The lack of waste, in reality, was a product of a lack of wealth.

One of the perks of my new job is that two of my meals are provided and paid for per day. This led to a discussion about waste.

Me being me, I felt compelled to mention Rexford Tugwell. Tugwell would become one of the chief economic advisors of the FDR administration. He was also enamoured with the Soviet experiment.

One thing that a lot of people forget about history is that a lot of people, including Tugwell, were obsessed with the waste produced by these united States. They viewed that waste as a lack of efficiency, and as something grossly immoral.

Tugwell visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He wasn't enchanted so-much with their abundance of wealth; though, as most westerners who were allowed inside the Soviet borders were, Tugwell was a reliable friend of the socialist cause and treated to all the alcohol and women he could handle and told that this was how most Soviets were living. Tugwell bought this and compounded it by taking it for granted that the Soviets seemed to not waste any food.

To Tugwell's credit, his visit to the Soviet Union predated the Ukrainian genocide by a few years; but, he still missed the same point that every Socialist has missed for the last hundred years -- the lack of waste, in reality, was a product of a lack of wealth. They don't waste anything because most people don't have anything.

To an extent, yeah, it's understandable why people would look at dozens of sandwiches thrown in the trash while people are hungry and see something wrong. I get it. But, in reality, that's a sign that we're generally doing well. It's a sign that we have so much that we might as well overproduce because the cost of coming up short in the endeavour to feed people who are hungry is greater than producing too much food. A lot of companies have figured, "Fuck it, if we're gonna overproduce anyway, why not feed our employees?"

Maybe there is an argument for reduction of waste as a principle; but, how dumb do you have to be to think that socialism is the answer in this day and age?

The market will punish people and businesses who overproduce to the point of losing money by...well...costing them money. There's an immediate incentive to be efficient. It doesn't make sense to make a million widgets when you know that only a thousand people are interested in buying them in a market economy. By contrast, the Soviet Union tried to centrally plan everything. A great example was their production of nails. The central planners thought it prudent to measure nail production by weight. If the nail producers didn't meet their quotas, they'd be punished. The nail producers realized that the fastest and least laborious way to meet the quota was to produce a lot of really big nails. The problem was that the people who were actually building things needed smaller nails. So, in a Socialist attempt to bolster efficiency and reduce waste, the Socialists created an abundance of waste. The big problem was that nobody in charge got punished -- that's how Socialism really works.

I'm not saying that any system is perfect. Even if we ever achieve my ideal of a stateless society, there are gonna be problems. Still, we have to understand the phenomenon of waste for what it really is -- a sign that we're generally, comparatively, doing okay at the moment.