If you were told to create a political and economical socialist system that has all the advantages of the historical attempts at it, all the advantages of capitalist systems, but none of the drawbacks of either, how would the end result look like? And please, no answers á la "it can't be done".

…it would be as it is now- a multi-faceted global society with the ability to address concerns for reduction and/or expansion of the polity…renew, reuse, recycle…

What the end result would look like would be something like what we in the US have no (have had since WW2).

Purely socialistic, and purely capitalistic economies simply do not work. Both polar opposites have proven to be ineffective in even the last 50 years. The problem is when you reach pure socialism, no one will bother working extra hard for the same pay as a guy doing nothing. AND when you have pure capitalism, it treats the economy like a “game” if you will (kind of like monopoly), and EVENTUALLY someone will “win” that game and cause a complete collapse.

The TRICK, and it’s something the US has done pretty well since WW2, is to make an economy that is FLEXIBLE. If you’re able to change your economy to be more capitalistic, or more socialistic pending what it needs to survive, then you’ve got a working economy much like ours.

Don’t listen to all these idiots who say we’re becoming a hardcore socialist nation (our taxes are NOWHERE near what they were in the 50’s, 90% highest tax bracket vs 30% highest tax bracket). And likewise don’t listen to any idiot who tells you that if we all just had the same/similar pay we’d get along just fine.

AS far as specific elements of each (which is what I think you’re going for here). For capitalism, the free market would be the most important I think. From socialism I might take pay capping similar to the NFL’s (the highest paid person can only make such and such a multiple more than the lowest paid person), and MOST definitely free healthcare (lack of it is a HUGE reason that our car makers can’t compete on the world market… the foreign competitors do have it).

Sorry for the novel.

Here is what we need to ask ourselves. “Do we really need eighteen different brands of toilet paper?” Let us say that we had one brand of toilet paper, and one brand of detergent, and one brand of cling wrap. We would be able to remove advertising from the budgets of major corporations. In this way we could restructure our manufacturing base so that the products are created to a standard, the standard is set, the price for this standard is set, and the workers would reap the rewards of their output.
As we have it now, 55% off most mutli national corporation’s budget go into commercials, that we as consumers will do everything to avoid. Let us have a brand revolution, and start to pear down the choices that we have as consumers. Do we really needs a panda express and a yoshinoia beaf bowl accross the street from eachother. Wouldn’t it be more responsible to have a pandanoia beaf express on every corner, and in this way, the money generated from sales do not have to be pumped into madison avenue in order to keep the product relevant. We get it , it is ethnic euro-asain cuiseen.

Anyway it is a start.

If you were told to create a religious and spiritual system that has all the advantages of the historical attempts at it, all the advantages of zealous systems, but none of the drawbacks of either, how would the end result look like? And please, no answers á la “it can’t be done”.

I’d ask whoever set me this task to clearly enumerate what he thought the advantages and disadvantages of each were—because it’s clear that this is something on which reasonable people disagree.

If he told me to use my own judgment, I’d turn down the task, because I don’t think I have the wisdom to do a reasonable job of it.

There are five main inherent structural weaknesses in capitalism: 1) The boom and bust of the business cycle; 2) a tendency toward collusion and corruption (businesses tend to become a form of organized crime); 3) the tendency toward monopoly, where the rich become richer, the poor becomes poorer at the expense of the middle class; 4) the tendency of the capitalist class to consolidate its power by monopolizing the political process; and 5) overproduction.

What the final society looks like will depend on how and how far we will be able to go in solving these problems.

One of the things that socialism does very, very well is any kind of insurance schemes, like social security, unemployment insurance, and health care.

Another is capital investment, such as schools and universities, scientific and medical research, funding for the humanities and the arts, public broadcasting, historical preservation, roads and highways, and other forms information, communications, transportation technology and infrastructure.

Another is management of power utilities, extractive industries like mining and timber, and water, land and the ecology. Another is capital lending. This would have the advantage of making investment more transparent and fair, rather than allowing private banks to redline or pick winners and losers in a de facto industrial policy that is publicly unaccountable to the political process.

Whenever a country allows one of these natural monopolies to become privatized, it creates a situation in which a privileged class can privatize public wealth on a scale that will allow it to enrich itself in ways that allow it to inexorably dominate the entire society.

Currently we have CEO’s paying themselves hundred million dollar salaries—at the direct of expense of stockholders—simply because they have more power than the true owners. They simply buy the legislature and start legislating themselves permanent advantages. These encourage enterprises to become “too big to fail” and so they get in line at the public trough ahead of everyone else. The age-old solution to this problem has been revolution and liquidation of the capitalist class.

