NationStates Jolt Archive

in a commnist country, everyone has to have equal rights, powers and freedoms
this means that no one can take charge and say "we need to distribute the wealth"
thus no wealth distribution may take place
and communism will never exist

This was made by a fellow online MSN aqquantance of mine. I don't actually disagree, as we ourselves (as Prussiatopia) aren't purely Communist. However, I'd still like to see the views of you NSers...

What do you think?

Pure Metal
DHomme
Kanabia
Glitziness
So..something or other
Letila
Etc. Will attack the quote because they're Reds.

Undelia
AB Again
Vetalia
Etc. Will say a bunch of shit because they're Capitalist pig dogs

Tribes
HN Fiddlebottoms
Myself
Etc. will contribute nothing useful.

Just a heads up.

Thanks, but I don't care. A bit of attack to this sometimes arrogant person is good for him. He's a bit too big-headed for his own good sometimes.

Communism is like Egalitarianism, without the titles. Everyone thinks they're better than everyone else, so communism is impossible. If you base it on the idealism of Communitism then maybe, otherwise...

*Looks at quote* Hmmmmm...*Thinks real hard* :confused:
Is he saying that all communists are anarchists, or have I just misunderstood.

Basically Communism is Anarchaism for poor people.

Technically yes, because communism can't exist without a leader, and without a leader, there is no one to keep check on the distribution of wealth, land and wages.
My $0.02.

Basically Communism is Anarchaism for poor people.
No it's not. Communists need their evil dictators.

Basically Communism is Anarchaism for poor people.

There is no rich and poor in Communism. That's the idea.

No it's not. Communists need their evil dictators.
But erm then it isnt communism because not everyone is equal.

Communism is communism for communists.

Basically Communism is Anarchaism for poor people.
Yes because communism means equal rights which means no leader. Rich people wont want communism because they lose money. Only poor people want it.

couldn't have explained it better myself

"There is no rich and poor in Communism. That's the idea."

^^ see above

Communism has got the right idea with equality, but it tends to attract the bad leaders, (*coughstalin*) which is probably why it has such a bad reputation.

But erm then it isnt communism because not everyone is equal.
One person in an entire country just counts as a statistical error.

One person in an entire country just counts as a statistical error.

No it counts as not being communism

No it counts as not being communism

No, it simply counts as a 'whoops, oh well, we've got to fix it' kind of mishap. As i mentioned earlier, it tends to attract the worst leaders (*coughfidelcastro*) who seem to act superior. It's not communism's fault.

No, it simply counts as a 'whoops, oh well, we've got to fix it' kind of mishap. As i mentioned earlier, it tends to attract the worst leaders (*coughfidelcastro*) who seem to act superior. It's not communism's fault.

So presumably fixing it implies removing the leader so there is no one to authorise the even distribution of wages/land. Whoops.

Is communism is a good idea? Maybe. Will it ever work? No, especially since Karl Marx can't advise on it anymore. People spin around communism to match their own styles of government and their own needs.

Communism will never work because of one, natural, human aspect: self interest.

Plus, for communism to really work, it has to spread worldwide, which will never happen.

Is communism is a good idea? Maybe. Will it ever work? No, especially since Karl Marx can't advise on it anymore. People spin around communism to match their own styles of government and their own needs.

Communism will never work because of one, natural, human aspect: self interest.

Plus, for communism to really work, it has to spread worldwide, which will never happen.

You assume. You never know, y'know.

If we're talking Marx, than a revolution with a "temporary" dictatorship is needed for communism. And because the only purpose of the state is a means for class repression when we're classless the state will wither away.

:rolleyes:

in a commnist country, everyone has to have equal rights, powers and freedoms
this means that no one can take charge and say "we need to distribute the wealth"
thus no wealth distribution may take place
and communism will never exist
Who says noone can take charge?

Isn't democracy in theory a system where everyone has equal rights, powers and freedoms as well? Yet there is a government and leaders?

In communism, there could also be leaders and governments without it ceasing to be "communism".

For it to work, the principle has to be "All are equal" (without the addition "...but some are more equal then others") and you have to find a leadership who won't abuse the power they're given and take more for themselves then they are supposed to recieve. (Good luck with that.)

At least right now, there's not a big chance of communism breaking out. China's really the only one to worry about, what with Taiwan and everything.

