A Bank Robber Explains: A fictional short-short story

How I Ended Up in Compliance: A fictional short-short story

Slat in the Hat: A short-short story

Roommates: A fictional short-short story

The Decline, Fall, and Rebirth of the American Empire: An improbability

Mamdani's Largest Significance

From "A Warning to the West" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Egg Crate Community

What if You Could Be Happy All the Time? A thought experiment

Musings of a Former Capitalist: A thought experiment

A Word With Marty: "PROPERTY"

Berkeley's Christmas Colors

Gray: A short-short story

A Tweetstorm Between Putin and a Peacenik (revised)

A Case for Economic Agnosticism

What's the best economic system: Socialism? Communism? Capitalism? A hybrid?

So many factors affect an economy that history nor theory provide adequate basis for dispositive judgment.

Thus, despite today's era of polarized opinions, it strikes me that the only responsible positions on the subject are agnosticism or advocacy of some sort of capitalism/socialism hybrid.

What do you think?

Prediction: In 20 Years, the U.S. is Communist

It's impossible to accurately predict major long-term societal trends because so many things affecting trends are unanticipatable.

For example, who in 1975, would have anticipated Google or the iPhone?

But if I had to bet, I'd wager that, not withstanding the Republican win in 2010, the U.S. will, within 20 years, have moved dramatically toward communism. The arguments:

• The gap between rich and poor is very large and expanding. Many from the middle-class are becoming poor. That large and growing group's anger will continue to grow as the gap increases.
• Many among the rich are privately growing more uncomfortable with the wealth disparity. Even many corporate employees are caring less and less about meeting corporate goals, caring mainly about holding onto their job. That's not the basis for a sustainable means of production.
• Especially as corporations offer ever less job security, choosing to part-time, temp, and offshore ever more positions, fewer college graduates seek to climb the corporate ladder, preferring to work for a nonprofit or the government, or starting a small business.
• Society's main mind molders--the schools, colleges, and media--are ever bolder in their move from neutral reporter to leftist advocate. For example, courses, TV news, movies, and popular Internet political sites (e.g., Slate, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Daily Beast) portray corporations as largely evil.
  

More subtly, those mind-molders have changed the vocabulary. For example, "neighborhood," which implies individualism, has been largely replaced by "community." Words like "individualism" and "competition" have been given a bad name while those like "connectedness" and "collaboration" have been deified.

• Demographic trends augur a societal move leftward. For example, the U.S.'s decision to only minimally control immigration and its plans for "comprehensive immigration reform" will add many more leftist voters. Also, immigrants or not, the poor have the most babies, and the poor tend to vote leftist.

I'm not sure the move to communism is, net, a good thing, I only think it's likely to be true. What do you think?