We have just produced the first mobile phone! Dissident, here is your one seven-billionth of a mobile phone!

Exactly how useful is the first seven-billionth of a mobile phone?

Besides which, you have severely underestimated the cost of distribution. Distribution is an industry in itself, and requires huge inputs.

Distribution outlets would be run and socially operated by workers in a classless, moneyless economy as well as manufacturing industries.

It isn't free.

I never suggested it was. In a socially owned system, the "cost" would be measured in labor and resources required, not fiscal pricing. There would be ample labor and automation available to meet the distribution requirements because there would be no price tag as an artificial impediment or limit.

This is why a gallon of water is more valuable in the middle of the Sahara than it is in the middle of Lake Superior.

True, but my above point makes it clear that when you do have a system requiring price tags, modern technology makes distribution considerably faster and more efficient.

Almost no one can afford a big factory on their own - this is why corporations and stocks were created.

A thousand workers pooling their resources cannot afford to create or purchase the infrastructure needed to start a multi-million dollar industry. A few capitalists working together, on the other hand, can. This is why workers invariably end up their employees rather than co-owners.

Many of the working class people I know own stock, whether directly or indirectly through mutual funds.

Same with me, and I used to be one of them. Yet none of them owns a sufficient amount that what they receive in return on an annual basis is so significant that they do not need to work, and instead hire others to do the job for them. Capital gains is a rich person's game, not one for those who only receive a few grand per year at most, but usually just $40.00 per month, if that. I'm speaking from experience here, and the business I once worked at where I had stock options was very profitable and not small by any means. The hard labor performed by me and my fellow employees made it profitable, and on one particular day we brought in $120,000 (yes, a single day!), and guess what? The upper management complained because the supervisor took $20 out of the cash register and used it to buy a pizza for all of the workers who had to miss lunch time that day. And btw, this was a business where we had to work every single holiday except for Christmas, with no holiday bonus checks (yup, it was non-unionized, and my attempts to create one we're thwarted).

Social democracy may have been formed to save capitalism, but not by making it less exploitative or reining in its excesses - because we know that all of us would be much wealthier and much better off if capitalism had been less impeded in its growth.

Seriously? Do you still believe what the conservatives used to say about trickle-down economics too? That the more money in the hands of the capitalists is automatically used to create more jobs? This is treating the free market as a form of secular faith.

The American system has been highly deregulated since the Reagan years, and the result is an ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor. Capitalism's less impeded expansion has resulted in increasing exploitation and imperialism across the world, and thus more wars, not to mention the massive toll taken on the environment with fracking and the relentless pursuit of polluting, non-renewable fossil fuels. Also not to mention the banking crisis that the government bailed them out of! Capitalism has never been designed to bring wealth to the majority, but instead thrives on a ruthless competition that pits companies and individual workers against each other. Putting a price tag on the needed services that the government currently still covers will simply force more workers to go without, or put them into further debt, with debt being another cornerstone of the capitalist system. In such an environment, crime borne of extreme desperation becomes more lucrative than any form of honest work available to the masses at any given time. The only reason so many of my neighbors can even afford some of the food their families require is because of social programs like food stamps, and their situation certainly does not improve as their food stamp allotment is continually reduced every year while the costing of living continuously goes up. You're talking totally faith-based ideology here, which flies completely in the face of all available evidence.

Insomuch as social democracy has saved capitalism, it has been much the same way that payments to the Barbary pirates saved fleets - tribute to prevent the robbers from destroying everything. In the case of social democracy, the pirates may be less aware of what they are doing than the Barbary pirates were (though in communities where piracy is the norm, it is normal for the people there to think nothing ill of their local industry) - but the mechanisms are much the same: they want a share, or they will destroy the wealth created by others.

Destroy the wealth created by others? You still cling to that myth that the wealthy few create the wealth, and that the workers deserve no more than a tiny fraction that the "boss" class is willing to throw them when it's labor that, well, labors to create all of that in the first place. It seems this is the main ideological divide between us, Baldur. You're not going to convince me against evidence that greed and parasitism somehow works for the majority, because I live in this world too, and I have certainly not lived a sheltered existence. I have worked for big business, created my own small businesses, and saw exactly how the system works without relying on government-produced textbooks or Ayn Rand novels to acquire my understanding of the system.

Here is why you'll never convince me that a system of production for profit and enrichment of the few will somehow "trickle down" to benefit everyone once the final restraints on it are severed:

I've seen crowds of homeless people, as well as the mental state they are in. You won't convince me that a system as advanced as ours that allows this is ethical or somehow working for everyone. Nor will you convince me that this situation would change once capitalists have their way 100%.

I've seen hard-working people try to make do with up to three jobs at once, and still have to choose between their cell phone bill, their rent, and a sufficient amount of food to feed their families every week, because communications, shelter, and food all have hefty price tags that far outweigh the tiny allotment the boss class allows them for their hard work. And this is often with the meager social programs that you say are actually hurting these people! That makes it clear the actual concern is not for these hard-working people, nor for those whose lives are wasted because they are thrown to the streets, but rather out of concern that the few who live opulent lives of massive privilege are somehow being handed an injustice by having some of this wealth redistributed to those who actually do all the work. I believe you align your loyalty with the wrong people in this world, Baldur, and that's not going to change.

You're free to believe as you want, and to fight for whatever system you want, of course, but good luck convincing me that the environment I see every time I walk out my front door, and which I'm subjected to myself, is in the best interests of everyone. Especially not when in the capitalist mindset, the interests of "everyone" are defined as whatever benefits the few at the top of the food chain. Nor will you convince me to cease doing everything in my power to help replace a system that hurts everyone I care about, and every decent person I know, with one that will provide a good and productive life for everyone. I'll gladly pit the ethics of that against the ethics of what you're promoting any day of the week, and every day of the week for as long as we both live.

We'll just have to agree to let the best ideology win in the end. But any hope you have of convincing me to support what I see in front of me every single day of my life, or to believe that unleashing such a system with no restraints whatsoever is somehow in the best interests of the world, is about as futile as the expectation that trickle-down economics will suddenly start working against all the evidence that it doesn't.