Liasia']You assume. You never know, y'know.
If it does, a good half the population will shoot themselves to avoid being governed by a system where a paper boy gets the same wages as a neuroscientst. Or get shot by the 4 year olds who now have the right to have a fire arm.

If it does, a good half the population will shoot themselves to avoid being governed by a system where a paper boy gets the same wages as a neuroscientst.
And the thought that all the people around the world will have decent shelter, good healthcare as well as food and clean water, will make these very same people take their very own lives in disgust...:rolleyes:

If it does, a good half the population will shoot themselves to avoid being governed by a system where a paper boy gets the same wages as a neuroscientst. Or get shot by the 4 year olds who now have the right to have a fire arm.

Somehow.. i doubt. Besides, plenty of children are killed and kill with firearms in countries which most definately aren't communist (thinking US). If a neuroscientist is equal to a paper boy, they shouldn't get different wages.

Who says noone can take charge?

Isn't democracy in theory a system where everyone has equal rights, powers and freedoms as well? Yet there is a government and leaders?

In communism, there could also be leaders and governments without it ceasing to be "communism".

For it to work, the principle has to be "All are equal" (without the addition "...but some are more equal then others") and you have to find a leadership who won't abuse the power they're given and take more for themselves then they are supposed to recieve. (Good luck with that.)

Your point about democracy is, in my opinion, extremely valid.
However, even if you find a leader with those qualities, he still has more power and is still asserting it simply by saying "wage must be £xx" and thus he still isn't equal. ("He" can be substituted with "her" to avoid sexism problems).

No, it'll only make the rich people disgusted.

because communism can't exist without a leader,

Yes, it can. But no society would ever be that perfect. It would be nice, though.

Actually, in Marxism, the answer is pretty obvious. The stage after capitalism is state socialism and that redistributes the wealth. The stage after that is communism and it is then that people have total equality and so forth. Anarchists, however, hold that capitalism can be dismantled without the use of the state.

Liasia']If a neuroscientist is equal to a paper boy, they shouldn't get different wages.

Somehow I think neuroscientists will take their skill elsewhere and all future people in education would much preffer to sit back and reap the rewards of "paperboydom".

Liasia']Somehow.. i doubt. Besides, plenty of children are killed and kill with firearms in countries which most definately aren't communist (thinking US). If a neuroscientist is equal to a paper boy, they shouldn't get different wages.

They both have the RIGHT to get the same wage, but the neuroscientist has worked harder, trained for longer and is saving peoples lives so thus deserves more money. The paper boy can work up if he wants to and get an even higher paid job.
Call me capitalist, but thats the way it works now, thats the way it should stay.

Somehow I think neuroscientists will take their skill elsewhere and all future people in education would much preffer to sit back and reap the rewards of "paperboydom".

Exactly.

Somehow I think neuroscientists will take their skill elsewhere and all future people in education would much preffer to sit back and reap the rewards of "paperboydom".

I think a lot of people would still go to university to become neuroscientists or whatever, if students were actually paid as much as the average person, and didn't have to pay for tuition.

Ah... why did the "sapient" human race EVER invent a common currency? Society would be so much better without it - it has an artificial value, can't directly benefit anyone and is always being heisted and hoarded. Communism would be best played out WITHOUT any wealth to distribute (or maybe this is more anarchoprimitivism or feudal system)... people would happily share and cycle everything then. In my opinion, wealth should only exist on the international scale (so that a communist state runs like a massive corporation - using the income from its exports to directly inject cash into the state and eliminate the requirement for exorbitant taxes)

They both have the RIGHT to get the same wage, but the neuroscientist has worked harder, trained for longer and is saving peoples lives so thus deserves more money. The paper boy can work up if he wants to and get an even higher paid job.
Call me capitalist, but thats the way it works now, thats the way it should stay.

Capitalist, bitch.

Somehow I think neuroscientists will take their skill elsewhere and all future people in education would much preffer to sit back and reap the rewards of "paperboydom".

Maybe some people would do the job for its innate rewards (satisfaction, advancing knowledge etc). Not EVERYONE in the human race is a slacker.

Liasia']Capitalist, bitch.

You called?

Liasia']Maybe some people would do the job for its innate rewards (satisfaction, advancing knowledge etc). Not EVERYONE in the human race is a slacker.

They would be if they could get paid for it.

You called?

You told me to say it. But hello anyway.

