a price tag on every needed item, production according to a profit motive, 

No, and no.

Prices in kapitalism are set by demand and supply and are the way to signal the relative scarcities of each. The Communist Bloc countries set prices according to planning targets regardless of supply and demand. They may still imply that things are not for free; but they are very different from prices set by market mechanisms.

Production was also not according to the profit motive. It was according to planning targets and quotas of products made. Regardless of theoretical profits or losses.

A true socialist system would be based on social ownership and would lack all of the above features, and thus would have no motivation to harm the environment. 

Why not? That's a non sequitur.

The social ownership, at least, dissolves any possible responsibility and accountability if environmental damage happens.

That is far from the case today: we can now produce an abundance for everyone, so that neither privilege nor pauperism for anyone is the case, but everyone lives free from want and the fear of insecurity. That is the next advanced stage, which the early generations of capitalism made possible. What you're arguing against is not what I'm arguing for. 

I know we can produce for everyone. The point is that poverty is always the default state. Technological progress accumulates in ways which help everyone. But everyone is born poor. Everyone is born with nothing. Everyone needs to go and get their own livelihood. *I know this is theory, and in practice works different*: babies have their sustenance provided for by their parents; and even later, few people today directly work in their own provision (rather than in another job which gives them money to then buy food and other basics). But all of these deviations from hunting and gathering for yourself only exist through social groups, from the family up, and could suddenly disappear in societal collapse: natural disaster, zombie apocalypse, or you becoming stranded on a desert island or isolated spot in the mountains, forests or deserts. That is why poverty is still natural, and even a Neolithic level of material advancement is not natural.

In that sense, of course I love that at least a few are able to have the greater material affluence of the mega rich. Because that means that someday everyone will have it.

Stop it.

Ah, not the gold confiscation! Must be the Japanese internment, then!

oh, wait, that's not how unregulated capitalism works!

And yet, oursourcing has been the greatest force behind reduction of poverty in the world. It has literally taken hundreds of millions of Chinese from starvation to middle class in two generations, and is now doing the same in Southeast Asia, and will subsequently do it in India and Africa. Sadly, those taken out of poverty by loopholes in the regulation of markets in the First World, don't vote in the First World, while union hitmen do.

And yet again, those cheaper products have managed to achieve essentially universal coverage by refrigerators, TV sets, washing and drying machines, et c., in the First World, something which hadn't been achieved even by the 1970s. Despite rises in inequality and in unemployment. The First World is now so rich that even when it's poor, it's richer than the 1950s middle class.

But that's still not what I was talking about. I was talking about countries becoming richer when they deregulate and poorer when they regulate; and about how this is evident when looking at comparisons within the same region and at migration patterns between close countries.






Cuteness is to die for
Cuteness cannot fail
Cuteness knows no limit
Cuteness will prevail