Imperfect

One of the lessons that my father taught me when I was young was: "Everyone has a scheme for getting rich that will not work." One of the things that I've learned as I grow older is that you can slightly modify that into "Everyone has a scheme for remaking society that will not work."

An aspect of political discussions that I've seen time and again is that someone will say, with the utmost confidence, that this or that political or economic system will fix everything. Someone else will point out that it's been tried before, and never worked, and the riposte will be that it's never actually been done correctly. Whether due to incompetence, unpreparedness or ill intent, whoever claims to have enacted communism, free market capitalism, democracy, you name it, have all done such a poor job of it that whatever hash they made of it cannot possibly be indicative of what the correct implementation would look like.

Except those are the correct implementations. At least as correct as actual people are ever going to be able to put in place. What makes a system workable is not how well its platonic archetype works on paper, but how well the actual implementation deals with the panoply of perverse incentives that are interwoven into the human experience. Because no system is immune to them, since no human institution can be proof against, well, humanity. In this, the foibles and failures that have gone before are likely to be blueprints of the systems of the future, rather than cast-offs. Attempting to ignore them, or hope that somehow humanity will transcend human nature will simply result in another piece on the pile of failed schemes.