Liasia']You told me to say it. But hello anyway.
I know I did, I was responding as if it were my name.

They would be if they could get paid for it.

I disagree. Why would people want to become astronauts when they could with much less effort and risk take up an office job with equal pay?
It's not all about money.

Your point about democracy is, in my opinion, extremely valid.
However, even if you find a leader with those qualities, he still has more power and is still asserting it simply by saying "wage must be £xx" and thus he still isn't equal. ("He" can be substituted with "her" to avoid sexism problems).
Here's what I'm thinking:
Think of an hypothetical, ideal leader...

She would still be equal if she said "wages must be $xx fo all" as long as she didn't make an exception for herself (or anybody else). Just because one has power wouldn't make a person unequal - as long as that person didn't abuse it or overstep his bounds.

Now, another question would be how this person got into the position of power...

I know I did, I was responding as if it were my name.

I know.

Liasia']I know.
Ah ok sorry.

To the 'paperboydom' comment, why in the bloody hell would you assume that I, nor anyone else in a reasonably educated society, would want to live their lives as a darn paperboy?!

A hypothetical... You want to be a doctor; education, health care, et cetera, are a given. Everything pays the same, do you choose to be a doctor or a burger flipper?

Look at American society... Teachers get paid less than those in careers that may not even require a college education. We still have teachers, don't we?

And no one stops to think that maybe the nature of a human, as with any social species, is to adopt the nature glorified by the society. That self-interest is both consciously and biologically synonymous with the interest of the society as a whole. I would wage had humans been staunch capitalist during our primitive development, we never would've had the cooperative capabilities to survive, much less dominate the globe. And practically the whole Native American cultural group followed the prinicples of primitive communism and anarcho-syndicalism, with populations equal to, if not greater than, many that had 'privatized', with equal technological progress in mathematics and agriculture.

What about democratic communism? Marxist-trotskyism? I mean, Karl was born in a time when autocracy was the trend... ...When the idea of health care was laughable, this economist/philosopher envisioned a society in which people lived to support each other. He simply state that, through times of revolution (presumably military), there would have to be a centralized leader or leading body.

Personally I think a command economy's centeral planning body would be much more effective in terms of actually producing the items necessary for society if the general populous had a say it needed.

And, just for the record, communism advocates economic equality, not necessarily social equality. Everyone should have equal rights and such, but that doesn't mean everyone necessarily has equal influence; democracy is about equal representation, but that doesn't mean I have the same influence as a senator.

They both have the RIGHT to get the same wage, but the neuroscientist has worked harder, trained for longer and is saving peoples lives so thus deserves more money. The paper boy can work up if he wants to and get an even higher paid job.
Call me capitalist, but thats the way it works now, thats the way it should stay.

And a farmer shouldn't get paid squat because people aren't starving... A CEO deserve hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because he works so much harder than a teacher. Price should be purportionate to demand, and food should cost an arm and a leg...

...If the paperboy happens to have grown up in a lower-class family, he most likely cannot afford an adequate education, leading him to his pretty much garaunteed place in life as a worker. Since he can barely afford to feed his family, he'll probably find 'other means' by which to acquire capital, removing himself from the taxed work force and becoming a totally unproductive citizen... ...Or he will work his way up, and become... A totally uproductive citizen, that's paid unreasonable amounts at the expense of the consumer.

Liasia']Maybe some people would do the job for its innate rewards (satisfaction, advancing knowledge etc). Not EVERYONE in the human race is a slacker.

Exactly... And those that are can be the paperboy/burgerflipper/ditchdigger/et al. After all, we do need some of them.

By the way, just to clarify, I believe in equal hourly wage. Every job is necessary for society (except for the useless ones created through commercialism and consumerism), and thusly equally important per unit of work done. I.e. the farmer and doctor need each other to support each other, one does not deserve more because he/she chose a more challenging career.

Oh, and one last thing... Canada and Sweden are more communist than North Korea (Juche), Cuba (Militarist Stalinism), or China (Psuedo-Socialist State-Capitalism).

idiot, the commmunity would take charge and decide...
trying to insult communism is ridiculous when you can't grasp it's simplest concepts.

One person in an entire country just counts as a statistical error.

Doesnt that make you a statistical error?

To the 'paperboydom' comment, why in the bloody hell would you assume that I, nor anyone else in a reasonably educated society, would want to live their lives as a darn paperboy?!

