maxstep wrote:What prevents somebody from leaching off the state?
There are plenty of proposals to explain that, including maintaining the wage-employment model. Socialism does not require the abolition of wages and currencies, it merely requires those wages to be set democratically rather than privately. A company wholly owned by its workers, for example, would be a socialist institution. A private company controlled by the government wouldn't be.
On the other hand, there is another perspective suggesting that such measures wouldn't be required at all. What's the point in trying to force the unwilling to work? You waste a huge amount of effort doing it, and the practice requires you to adopt highly inefficient forms of institutional organization--like top-down hierarchies. If people genuinely don't want to do anything, I guess that ought to be their right. I don't think most people would genuinely opt to do nothing once the novelty of being able to do nothing worse off. That would be pretty boring. But even if I'm wrong on that, we've already entered a stage of economic development where we don't actually need most people to work anymore. Most of our workforce is either there unwillingly (the marginally employed) or employed merely forcing others to work (management). We employ way more people than our economy would really need to in order to maintain the same productive output.
It's kind of like farming--two thousand years ago, 90% of the population had to be engaged in agriculture just to feed the other 10%. Now it's something like 3% of the population feeding the other 97%. That sort of change in productivity happens elsewhere as well. We're not very far off from having basic knowledge work replaced by computers, for example. We're going to see massive amounts of unemployment when that transition occurs, and that's almost certainly going to start in earnest before the end of the decade. There's no real point in trying to force people to work when they can be fairly easily replaced by computers and advanced tools; at that point we're merely employing people out of habit, and that's going to put our economy at a huge disadvantage. When that happens, socialism will be the only rational option--and that may well include giving lots of people the freedom not to work.
How will we move forward without any personal incentives?
The purpose of socialism is to
increase the importance of personal incentives. By giving people meaning in what they do, and paying them fairly for labor provided. Capitalism
destroys personal incentives in favor of private interests.
How can a government effectively take control of the lives of each of its citizens?
The government taking control of everyone would not be in-line with socialism. The whole point of socialism is the empowerment of the worker to control his own life--not to have it controlled by central bureaucrats.
Is there any form of private property or ownership of anything?
As another poster noted, there is an important distinction between personal property (what you control because you use it) and private property (what you control because a government has stepped forward to protect your claim). Personal property ceases to be yours when it is no longer used (when you move out, when you leave it on the sidewalk, whatever), private property is yours until you sell it to someone else--the claim is durable.
Is there room for a private sector?
That question isn't really meaningful from a socialist perspective. If you mean "private sector" as "firms engaging in economic activity not directly controlled by a government," then absolutely, that's the only thing that would exist in a socialist society. If you mean "private sector" as "firms engaging in economic activity [n]wholly or mostly owned as private property by investors[/b]," then no. The critical distinction here is the ownership--in a socialist society, the workers using a particular bit of capital would be the immediate "owners" of it.
How do government jobs provide economic growth when employees are all paid in tax money?
How can a government that doesn't exist provide jobs? Socialism != "Government Jobs".
You can just stand by and let people who don't have a grudge against organising do the heavy lifting.
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