Re: Communism!
OK, but one rant deserves another...
Communism is the political/economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine - sounds great in theory but doesn't work in practice. Funny how all the folks who like the idea never seemed to have lived under it. Go hunt up some first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe and ask them about it.
The only people who ever favored it in mass were those who had such a raw deal that anything looked like an improvement (for example serfs & slaves). You can't collectivize everyone except by force... if you don't use force, somebody will opt out and pursue his own self-interest (me, for one). When you use force on people who are just minding their own business and individually reaping the fruits of their own individual efforts instead of throwing it in the communal pot, they tend to resist... then you have to kill them (or at least enough of them to scare the rest into toeing the party line)...when you pull on that thread you get Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc... If you are not willing to kill (great big batches of) people over it, your communist state is never going to be any bigger than a hippy commune because folks just don't buy into it willingly. Most free people just are not interested. That's why they had to built the Berlin Wall to keep people in, and America has a Border Patrol & INS to somewhat stem the tide of people trying to get in.
Is America perfect? No... but if you ask me the way to fix it is more freedom not less.
Originally posted by Delthayre
Don't make this a topic of debate, merely humor a desperate and lonely man. (word man is used for effect, it sounds better)
Don't make this a topic of debate, merely humor a desperate and lonely man. (word man is used for effect, it sounds better)
Communism is the political/economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine - sounds great in theory but doesn't work in practice. Funny how all the folks who like the idea never seemed to have lived under it. Go hunt up some first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe and ask them about it.
The only people who ever favored it in mass were those who had such a raw deal that anything looked like an improvement (for example serfs & slaves). You can't collectivize everyone except by force... if you don't use force, somebody will opt out and pursue his own self-interest (me, for one). When you use force on people who are just minding their own business and individually reaping the fruits of their own individual efforts instead of throwing it in the communal pot, they tend to resist... then you have to kill them (or at least enough of them to scare the rest into toeing the party line)...when you pull on that thread you get Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc... If you are not willing to kill (great big batches of) people over it, your communist state is never going to be any bigger than a hippy commune because folks just don't buy into it willingly. Most free people just are not interested. That's why they had to built the Berlin Wall to keep people in, and America has a Border Patrol & INS to somewhat stem the tide of people trying to get in.
Is America perfect? No... but if you ask me the way to fix it is more freedom not less.
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