Unfortunately, they know this already, which is why we have greatly expanded the prison system ten fold since the mid 1970s; militarized the police; debauched the discretion of judges with mandatory minimums; and expand the reach of the criminal justice system into ordinary people’s private lives by way of the war on drugs. On the other hand, capitalism as we know it is much closer to collapsing than anyone realizes. It could go in a matter of a year, leaving behind a society in only slightly better shape than post-Communism Russia.

Once the government is in control of even a few of the nation’s natural monopolies outlined above, it can easily expand and contract fiscal expenditures and the money supply in ways that quell the ups and downs of the business cycle. This will bring stability and the expansion of credit and commerce that predictability normally follow.

The more difficult problem to check the tendency toward collusion and corruption. Take health care, for example. In America we spend about $7,000 per capita—more than any country on earth—and yet our health outcomes are somewhere between Trinidad and Ireland because 49 million people are uninsured. The system is shot through with legal forms of corruption, like denying people insurance for pre-existing conditions, or arbitrary and automatic denials on everything but the cheapest and most routine services.

The system is also rife with illegal scams: Medicare drug price gaming, double billing, paying or fooling poor people into getting unnecessary operations or ambulance services. The higher up the food chain the more organized and lucrative these scams are—and the more politically connected and invested the players. Here, the obvious answer is to nationalize the whole thing into one single-payer, not for profit scheme.

Unfortunately, you can’t do this sort of thing in the industrial sector, since you need mass-produced products and mass markets to stimulate globally competitive products. Products like cars and computers come along only once every generation or so; after which, the markets saturate, prices drop and the economy stagnates.

The real reason you need 17 brands of toilet paper is because if you had just one brand, you could easily make all the toilet paper that anyone could want; and your market would saturate. Brand differentiation allows you convince people to pay a premium to satisfy aesthetic or psychic needs that they didn’t know they had until the market researchers strip-mined their psyches with focus groups and found their hidden anxieties, group loyalties and social pretensions. So, instead of buying plain glossy utilitarian toilet paper, you can buy the perfumed “prestige” brand toilet paper, or the softer than soft, or the whiter than white paper, or whatever completes your totally accessorized lifestyle. (With modular construction and recycling, this need not as big an ecological bust as it sounds; the bigger danger would be a shallow materialism.)

By far the most difficult thing to overcome is the visceral hatreds that American’s seem have for one another—racism, sexism, nativism, the liberal-conservative, secular-religious culture wars, and all the other social fault lines that cleave society into the virtuous and worthy “us” (the “real” Americans) from the despicable and unworthy “them.”

Nobody is going to willingly pay into a system that hated “others” draw benefits from (unless it is to pay for prisons and police to punish and oppress them. One outcome, already partially implemented is a kind of “carceral state” in which the economy revolves around one part of the population imprisons the rest—a kind of apartheid prison state in which a privileged “us” enjoys the full rights of citizenship on the backs of an economically enslaved second-class peasantry.

While Obama’s election offers some hope for a broad social “we’re all in this together” epiphany, our sad history shows that no one ever went broke overestimating the average American’s capacity for small-mindedness, racism, or willingness to screw the other guy. Already we are seeing from Obama’s cabinet picks that a lot of the New Order is the same as the Old Order. But all of that could change if the bottom falls out and we truly are all in the soup together. Or if the guy on 60 Minutes last night can get cold fusion working and we move straight into a post-scarcity society.

Should we ever choose to live up to our constitutional ideals and pursue a more equitable and rights-based society, these policies will guide institutional relationships toward the kind of outline presented above. As people become less and less driven by necessity, our economy and our political institutions will be transformed in ways that promote human dignity and political participation in ways we can only imagine today. It would, I think, look very much like the Federation in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

@MontyZuma that was staggeringly brilliant

I was going to give a funny answer, but then I read @MontyZuma‘s response, and I forgot what I was going to say. Something about alternate universes or some such.

Is this a homework question?

@Judi no it is not

I can see this occurring only in a world in which there is such an abundance of resources that there is no need to compete for them. Not impossible, with a sufficiently advanced technology. You would need cheap, virtually limitless energy, probably from controlled fusion, and the means to reclaim and recycle everything else. Nanotechnology has some promise in that regard, together with genetically engineered organisms. I recently read about a kind of bacterium that could break down old tires into ethanol, for example.

Utopian Sci-Fi now, but not unattainable.

It would take an incredible abundance of resources, because human demands expand to consume the resources available. We don’t measure wealth independently; we measure wealth by comparing ourselves to other people. And we don’t consider ourselves wealthy unless we have more than the right number of other people.