Nuclear War.

[Tattila the Hun]

I was under the impression, that US and USSR combined could have glassed the earth five times over....

Why don't you accuse fez of being pro-shooting people, or NRA fanboy? I mean that's M-16, or CAR-15, designed to kill.

I like german WWII era equipment, Tigers, SturmVogels, etc.
I think they're neat. And propaganda has never been as good as it was in WWII era Germany. (Goebbels was genious in his area of expertice. )

As these are products of the Third Reich, or Nazi-Germany, does that mean I'm a neo-nazi?

Well, I don't believe the state of Israel should exist, either. (Should not have been created, to be precice. It's there, can't do nothing about it.) So, maybe I'm an anti-semite too. (Though I have nothing against jews.)

[Sir Og]

Originally posted by Lonestar


You'll noticed I very carefully said that believing in the ideology of communism is stupid.

And, it's further worth noting that the track record of capitalism ( albeit, at least a little regulated) indicates that the quality of life for the average joe is a lot better than it is in communist countries.

The average joe in 19th century Britain for example wasn't doing great and if you add the hundreds of milions from the colonies the picture doesn't look that bright for capitalism. Only after capitalist countries became more "Social" the average joe's quality of life was on the rise.
I am not sayng that socialism was great though. The planned economy sux big time and without strong economy it is hard to get anything going.

[Sir Og]

Just want to add that the fact that socialism was invented and had many supporters in the most devoloped capitalist countries should tell you that capitalist societies were not that great.

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Agathon


I see. Using guns means that they had become capitalists.

They had to get the guns from somewhere. But how? By possibly...trading Goods and services? Sounds like they had the basic concept down.

Really, I take it you have lived in New Zealand? I've read GGS and one example does not a general claim make. The Maori tended to buy and sell, but as communes not as individuals. The settler farmers were quite pissed about this as they couldn't compete effectively.

Maori also had the concept of Property down, as they went out of their way to raid other, less technological advanced tribes. You see that sort of thing everywhere. Certainly not communal.

That's a BAM.

I'll make a concession here; I have no idea what that means.

Sure they will. They just have to believe in what they are doing. Wars are the primary example of such behaviour.

You are presuming that our culture, which forces unnatural behaviours upon us (the like of which our ancestors would have found obscene) has no effect.

Culture certainly does have a large effect on motivation, but in cases where there's a strong disincentive to work over a long time, the work ethic will slowly be errorded away. As people see others shirk without reprocussion they will be inclined to shirk as well, even if they were taught not too. Eventually you get a situation like that of Russia where "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."

Of course you can use negative reinforcement instead of positive reinforcement, and hand out beating with the same regularity that capitalists hand out pay raises. This was how slavery worked after all. This is also generally how conscript armies work.

Again, wars disprove this first supposition quite effectively. Moreover one doesn't have to be committed to a planned economy to be a communist. Any communist worth the name is committed to outcomes, not means.

Gotcha. Streets red with Blood.
Next time, just come out and say it.

But that's hardly the point. The communists think that capitalism is inherently self destructive and looking at the environmental evidence it is hard to argue. The flipside of your assertion is of course that a decentralized economy finds it very hard to solve collective action problems such as those that cause pollution.

I call Bull****. Marx believed that it is historically inevitable that wealth will concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, until the world is divided into a small number of wealthy capitalists and the large mass of the proliteriat, with no middle class at all anymore. The proliteriat will only be paid enough for them to survive (as they were in Marx's time)

And, as anyone can see by looking around them, the middle class has not been disappearing, but has instead grown. Also, workers no longer are at the starvation point, and in fact their lot has been getting better steadily. Thus, the law of "increasing wealth and misery" is not in effect, and there is no reason for the revolution ever to occur.

Of course the right wing solution is to sit around and pretend it isn't happening, all the while living a ridiculously unsustainable lifestyle and dooming our descendants to the inevitable reckoning.

That's the view of some rightwingers. I'm a bit on the treehugger side.

Oh yeah, of course it is the same thing. In one case you have a private company aiming to enrich itself, on the other a public service. But I guess you don't live in a civilized country with a public health care system - so you've never seen a public monopoly work.