A hypothetical... You want to be a doctor; education, health care, et cetera, are a given. Everything pays the same, do you choose to be a doctor or a burger flipper?

Look at American society... Teachers get paid less than those in careers that may not even require a college education. We still have teachers, don't we?


THANK you. I'm a teavher myself, and I do it because I find it interesting. I know I'm never going to get rich by doing it, and there are plenty of jobs that pay much better, but I've never felt the urge to try and get more money than I actually need. I prefer to do a job that's useful to society and that I enjoy.

idiot, the commmunity would take charge and decide...
trying to insult communism is ridiculous when you can't grasp it's simplest concepts.


Uh huh. the same as this online community takes charge and shows people the one true way of existing properly?

communism should be run by the computer, citizen.

Exactly... And those that are can be the paperboy/burgerflipper/ditchdigger/et al. After all, we do need some of them.
.

Thats the best some people can achieve. Either through lazyness or incompetance, people from the same school/college as me flourish others not, guess who ends up flipping burgers.


By the way, just to clarify, I believe in equal hourly wage. Every job is necessary for society (except for the useless ones created through commercialism and consumerism), and thusly equally important per unit of work done. I.e. the farmer and doctor need each other to support each other, one does not deserve more because he/she chose a more challenging career.

HAHA.
Where do I begin.
Firstly communism is supposed to run by we take only what we need. Being paid by the hour suggests hard work and stuggle will earn you more reward and therfore more food/luxuries and thats evil inequality!!11shift!

Secoundly some jobs are more intense than others. I can put my feet up for 8 hours each day with a book and be a security guard easy. I'm a surgion and I do a 3 hour operation I will come out drained and will certainly have put more work in 3 hours than most other jobs.

Not to mention it encourages slacking off! Grave digger X digs 3 graves an hour and Grave digger Y decides he'll take it slower and digs one grave in the entire day, but since he's "worked" twice or mabey even three times longer he should be paid more??

How do we work out which jobs are more "intense" or "valuable" or even stressfull or desirable?, Who knows. But the market will certainly be a better judge than what the proletariat comes up with. I've always felt we should encourage people to take up more challanging careers (especially those with the tallent to do them)

To the 'paperboydom' comment, why in the bloody hell would you assume that I, nor anyone else in a reasonably educated society, would want to live their lives as a darn paperboy?!

A hypothetical... You want to be a doctor; education, health care, et cetera, are a given. Everything pays the same, do you choose to be a doctor or a burger flipper?

I might choose burger flipperdom... or I would try very hard to find the easiest job possible and pick it to maximize my relaxation time but I would not pick being a doctor. Doctors have to work hard to get their education, they have to do well in their field and have all sorts of responsibility. Why would I want all responsibility and no reward? Seriously, given an option between slacking off and not slacking off with the same results I think that most people would pick slacking off. There is no incentive to work hard to become anything if all things are valued equally in terms of pay. I mean, sure there are some intrinsically motivated people within any society but they are not the majority, extrinsic motivation must not be forgotten or ignored, trying to get everyone intrinsically motivated would require brainwashing on a scale that the greatest fascist could hardly comprehend or be capable of.

Just to argue the OP's point, communism is an economic system. It says nothing about political rights, etc. I run chellis as a communist benevolent dictatorship, personally.

...
What do you think?

People dont understand the difference between anarchism and stateless communism. They're two very different things. Stateless communism can have more centralised democratic systems which enable planning of the economy

Communism will never work because of one, natural, human aspect: self interest.
People assume this about human nature, but how can we ever know that this is natural and not just something that is subconsciously taught to everyone from birth? Communism doesn't work because the people who practiced it on a national level were raised with a capitalist mindset.

Thats the best some people can achieve. Either through lazyness or incompetance, people from the same school/college as me flourish others not, guess who ends up flipping burgers.

Excuse me, I'm currently flipping burgers... Not 'cause I want to, but because I can't currently afford a higher education (working on it through what few socialist means there are left in America). And that doesn't really apply to the argument... ...Many are capable of being the CEO of McDonalds (physically and mentally), but most will end up flipping burgers simply for the fact that it is one of the few ways a person born into poverty can manage a living.

And lets keep in mind that America is the wealthiest nation on the planet, controlling over a third of the world's wealth. Were it not for us being the richest of the richest, you could imagine what being part of the working-class would be like (1930's US, anyone?).

