Goldilocs and the three Social Democratic Bears

How Goldilocks Learned to Stop Worrying and love 

the Nordic Model

 

Once there were three bears, and they thought that they ought to go to the market. "We hope the market will be good", said papa bear, "lest there would appear a tiger to upset the market, and so disrupt the equilibrium that is assumed to be inherent in markets".

Once upon a time also and aligned in time and space, was a girl named Goldilocks. She was a bourgeois beast, a pig of capitalism.

She went for a walk in the forest. Pretty soon, she came upon a house. It didn't have any price tag, so she knocked and, when no one answered, she walked right in.
She thought: "No price tags anywhere, I hereby make my a priori assumption that everything in this house is free for all".

At the table in the kitchen, there were three bowls of porridge. Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.

"This porridge is too hot!" she exclaimed.

So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.

"This porridge is too cold", she said, "whoever made this, their comparative advantage does not lie in cooking, because this is not according to my consumer preferences".

So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.

"Ahhh, this porridge is just right," she said happily and she ate it all up. "I certainly have this propensity to consume".

After she'd eaten the three bears' breakfasts she decided she was feeling a little tired. So, she walked into the living room where she saw three chairs. Goldilocks sat in the first chair to rest her feet. 

"This chair is too big!" she exclaimed.

So she sat in the second chair.

"This chair is too big, too!", she whined. "This is not according to my preferences, whoever made this furniture they have no comparative advantage, they will go bust pretty soon if they would try to sell their items in the market. That is my deduction, maybe I could even write a paper on this".

So she tried the last and smallest chair.

"Ahhh, this chair is just right", she sighed. But just as she settled down into the chair to rest, it broke into pieces! "Oh well, now I have at least caused some demand. Someone will have to fix this chair, and so the economy will have more turnover". "This compensates my earlier behavior when I consumed the porridge and assumed it would be OK by deferred payment".

Goldilocks was very tired by this time, so she went upstairs to the bedroom. "Now it's time for retirement, it is my rightful entitlement".

She lay down in the first bed, but it was too hard.

Then she lay in the second bed, but it was too soft. "Oh no, there seems to be this recurring pattern that so many goods are not according to my preferences. That's why I have to go shopping so much, and try things before I buy them".

Then she lay down in the third bed and it was just right. Goldilocks fell asleep.

As she was sleeping, the three bears came home.

"Someone's been redistributing my porridge," growled the Papa bear.

"Someone's been redistributing my porridge," said the Mama bear.

"Someone's been redistributing my porridge and they redistributed it all away! What propensity to consume is that, this gluttony of the rich we here have evidence of", cried the Baby bear.

"Someone's been using my chair," growled the Papa bear.

"Someone's been using my chair," said the Mama bear.

"Someone's been using my chair and they've broken it all to pieces, what a waste, and what kind of moral hazard is that", cried the Baby bear.

They decided to look around some more, to make an inquiry into the nature and the causes of their findings, and when they got upstairs to the bedroom, Papa bear growled, "Someone's been sleeping in my bed," "Someone's been sleeping in my bed, too" said the Mama bear.

"Someone's been sleeping in my bed and she's still there!", exclaimed Baby bear.

Just then, Goldilocks woke up and saw the three bears. She screamed, and her economic mindset suddenly went into disequilibrium and confusion.

Goldilocks and the three social-democratic bears looked at each other and then, the speech of papa-bear: "Now what do we have here? The bitch of capitalism. Are you "harvesting" without contributing? This is unacceptable, either you join us and then we expect you to study, to work, to participate, to comply, to be equal, to be profitable and to pay taxes of what you harvest.
This is what we demand from you, and it is a rather semi-egalitarian expectation, and they are a bit more Bayesian then your expectations. This things are duties, but there are also rights to claim".

Papa bear: "We write some (political-economic) notes, and we write some (political-economic) words". "We are dancing social-democratic bears alright, but we sometimes change the tunes, the notes and the parameters etc. so we are not completely at the mercy of the pigs of capitalism as the marxists claim. But make no mistake...!
Either we have some free-riding issues, which I tend not to call "sick-riding incentives" but rather the welfare state, or we have huuge guard costs like excessive large prison populations + large police force expenditures, and increasing inequality and asymmetric political and economic struggle in our Geo-economic jurisdiction, which we usually call society."

"You have to decide if you wanna join us or leave? You can decide now or think about our offer for a while, but first I'm gonna be honest about what I think about you, you are a pig of (predatory) capitalism. But you can if you want to be, if not a queen, then a little princess of social capitalism, or social democracy as we usually prefer to call our economic model.

We can offer reasonable flat hierarchical working structures, a welfare state and a pretty good aggregate probability-profitability payoff structure, caused partly by syndicalism + high tariffs and partly by after tax distribution. What do you say? Wanna be a social democratista, and a cute little social-capitalista perhaps?"

Goldilocks then imagines collectivization and authoritarian central planning etc. and screams out loud and runs out of the house, but she soon stops and then thinks for a while, like Kahnemans system 2 slow thinking concept. Then the little bear walks out to speak with her in a Socratic dialogue, and then Goldilocks comes back into the into house, and papa bear proclaims: "We're glad you want to become a social democrat, thou art hereby included...!".

The social capitalistic consensus democracy was then restored, and Goldilocks and the three dancing social democratic bears lived in an economic equilibrium the rest of their lives.

Happy Ending as pr. Joseph Schumpeter's prediction.

Copyrighteous: @equalitus.