Originally Posted by makeinu
Fair enough, but it's not clear that such a system would have a lower overhead than the capitalist system.
Yeah I know, but that doesn't address the question of overhead. You talk about how efficient it would be to shed the overhead of the capitalist system, but what would be the overhead of maintaining an ideal true democracy?
Well, with half or more of all current employees working
just to maintain the system, it shouldn't be hard to fathom. For example, since all wars are fought solely to protect and expand capital interests (sources of energy, labor, materials, markets, etc.), war would be eliminated. During the 1990s the United States alone spent $3.3 trillion on “defense” and they've probably spent that mush just the Iraq oil war. The current world aggregate of defense spending must be truly staggering. If “defense” were unnecessary, what would you vote to devote several trillion dollars worth of resources to? The truly vast resources now devoted to maintaining standing armies and munitions, and fighting wars would be available for useful and productive efforts like natural disaster preparedness and relief, food production and distribution, housing construction, infrastructure construction and maintenance, scientific research, developing new technologies, space exploration, and/or to whatever else we collectively decided to devote those resources.