Why not give the burger flipper and the CEO the opportunity to make a life while doing what they want, not force them into careers they dislike simply to make a living (decreasing production and morale, I might add)?.


HAHA.
Where do I begin.
Firstly communism is supposed to run by we take only what we need. Being paid by the hour suggests hard work and stuggle will earn you more reward and therfore more food/luxuries and thats evil inequality!!11shift!


It is the only feasible way in which to run a modern industrial nation under communism... A farmer that refuses to farm but one hour a week does not produce the same as one farming 40 a week, thusly not producing according to ability.


Secoundly some jobs are more intense than others. I can put my feet up for 8 hours each day with a book and be a security guard easy. I'm a surgion and I do a 3 hour operation I will come out drained and will certainly have put more work in 3 hours than most other jobs.


Yes... ...And, going back to agriculture, a farmer can toil over endless fields day in and day out and make less than a security gaurd. Capitalism is not about what jobs require the most labor or produce the most, just what is most demanded. If you produce enough food to feed your whole country, farming is a worthless industry and farmers are impoverished... Impoverished for having been productive as a whole, I fail to see how this provides incentive. Farming is already largely subsidized, and it's still hard to make a living wage through it (you can feed a village with your yield, yet you cannot feed your own family?).

And, keep in mind, under a communist system, they chose that career. The burdens are theirs to endure; it is their contribution to society.


Not to mention it encourages slacking off! Grave digger X digs 3 graves an hour and Grave digger Y decides he'll take it slower and digs one grave in the entire day, but since he's "worked" twice or mabey even three times longer he should be paid more??


That's the same under capitalism... ...Why do you think everyone tells me not to clock out for my breaks until the last moment. What's more, in a managerial position, you do less work and have the same 'incentive' to stay on the proverbial clock. Then you have salaried workers...


How do we work out which jobs are more "intense" or "valuable" or even stressfull or desirable?, Who knows. But the market will certainly be a better judge than what the proletariat comes up with. I've always felt we should encourage people to take up more challanging careers (especially those with the tallent to do them)

Yes, the market does a wonderful job of deciding what is of appropraite intensity and who deserves the appropriation of capital... Just look at free markets of the past. Children mined for 18 hour days at about $.5-1 an hour, sufferring injury and slave-like conditions (wage slaves, anyone?), while the wonderful industrialist held over 80% of the nation's wealth in about 5% of the population. Because, of course, the miner wasn't working nearly as hard as the industrialist... I mean, do you know what kind of labor it is to scream at child when they ask for breaks, or fire them for maming themselves. That's what I call just appropriation... ...Actually, free-market capitalism calls that just, which is why I ABHOR capitalism.

People assume this about human nature, but how can we ever know that this is natural and not just something that is subconsciously taught to everyone from birth? Communism doesn't work because the people who practiced it on a national level were raised with a capitalist mindset.

Exactly... Human nature is to assume the manfiested nature of the society that specific human is in. The values glorified by society are what we, subcounsciously and consciously, percieve as an appropriate 'nature'. For instance, the Church in Spain, during the whole 'lets burn the "Witches"' thing, killed or forced out 14 million people. Dropped its population from 20 million to 6, in just a decade or so; this obviously had a negative economic effect on everyone in the country (including the heads of state), and in many cases they burned the possessions of these former 'witches'. In fact, it's against our percievd nature to kill people at all (cops have to go through training to accept it psychologically), yet numerous societies throughout history have murdered senselessly, because society had taught them it was essentially what a functional member of said society would do...

And why are we still ignoring native Americans?... I mean, they had classless, collective societies well beyond the point of privatization in their eastern counterparts, yet remained in this state of primitive communism. If you're going to try and argue that half of a whole hemisphere of the globe held a mindset contrary to human nature, successfully, yet we can't even hope of reeducating the population of a single country, then this argument is kinda pointless... ...'Cause that's unreasonable and conflicts with said evidence.

Why not give the burger flipper and the CEO the opportunity to make a life while doing what they want, not force them into careers they dislike simply to make a living
Ok, to the last poster, we cannot allow the people to do what they want otherwise they will not do what we need. Certainly Arty might be a better artist than a hamburger flipper but that does not mean anything if we have enough artists and need more hamburger flippers. The market tries to get people into the positions where they are needed not necessarily where they want to go(if they do well enough to get a position that they want or those positions are abundant than good for them) seriously though, we can have too much of one type of position and not enough of another and this can lead to bad things.

