OK, here’s my $0.02
Socialism cannot work, but neither can Capitalism.
Although I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘work,’ I will define it for my present purpose as increasing the wellbeing of those living in a given socio-political-economic regeime as measured by mean, modal and median income, poverty rate, unemployment rate, mortality rate, and average life expectancy.
My feeling is that in order for a citizenry to experience an increase in their standard of living, as reflected in the aforementioned quantitative measures, there needs to exist adaptive tension. This adaptive tension would be applied to public, private, and other institutions. Adaptive tension leads to innovation in the form of inventions, increases in effeciency, exploitation or creation of new markets and consumer needs. These advances will, theoretically, in concert lead to increases in the measures mentioned above.
The question is how exactly this adaptive tension is to be facilitated. Some would contend that freeing markets will do this, others that increasing the number of or funding for government programs will acomplish this, and there are numerous other theorized mechanisms through which adaptive tension may be facilitated.
My personal take on the creation/facilitation of adaptive tension is that fluctuation between situations or structures biased toward the success, in terms of securing profit/funding for an entity or the survival of an institution or business, of creative/innovative and organizational structures will yield the most advance in the measures noted above. This is one phenomena that has been witnessed in many businesses (ie: GE, Lancome, Tech Sector companies, etc.) where profits are seen to climb when creative units are brought under more strict organizational control. The opposite is seen with regard to innovation as fewer products are created when such organizational control is applied.
The theory that is born out of such observation is that if operational control is periodically increased and decreased higher profits, on average, are seen.
My extension of this theory is then that in order for the quality of life to increase for a populace, the tensions applied to governmental, business and other structures must similarly fluctuate.
This will result in funding fluctuations for governmental structures, necessitating increased efficiency, as well as increased funding for such structures, allowing for the expansion of services, assuming that the previously created efficiencies are maintained. In this case an increasing number of services at an increasing level of efficiency become available.
In the case of businesses, periods of increased organizational control will lead to more efficient utilization of the innovations made by creative/research branches. Increased funding and decreased organizational control over such branches will lead to an increase in innovation (as measured in the number of innovations or products created). This would then theoretically lead to more and better products and services avaiable to consumers.
The real would application would be to the existent political system in the US, and in some other countries. One party typically advances policies that benefit some public sectors and some economic sectors, while the other advances policies that benefit other public sectors and other economic sectors. This might be seen to operate on more of a sliding scale in other countries with more than two parties.
Why then are there so many inefficiencies seen in government and business/economic structures? I often return to this question and feel the answer to be that when the political pendulem shifts in the US one party will not create adaptive tension by removing some of the beneficial programs that the other party provided for its favored public and private sectors, the cumulative effect of which is the massive inefficiencies that can so readily be seen in so many public and private sector structures.
So that is my two cents. Adaptive tension is needed in the form of fluctuation between the socio-political-economic extremes of socialism and capitalism. This most often takes the form of political parties pandering to their favored public and private sectors, applying their stated belief in a given set of economic and political principles as it is convenient to benefit or apply adaptive pressure to public and private sectors as the favor of the dominant political faction would have it.
I will admit that a number of assumptions are built in here, namely the assumption that governmental strucutres and business structures will readily mantain efficiencies that have been realized under increased organizational pressures/decreased funding or profits.
