> Socialism is about paying people in proportion to the amount of pain and sufferring they put in to their work.
No. Marx's own words: "The share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour time."
> The free market ensures people are paid in proportion to their actual contribution to the economy as decided by the market via supply and demand.
orly?
"In recent months, the pay packages of a number of financial executives have gained public attention, especially in the light of the collapse of mortgage-backed “alternative” or “exotic” investments. Despite Citigroup’s disastrous performance, its former CEO Charles Prince retired in November 2007 with a $68 million retirement package. In October 2007, after investment bank Merrill Lynch had written down over $12 billion in bad mortgage debt, its CEO Stanley O’Neal left with a severance package of $161 million, on top of his $48 million salary. In January 2007 retailer Home Depot ousted its CEO, Bob Nardelli, for poor stock performance and an abrasive personality. Nardelli, who went on to become CEO of automaker Chrysler, took a $210 million severance package. When pharmaceutical firm Pfizer fired its CEO, Hank McKinnell, in July 2007—amid layoffs of thousands of workers and $4 billion in losses—McKinnell took a severance package of over $180 million."
Such stories abound everywhere you look. Meanwhile, professions that form the backbone of our society - nurses and paramedics, police officers, teachers - are horribly underpaid. I can only conclude that the free market is retarded, or at least that it's no better a decider of people's actual contribution to the economy than anything else.
> Under socialism you could nail your balls to a wall all day and get paid more than a scientist who discovers the cure for cancer even though your actual contribution to the economy is vastly different.
No, you would get paid the same amount for doing the same amount of labor. This assumes that nailing your balls to a wall is of some utility to society (perhaps by removing you from the gene pool.) When Lenin co-opted the principle of "to each according to his contribution" he stated specifically that it applies to "socially-necessary work"; I think Marx would have agreed, but took for granted that no one in a socialist state would waste time doing unnecessary jobs.