Yes... ...And, going back to agriculture, a farmer can toil over endless fields day in and day out and make less than a security gaurd. Capitalism is not about what jobs require the most labor or produce the most, just what is most demanded. If you produce enough food to feed your whole country, farming is a worthless industry and farmers are impoverished... Impoverished for having been productive as a whole, I fail to see how this provides incentive. Farming is already largely subsidized, and it's still hard to make a living wage through it (you can feed a village with your yield, yet you cannot feed your own family?).Here is the reason for that, if they produce too much then we obviously dont' need that many farmers. The poor wages are a sign to get out of that field. What is supposed to happen is that farmers will leave that field and go into other more desirable ones thus making things work. I mean, if we have too many farmers then we have too many farmers, overproduction is not efficiency and the market knows this.

Yes, the market does a wonderful job of deciding what is of appropraite intensity and who deserves the appropriation of capital... Just look at free markets of the past. Children mined for 18 hour days at about $.5-1 an hour, sufferring injury and slave-like conditions (wage slaves, anyone?), while the wonderful industrialist held over 80% of the nation's wealth in about 5% of the population. Because, of course, the miner wasn't working nearly as hard as the industrialist... I mean, do you know what kind of labor it is to scream at child when they ask for breaks, or fire them for maming themselves. That's what I call just appropriation... ...Actually, free-market capitalism calls that just, which is why I ABHOR capitalism.Yeah, that is due to the labor market. There were millions of people who wanted jobs and not enough jobs for all of those people. If there is a massive supply of laborers and a small demand then prices go down for the labors because of this. You are obviously referring to the industrial revolution which was a massive period of change in which the market absorbed a massive influx of workers and given those conditions it would have been hard for any economic system to adapt to the problem. However, in favor of capitalism I must say that it was able to grow very rapidly in response to these conditions and they continued to adapt. Let's just look at it this way, we could have tried to solve the problems of that system through massive government intervention and ended up hurting future growth or we could have just taken the blow and the future growth, we did the latter and it has paid off. Certainly your status may be bad now but there is a chance for a better future, just remember, our American forefathers sold themselves into slavery for a chance at a better life, flipping hamburgers is probably better than what they did(well, it wasn't real slavery, it was indentured servitude for a few years for passage over to the new world but still it was pretty much temporary slavery)

And why are we still ignoring native Americans?... I mean, they had classless, collective societies well beyond the point of privatization in their eastern counterparts, yet remained in this state of primitive communism. If you're going to try and argue that half of a whole hemisphere of the globe held a mindset contrary to human nature, successfully, yet we can't even hope of reeducating the population of a single country, then this argument is kinda pointless... ...'Cause that's unreasonable and conflicts with said evidence.
The North American indians did not have very advanced societies and the fact is that I don't think anyone doubts that small groups of communists can exist but communism cannot work for cities and nations because of the fact that the community is too large to actually feel close to. I could work in a communist society with my family or even a small city but I could not do that with few million other people.

The Aztecs are not a group that you are looking at because they had a caste society and well, liked killing people and really are not an ideal society to emulate.

The incans also had a classed society.

Really, what the native Americans show is that classed society is required for advanced society. Indians are not advanced and they are communist, Incans and Aztecs are advanced and they have caste systems(which are worse than capitalism which also has classes but greater class mobility as well)

In response to the original post: Why couldn't wealth be redistributed collectively?

I might choose burger flipperdom... or I would try very hard to find the easiest job possible and pick it to maximize my relaxation time but I would not pick being a doctor. How strange, I would pick whichever job I enjoyed the most. Most enjoyable =!= easiest.

Ok, to the last poster, we cannot allow the people to do what they want otherwise they will not do what we need. Certainly Arty might be a better artist than a hamburger flipper but that does not mean anything if we have enough artists and need more hamburger flippers.If no one is willing to flip hamburgers for a living then the people who want hamburgers can flip them themselves.

