productivity falls enough. Communist states can't do that though- it is an inefficiency and cruelity they are dead set against.
Brazil is not a highly "capitalistic" economy. And never was. But had a better system than the USSR, with is not hard. Much of the world did better. Today only Africa and a few set of nations posses worse institutions than the USSR.
No, it was capitalist. It wasn't
free market.
In the last 200 years the country that followed closer the concept of a pure market economy was the US. The richest country in human history.
You mean the nation that gave out free land to railroads, erect import barriers to help local industries, insured a favorable business climate by crushing unions and let some of the most awesome monopolies in human history emerge?
They executed less the 1 thousand people, mostly commies and other political activists. The minimum for a dictatorship to function.
Er, no. You can just dump dissidents in a prison and remove access to the outside world- it isn't necesary to kill people unless you have so many that you run out of prison space (in which case you should probably just build gulags and used increased mortality to thin their numbers).
Course, Brazil was one of the nicer National Security States. Argentina was the most brutal and Peru was "the good guy"- the Maoists killed more than the government there.
Aid is more of a burden than a gift.
Only if incompetant. Free money is always useful.
These institutions are protection of property rights, contracts, reasonable taxes, judicial stability, monetary and macroeconomic stability and stability of the political institutions.
Stable economic climate and political is true. The first means that money has enough certain value to prevent the economy from breaking and reforming as barter (which isn't conductive to large scale planning or growth in general). The second means you don't have to worry about the PLF and POF killing you for your stuff.
The others though... corruption was high in the 19th century US and modern China. I'm not sure how essential each were or if the nations that grew first actually had them.
became developed because the already developed countries "helped" them.
Well, protecting them from outside invasion
does count as help.
But yeah, internal changes were responsible for their success although aid could have been responsible for forming them.
That is a way of rationalizing his idea that somehow the USSR had a good socio economic system, they didn't.
I don't think he believes that, just that it is better than modern Russia. Which is a depressingly low bar it has to vault.