Do not forget we are talking about Human's.

At the beginning of today’s class, we discussed what might be the obvious issues with a socialist economy. I brought up my point that humans naturally want to be different from other people and so equal pay would not allow this. Alex then said that he felt equal pay could work if each person would be allowed to use their money however they wanted to. I think Alex brought up a great point, but I immediately responded that this would not make people feel equal because there would be too many problems that would arise. I explained that people would take advantage of the system in which the economy runs buy, and therefore people would not feel equal. Even though I got my basic point across, I was not able to back up my argument with actual evidence of what would go wrong in Alex’s plan.
I think that Alex’s idea is very good because people should feel different from others when they are allowed to spend money in their own way, but I feel that this idea would fail in other ways. This idea may fix the basic problem of individuality, but I feel it would be impossible to find a balance between being equal and having individuality in this system. Firstly, I am assuming that everyone receives equal wages. This would be problematic because people would need to be assigned to different jobs. People would complain that they had a more difficult job than a person making the same amount as them. I understand that people should be worrying about the whole and not themselves, but I believe that the creators of this type of economic system are forgetting that they are dealing with humans. I believe that socialism would work out perfectly for any type of high-function being that does not have a sense of self, but not humans. Humans constantly compare themselves with others; Alex’s idea covers the basics of the human need for individuality, but I feel that it forgets about the many other aspects of humanity. Human’s have a sense of self that constantly evaluates its own situation compared to others; I believe that this sense of self would cause the majority of the problems with this economic system. Lets first look at what this type of government expects: everyone to do his or her job. In most jobs, not everyone does perform as well as each other. It seems like someone who performs well would be frustrated if someone else, who performed poorly, was being rewarded the same amount as them. I do not even have to be talking about money when I use this example. Maybe the person performing proficiently is not even being acknowledged for their good work; it does not seem like this person would want to work hard any longer.
The main problem with Alex’s idea of letting people spend their money how they want would be people’s ability to take advantage of the system. It seems like people in this society could have trouble with spending too much of their money; if someone did not have enough money to survive because they spent it all then it would be interesting to see what would happen next. It seems like the government would have to step in and give aid to the people who need help, because if they did not, these people would want to rebel against the government. If the government does provide aid, then other people would feel like it was unfair and ask for aid themselves. I feel that they are too many situations like this for this type of government to succeed. People always find some way that the government system was unfair to them which would cause them to rebel.
It seems like this type of economic system could only work if the individuals of a society cared more about the whole of the society than they cared about themselves; since I do not see this as possible, I feel that a socialist government would inevitability fail.

Do you think that the human sense of self causes problems within society?