People assume this about human nature, but how can we ever know that this is natural and not just something that is subconsciously taught to everyone from birth? Communism doesn't work because the people who practiced it on a national level were raised with a capitalist mindset.
Well, it is quite simple, Communism cannot work on a national level because it requires a level of moral strength that is not likely to be mass produced. The mass production of morality would require a fascistic state in order to accomplish this goal, because that type of state is one that we would not want we end up with just a large, bureacratic corrupt state to deal with our problems. No matter what you have to deal with the problem of incentives, small societies can deal with this problem with social incentives, large societies are too large to provide the same social incentives and thus money has to arise to give these incentives. Because of the complexities in incentizing people to do things different levels of money must go to different folks. Avoiding incentives is impossible no matter what society you live in.

Communism was never claimed to be implemented by anyone.

Socialism has been, and it does work.

There is no need for a "leader", the people will to take power for themselves.

"Stalin did not kill all those people. You actually believe what is said about him, think about who is saying it. An enemy is not going to make someone they hate sound like a nice guy. Stalin did kill, but only people that tried to take over the SU to reinstitute capitalism (Which happened anyway).

As it turns out, there is no need to discuss history with Antonov-Ovseyenko and many other critics of Stalin. No it is not necessary to discuss the deaths in Siberia fighting Japan or in Finland thanks to the war that was going on in those years. Academic sources show that Stalin's "Great Terror" couldn't have killed 19 million.

Fewer than 25 million died from all causes from 1935 to 1941. That's using concrete numbers for 1935 to 1941 and the highest number from that period to estimate 1941, which according to historians was well past the peak of the "Great Terror" anyway. (2)

So to arrive at 19 million deaths to blame on Stalin, there had to be fewer than 6 million deaths from normal causes between 1935 and 1941. Again to round off in our critics' favor, let's assume that to be 900,000 deaths a year for seven years as the deaths from normal causes. So for example, in 1936, that would mean a crude death rate from normal causes of less than 5 per 1000 a year, based on a population of 180.2 million people in the Soviet Union.

That's impossible and the death rate has never been that low in the Soviet Union, Stalin or no Stalin, not even in 1982, when the crude death rate was 10.1. (3) In fact, the crude death rate has never been below 5 per 1000 a year in U.S. history either. A more realistic death rate from natural causes would be around 20. It was 20.3 in 1926, which according to almost all historians, was before Stalin started his repression, since he had only just assumed leadership in 1924.

So who is this responsible for this blatantly impossible assertion about Stalin? It was the son of a Trotskyist. Antonov-Ovseyenko was a Trotskyist who tried to use his military position to aid Trotsky take over the party in the USSR."

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/stalindeaths.html

Notes:
1. Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko,The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny, (NY: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 213.
2. Ger P. Van Den Berg, The Soviet System of Justice: Figures and Policy, (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), p. 180.
3. Ibid., p. 181.

Children should quote their sources, it's pretty ridiculous that all try to pass of arbitrary figures off as "Facts".

In response to the original post: Why couldn't wealth be redistributed collectively?Because of the fact that each individual deserves a different slice for what they do. This is based upon the fact that certain jobs are more important than others, knowing how much material needs to be ordered is a quality that is rarer and more important than just fixing the material. The fact is that the problem with redistributing is making sure that it is a fair and effective distribution, it really is more effective to just let the market distribute and just skim off the top for whatever is required for society.

How strange, I would pick whichever job I enjoyed the most. Most enjoyable =!= easiest.This is still part of economic incentives and really a part of capitalism itself. The fact of the matter is that harder work will discourage some people so therefore the reward must pay off. I would honestly prefer to not go into engineering if the pay was the same, but the pay is not the same so therefore I go into engineering which due to pay difference will benefit myself as I get more pay as an engineer and society will benefit from my efforts to improve whatever the heck I work on, it creates a win-win situation. Just face it, not everyone will want to get certain jobs, I mean, seriously we would probably experience a decline in the number of doctors and many things like that.

If no one is willing to flip hamburgers for a living then the people who want hamburgers can flip them themselves. This means that there is greater inefficiency and waste just to support some stupid ideal. I would rather just pay some dude to flip my burgers for me because it wastes less of my time, it gives the dude a job, and I get a burger. Besides, do you think there is a glut of people willing to do all of the other jobs too? I mean, I don't think that the average bike assembly line person loves their job but if we did not have them then society would take a large jump backwards.

Because of the fact that each individual deserves a different slice for what they do. This is based upon the fact that certain jobs are more important than others, knowing how much material needs to be ordered is a quality that is rarer and more important than just fixing the material. But fixing the material is also important.

