The reason traditional systems work is because individuals sought out differences and manage to achieve a roughly ideal efficiency without much intervention or planning. Intervening and trying to be planned or maximized in efficiency has failed in reality and requires an absurd amount of brainpower. The decision would be arbitrary, too. Who gets to decide what I am best at? It cannot be me, because then it is not organized by the government. If it is by the government, I will become a terrorist and attempt to kill them. Even if talking hypothetically, this system breaks upon contact. What utility is achieved? And for who? If I am sick, how will the system still operate for maximum utility, when it did not plan for me to be sick as much as I was? We can scarcely calculate the weather to a degree accurate enough to make a system like this ideal. If a volcano goes off. If an earthquake happens. How would this work in a non-participatory planet? The fact that inequality exists makes the attempt at balancing by intervention absurdly complicated. You would have to review every citizen every few years in comprehensive detail and then analyze for their best use. Which may be variable rather than singular, and which will change based on factors that cannot be accounted for. They walk onto the street at the wrong time and now their legs are gone and your planning for a year of what they are best at is over. You have to reassess. How does this make people happy, either? What someone is literally best at and what they should do literally is completely arbitrary. A government might wish to maximize the amounts of forts across the border for protection against outsiders. It might wish to increase the public revenue. So why should it not just take control of all economy, put everyone on minimum rations, slave labor practically, and keep all capital / benefit to themselves? It is 'technically' the best for everyone. The highest degree of protection, the most
usefully directed economy. But the problem is, according to who? Who gets to be Prime Minister in this case? Why vote? Why not dictate people's vote for them? Social engineering only works to a degree. You will always get insurgents. And if the system they live under is not popular, and systems with similar concepts / features have not been, how do you plan to deal with them? The Americans could not manage to beat out insurgents from a country with enormously less resource and capability to fight back. Not because they suck, not because they are bad, but because the issue is difficult to deal with. Now, if you truly do not care about happiness of individuals, then whole ideology has no moral parameters, and making moral arguments against things such as slavery is extremely limited. Even forced breeding. It is beneficial. It is orderly. It makes things neat and tidy. Forced population control. Significant eugenics. Lots of things. And who says that it will grant more happiness in the end? Some people literally do not like technology. Most people would not enjoy this system at all. Government control is not realistically more efficient nor does it yield efficient results. It is often completely dependent on the individuals that constitute it. Same as a lot of businesses, or societies. It also has to be capable of managing what you ask. The amount of bureaucrats to get even reasonably close to the level of control you are talking about is completely impossible. You would not have any workers for anything beyond bureaucracy, because everyone would have to keep tabs on everyone most of the time, to make sure nothing was going wrong with the plan.
Italy and Germany were far more public and government controlled than the vast majority of countries in the 1930s - 40s, Italy literally being the highest (IIrc), and by a lot. America still completely dominated most metrics, and not by a small amount, by an enormous margin. Mostly due to their private and market handled systems. You could come up with a lot of examples. But very rarely do governments do their best work by micromanaging. Even if we said they did, against example, is it better than private affairs? How so? Private affairs would achieve the same ideal efficiency, but without any necessity of the enormous bureaucracy, and at best, perhaps a loss of efficiency here and there, because somebody might be 5% more efficient as a butcher than they are as a lawyer. Regulating malicious behavior is something that comes with macro-managing, and it can be effectively done without the micro. If I get cancer, do I just get shot? Or do we wait until I am not particularly efficient anymore? How would this system ever be implemented?
This is a bit all over the place, and I do apologize. But in terms of ideals to strive towards, I am not seeing how it is ideal, even theoretically. It would need such high bureaucracy that there would be less and less workers, meaning raw material production, material processing, pretty much every field of doing things would completely collapse, it would induce mass famine and complete ineptitude across the board.
This would not be conducive to more lives, either. If it was actually adhered to no matter what, it would cause self-extinction. There is no time to hunt when you have to assess everyone constantly to make sure they are doing the right thing, which, even just on a one - one person basis, is very difficult to do. 'We will just assess people once in life', and sacrifice how much efficiency? Make the system how redundant? What about if literally anything happens? They get reassessed again? What if someone has a severe emotional breakdown for a few weeks? The theoretical of this is fairly useless because it is not practically applicable for the vast majority of the time. Nor does that actually solve the fact that this supposed greater sum of happiness means anything. Most individuals are less well served at a given time by this structure. Many individuals will never be served by it. They will constantly be miserable and disenfranchised, work poorly, strive for little. I do not see how this would incentivize creativity, technology, more gain in happiness. It is just self-perpetuated suffering. A system based on perfect prediction of the future is not applicable to a system that tries to think in regards to the long term rather than the short term. Because one is a guideline and a fairly reasonable estimate and understanding of consequential logic. The other is an attempt to organize disorder en masse without it going wrong. The logic of doing one does not resemble the logic of the other.
The best society to strive towards would be individual and perhaps significantly mutual between groups of people. It would never be collective entirely. The sum happiness of 4 people does not outweigh the happiness of 1 person, except by an individual's arbitrary standards. Every time the system has to resort to completely ruining a person's life, stripping away their self-expression and so on, it could be considered a failure to create a happy citizen. No amount of iteration will change this. The 'best society' then completely falls flat, because everyone is practically a half-time bureaucrat-slave starving to death.