Foreigners laugh at you guys because you can't for the life of yourselves provide health care for your people at a reasonable cost. Canada manages to provide world class health care for all its people at a fraction of the amount the US spends on health care because private markets simply cannot provide efficient health care.

Here's another concession, I've heard both good and bad things about the Canadian health care system, and I can't make a comment on the American Health Care system because all my life I've either been in the MIlitary, or a military dependent. I won't comment on what I don't know.

1. No they are not. The central concept is public control - people disagree over what that means . Some are statists, others would devolve to local communes.

2. Private monopolies are always destructive. Public monopolies can be if badly run, but are not necessarily so. Of course in the US you live under the perverse impression that government can't do anything right (except spend billions on weapons). But if I compare the state run primary school system and health care system I grew up with, with the joke that most of you guys call education, there's no comparison.

The thing is, though, that private monopolies that are badly run tend to disapear, while public monopolies that are badly run tend to go on and on and on. I mean, take Standard Oil. Yeah, they were a monopoly, but they didn't charge much more than what later companies did, and they lost their monopoly even before the government intervened. For situations like oil where there's no good reason for somebody to have a monopoly, you can either wait for them to disapear by themselves, or have the government break them up, all without resorting to socialization. When the government tries to socialize an area like this, they generally also have to cut of trade in that area or resort to huge subsidies to keep the industry competitive.

On the other hand, there are some industries where there is a natural tendancy for a monopoly to form. Take operating systems, the most popular operating system has an intrinsic advantage based solely on its popularity, because developers will tend to make more products for the most used systems. Here it is possible to make a case for a government monopoly, but they have costs as well. For instance, if the conditions that make a natural monopoly disapear, as they did for train travel at around the turn of the century, the government monopoly will continue chugging along, since it exists through government fiat, not the working of the market.

It also has perverse consequences by sometimes encouraging "races to the bottom". But I'm glad you brought up Microsoft because it shows up one of the problems with capitalism - people with enough money can simply subvert the system and will do so at every opportunity.

News, I'm sure, to those Enron Execs whose company was not bailed out.

Also, graft tends to be directly porportional to the amount of government intervention in an industry. If people are getting subsidies all the time, who's going to scream "bribe!" when this or that company gets one? The sort of things that would get the media in a tizzy if they happen in America don't even make the papers when they happen in France or Germany, let alone China, which has an almost unbelievable amount of graft.

I believe Che Guevara once said "competition is a means of increasing production" - it's not as if a communist system must completely abandon it.

The power remark is of course complete rubbish. Sure, in a capitalist economy, everyone with money has some degree of power to determine what gets produced, but of course in vastly unequal amounts.

*sniff, sniff* sounds like Horse**** to me. If a product is shoddy the company can either improve it, or go under. Even Hyundai has grasped that.

Unless I live off capital I must sell my labour or starve (or eke out a living on welfare, which would be abolished if your friends had their way) - you can quibble, but that sounds like being forced to work.



Who says you can't have some choice in a communist society? As I said, most people don't have any choice but to work and most people have to put up with jobs that they may not like but which are available.

Sound's like you're *****ing about having to work for your own self-interest. Sounds...lazy.

How would most people work in a Communist Society? Are they all brainwashed into working voluntarily? How is that good? Do many refuse to work? How would society function?

A freedom which does not exist for the vast majority of people other than the parasitic layabouts who live off investments.

News, I am sure, to people who made wise investments, and were rewarded for it.

I wonder if I'll be a parasitic layabout around age 50 or so when that Guv'ment Thrift Savings Plan (kinda like a IRA) I've been putting a hundred dollars a month in since I was 18 kicks in? I'll be a parasite because I had, well, the foresight to get ready?

Phhhtt! Ever tried doing that? Rich people have bought up most of the nice places.

If you're running off to live like a hermit becuse of the scenery, then you're one pampered hermit.

I don't see why. Where do you get this perverse idea from? If people don't want to work they won't get paid. If they want to work only a little, they will get paid a little.

I think this falls under the first quote, at the top of the page.

Oh blah blah. And of course we know how "true" those images are. Everyone in the west lives in a huge house and has all the latest clothes. But no one ever sees the 10 year old Indonesian children who make them.

