@Tlos Market Socialism still has its issues even if we take a government out of it, such as we still have an issue of incentivizations in that it disincentivizes success or hard work. Take the Pareto principle, which states 80% of the results will come from 20% of workers. Think about how often you'll hear complaints from college students or high schoolers about how shitty their coworkers are who never seem to do anything. Those will typically be your 80% that does the 20% of the results. Socialism rewards them equally to those who do not put in any work at all, and so it essentially says to the workers that the fruits of their labor that they sell will not be returned by hardwork to keep the business afloat, but rather, that they might as well put in the minimal effort to reap the maximum reward. (All economics and human biology works on this paradigm, in that humans want to earn the most whilst putting in the least amount of energy, and where that equilibrium is going to be is different depending on things like personality types.) This is one of many of the psychological pitfalls socialism falls into because it fails to account for how humans are driven by incentivizes, which is a strength of capitalism in that it uses what may seem to be the more harmful aspects of human psychology (the drive to earn more resources such as through greed) to benefit society as a whole through things like entrepreneurship, human capital, resources, labor, etc.
Also note that the issue with running a company is you need different people with different qualifications with the knowledge and human capital to make informed decisions, and are placed in a hierarchy accordingly. If you collectively own the means of production, these people will not be able to properly inform or have a say because of their work, which will cause the workers to make worse decisions. You want businesses to be really productive, which is why you have such a rigid hierarchy and centralization of power, but you don't want the same from the government due to its tendency to grow into an unshackled leviathan, so you pin branches against one another and decentralize. Businesses should be in competition with one another already if it's not a monopoly, (in which case, the government should intervene as it only harms the market, consumer and worker) so you usually don't have to worry too much if you know how to properly regulate the market. Shackled Leviathan.
@Bestboy
Understandable, but I don't think anecdotal evidence is the primary crux of most arguments.
One of the more compelling counters I've seen is that Biden's Election votes is that it violates Benford's law in the contested counties, which is often used as a rule because it's a good metric for finding statistical anomalies, especially because in Voter Fraud, the numbers tend to clump together as opposed to how they would naturally because it violates one of the general rules of Benford's law.
How it works is that it says that it categorizes the frequency of the first numerical value (for instance
1,000,000) and then lists them by frequency, which tends to be a downward trend.
Granted, it's similar to other issues in statistics where it is possible to happen by chance alone or other unusual situations, it's just really, really unlikely. (Similar to confidence intervals) Also note that some deviation is expected as is with all statistics, but more deviation is more concerning.
(To be fully honest, the graphs here are also from a partisan source, but from what I can gather, the numbers are accurate, but still take it with a grain of salt if needed.)
First digit frequencies
Second Digit Frequencies in Allegheny Pennsylvania
[imghttps://theredelephants.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Trump-.jpg][/img]
Second Digit Frequencies in Allegheny Pennsylvania with Absentee ballots
[imghttps://theredelephants.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.jpg][/img]
(Note Trump's is slightly lower than expected which is explained by distrust of the postal system, but Biden's doesn't follow the graph at all, which is concerning)
So far the only article I've seen that tried to counter this claim was by EIP, which was established earlier this year by Standford and isn't the most impartial for sources. (For reference, the only two authors that I couldn't find evidence of potential bias is Emma Spiro and Joe Bak-Coleman, which fair enough, given their credentials appear in order. This does not mean their wrong, just as the previous graphs may not be wrong, but again, grain of salt)
The issue is the article doesn't address or really counter the data or actually even show the actual graphs in question, but more tries to apply guilt by association without rebutting or explaining the phenomena. (For reference, I try to debunk all the pieces of evidence I come across and if the evidence I find to debunk it is shoddy, then I try to see what the general consensus around it is.)
Hopefully the data used here is wrong because if it actually turns out to be correct, there's some major questions we need to be asking ourselves.
Keep in mind this isn't the only evidence I've been looking into, but I've been trying to debunk this one or see how likely it is to be true, so there's some concern here at least just from this evidence alone.
For reference, here's the data from the Iranian election used to prove fraud there. It's not nearly as bad, but it is enough concerns.