Wasn't price setting one of the huge problems the communist blocs were unable to overcome? Setting prices based on cost involves setting quotas and properly anticipating demand.
Demand of what precisely?
And as stated, in one such example, price is determined by accounting for energy expended to produce. For a physical resource, its energy price is based on the cost to replicate that physical resource, including things like petroleum (we can technically fabricate crude oil, but it takes a lot of energy to do so at the moment and has an energy expenditure cost to remove its harmful effects from the planet). So improvements in the economy would be based on reducing those energy expenditures to expand purchasing power, using technologies we have now that the communist blocs were not able to fathom when they were in operation, such as renewable sources of energy. For food, it's dependent on arable land for certain crops to flourish, available water, etc. Such a system is designed to reduce wastefulness, and when you reduce wastefulness, you come closer to abundance, which reduces the absolute necessity to measure demand so long as abundance is maintained.
The communist blocs were isolationist, which is why they annexed other nations, because they could not meet the needs of the people with their small chunk of land and took someone else's. But this is the modern world, where we have things like the European Union. And while it's not an ideal view of what is envisioned (I'll get into that a bit more later), it's an example of solving the problem in a more responsible and democratic way for an economic bloc with which to pool resources from and manage. North America and Greenland have enough resources amongst all the associated countries to essentially form a similar economic bloc.
Technocracies (and communism, for that matter) do not function on price systems very well, which is why alternate means of prosperity distribution are required.
I am not against some of the ideas there, like having an elected body composed of experts. I'm one of the people who would currently benefit under such a scheme. But the power imbalance is moved to power within a subset of people (those who are qualified to elect experts) instead of the population as a whole. I don't think it's an obvious win.
Everyone has a skillset, so everyone would have someone to elect vocationally, so the "population as a whole" has something to say. For example, law enforcement and the military would have a voice, as civic protection is a technical skill. As another example, firemen would have a vested interest in ensuring that people who have practical expertise AND scientific knowledge to have a voice on issues of public safety, to make their jobs significantly easier and reduce their on-the-job fatalities.
College-age adults would elect based on field of study, those not working would either elect someone to a technocratic Senate based on their last vocation or elect people to the House to represent their non-technical concerns and reap the benefits of expertly-guided social well-being. I do not advocate for only experts in power, I advise wholeheartedly against it. But SOME elected experts is better than the system we have now where NONE are and we get people in power who are the best bureaucrat or able to whip up social anxiety alone for the benefit of their paying donors.
The problem with technocracy is shown in the European project. Technocrats make bad policy makers because the problem with saying "we'll use *science* to come up with the best outcomes" is that you've still got the sticky question of "best outcomes." Who determines that? Do the technocrats, as was the case in Europe when the Union left countries like Greece out to dry because they refused to follow the harsh austerity policies that German economists considered to be the best outcome?
The EU is not a democratic technocracy. They are not elected and have nothing to counter-balance their enacted governance. A true democratic technocracy involves full elected positions and can review things at both the micro (regional) and macro (vocational) level.
That being said, the EU has its major issues and, despite the word bandied about, it's arguable that it's even a technocracy at all. But when you look at the politicians and pundits who vociferously detract from it like Nigel Farage, it's difficult to see it as worse for the public good than what we have in North America. But yes, it's far from perfect, primarily because its grip on being a technocracy is tenuous at best and because, if it actually is one, it operates within capitalism, which is ill-suited to it.
Capitalism's built great wealth and abundance. All we need to get on is making sure that it is *shared* in a sustainable way. If you take 90% of a billionaire's assets, that's still $100 million which is plenty of incentive to work. Then you could give $90,000 to 10,000 households.
If you're forcibly taking assets to re-distribute them, one could argue it's not capitalism anymore.
Besides that, good luck getting that to happen, when they have so much capital that they can buy and sell the politicians you would elect to force them to do so. What do you think lobby groups are, if not the wealthy using their power to assuredly deny you access to the capital they are supposed to share sustainably?
Basically...
who's going to do this? are billionaires going to let it happen?
This.
Well, sure, but "My political ideology only fails when you try to use it in the real world" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
Thankfully, it's not mine. I do not endorse or advocate communism personally, as all my posts in this thread indicate. And I don't think others here have, either, given what started this dialogue in the first place.
That being said, I don't ascribe to the belief that just because something hasn't existed in practice doesn't mean it never can or never will. You seem to and openly admitted as much.
By this line of reasoning, capitalism has never existed in any form where racism, xenophobia and populism didn't exist in large numbers of the general population. But I'm not about to say that having capitalism without them is impossible, either, because that would be incredibly foolish. Because correlation does not inherently imply causation.