Apart from a very few people, capitalism tends to reward the docile.

I would argue that someone living in the Haight Ashbury, Compton, or San Diego's Barrio Logan all live an order of magnitude better than most devolping countries, and certainly better than any so-called communist countries.

As an example, Barrio Logan is an economically deppressed, high crimerate "ghetto." (Naval Base San Diego is located here) Yet, it's filled with immigrants, both from South of the Border and Asia. I'm sure many would agree they have a higher quality of life in Barrio Logan than, say, Tijuana. Workers here are treated far better than other places.

And yet, we're a capitalist society!

Suits me. I couldn't give a **** about people whose only desire is to screw others over for their own benefit.

Of course, all indications are, that, in a Marxist country, the rebels would be justified by our usual standards.

You assume it's yours by right.

Christ, I hope so. I work hard for it. I worked hard to get to the point where I'm making a little more than some people. It's a dangerous job (not so much getting shot at, as working in a pseudo-industrial enviroment), and I think my income is, well, mine.

My Dad was a Marine, and now is a high-ranking civil service in the DIA. Work for him starts at 0530, and doesn't usually end until around 1800, then the drive home in Traffic. Ballpark, he makes $70k a year in this job. Upper-Middle class, to be sure, but he works hard for his money.

Uncle is a civil engineer, has done a lot of work on Dams and whatnot. Makes 6 figure income, and is currently entertain a prospect to work in Iraq for awhile. He worked his ass off to get his degrees, and eventually his PhD. And now he's being rewarded for it.

Awwwwww........ boo hoo.

Wasn't the state's to begin with, it was the family's.

Strangely, you can, make the argument that a healthy family is essentially communist.

A father may work hard for the benefit of his family, but he has many motivations which don't apply to a worker toiling for his country. The parental drive to provide for the children comes from instincts hardwired into the human brain after millions of years of evolution. No such evolutionary imperative drives people to toil for an abstraction such as king and country. A father or mother receives also direct benefits from the work they do for the family. The same is supposedly true for communism, but when the size of the "family" grows huge, the connection between work and benefit becomes abstract. There is no immediate perceptible change in the collective fortunes of the state when one worker slacks off, unlike the change in a family's fortunes if Mom or Dad slacks off.

There is one thing which a communist family and a communist state do share: unfettered power for their leaders. If Mom and Dad want to be abusive, the children have no recourse inside the family. And if a communist government wishes to abuse its power, there are no checks and balances to stop them. Parents are (ideally) kept from abusing their power by the rule of law, but there are no credible police forces for the misbehaving governments of the world. If people can't always be trusted to resist the temptations of power over their own children, how can any sane person claim that politicians should be implicitly trusted to resist the temptations of power over a population of total strangers?

Yes the freedom to starve, the freedom to exploit others.... etc.

Freedom of personal Property. Freedom of travel, freedom of press.

[Lonestar]

Sorry, one last question for all the communists here.

If you could distill communism into a single line, what would you say?

[Agathon]

2 quick responses.

Pointing out that people in slum areas of the US live better than those in Indonesia is missing the point, they are part of the same economic system. After all you buy the goods they make.

You seem to me to be confusing the distributive function of markets with their (supposed) incentive function. One need not object to them - after all a market system in which each person has an equal amount to spend each week is still a market system of sorts.

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Agathon
2 quick responses.

Pointing out that people in slum areas of the US live better than those in Indonesia is missing the point, they are part of the same economic system. After all you buy the goods they make.

Point was even the slums in a western, succesful capitalist country are more appealing than the life in a communist country. Hence, the great effort communist countries take to isolate their people from western viewpoints.

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Agathon


You seem to me to be confusing the distributive function of markets with their (supposed) incentive function. One need not object to them - after all a market system in which each person has an equal amount to spend each week is still a market system of sorts.

You seem to be saying that a fair economy would involve everyone having the same income, so they can all use the income to buy whatever they want, thus combining the best aspects of communism and capitalism. The problem is that not everyone does work of equal value. I'll be damned if somebody spends 8 years learning some advanced complex skill and gets paid the same as a ****ing taxi driver.