The fact is that the problem with redistributing is making sure that it is a fair and effective distribution, it really is more effective to just let the market distribute and just skim off the top for whatever is required for society.No one would be willing to set a tax rate high enough for what is required by society.

This is still part of economic incentives and really a part of capitalism itself. The fact of the matter is that harder work will discourage some people so therefore the reward must pay off. I would honestly prefer to not go into engineering if the pay was the same, but the pay is not the same so therefore I go into engineering which due to pay difference will benefit myself as I get more pay as an engineer and society will benefit from my efforts to improve whatever the heck I work on, it creates a win-win situation. Which job, out of all of the possible ones, would you most enjoy doing?

Just face it, not everyone will want to get certain jobs, I mean, seriously we would probably experience a decline in the number of doctors and many things like that.It's possible, but I doubt it. More people would be able to go to medical school if it's free.

This means that there is greater inefficiency and waste just to support some stupid ideal. I would rather just pay some dude to flip my burgers for me because it wastes less of my time, it gives the dude a job, and I get a burger. And if the dude is willing to accept that, that's fine, but he shouldn't have to pick it due to a lack of good options.

Besides, do you think there is a glut of people willing to do all of the other jobs too? I mean, I don't think that the average bike assembly line person loves their job but if we did not have them then society would take a large jump backwards.I don't agree that society would take a large jump backwards; everyone doing the work they enjoy and being able to make a living off of it is a step forward.

If someone isn't willing to do those other jobs for a living, then people can do them themselves if those jobs are so necessary.

<snip>
Does it matter? The fact is this, Stalin killed people out of paranoia and stuff like that. I mean, the fact is that the death toll is in the millions and I don't need a dictionary to say that. There are stories that he had lists of names that he would just x out people he wanted eliminated. Ok, it is in the millions and let us be done with it. Who cares how many millions? 1 million is an insane number to kill and the fact is that there is a lot of controversy over the exact number of millions anyway.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin#Death_toll
The numbers that people are quoting are probably from this anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_of_Communism

Holyawesomeness, all your points are dependent on living in a society that all of it's members are well off. Socialism and Communism honestly cannot be implemented in first world countries because it's not in the class interest of the rich citizens to implement it. However, the poor are going to get tired of being exploited in the third world, and will force us to equalize sooner or later.

You've "heard stories"? That is your defence?

Well, your liberal argument doesn't stand up. Americans kill billions a year through their imperialist ambitions, they don't do anything to stop it, so they are responsible. Stalin killed enemies of the people, and defended the people. He industrialized the entire nation in a few years what took other nations decades. Without him Russia would have been destroyed by the Nazi's, as it almost was.

You've "heard stories"? That is your defence?
I saw it on the history channel and I have read his biography. What is your point? The man was a bastard through and through and I don't think that anyone would fault me on saying that. I even posted links to keep you happy ok?

THE US LETS ANYTHING BE SAID ABOUT HIM!

It doesn't matter if you watched the History channel, they have reported false things before, and any book written about him in the US that is not showing him in a terrible light will not be published.

But fixing the material is also important.
There is no doubt that fixing the material is important, if it weren't then nobody would pay for it.

No one would be willing to set a tax rate high enough for what is required by society.Perhaps not but the difference will not be enough to really cause problems. Besides, I recently read in a book called "Just Capital" by Adair Turner, an economist that a good tax rate was around 40-45%

Which job, out of all of the possible ones, would you most enjoy doing?The easiest one, it will stress me less and not weigh on me after the work is done. I really don't want to work, I would really prefer to sit back, relax, and have fun with some friends. This may not tell you much in terms of what field I will go into but it does tell you something about my nature, I would take an easy job just so I would have an easy life and this nature would not be very favorable to a socialist society because not all jobs can be equally easy. If we included the aspect of monetary incentives then I would go for the job that pays the most for simple reasoning, more pay means that I have more prestige and that I can do more with what free time I have because money allows for more value to be taken from free-time. I mean, really what is better: a trip to a neighboring small town or a trip to Paris or Rome or something to see amazing sights? I think most people would prefer amazing sights and those are only available if one has the money to pay for that improvement.

It's possible, but I doubt it. More people would be able to go to medical school if it's free.Medical school is known to be incredibly tough, I am not sure that they would go there if they did not have economic incentives and I definitely don't know that they would stay within our nation if we did not have different wages for different jobs. Brain drain would represent a loss of investment for a nation that has free medical school and a lack of competitive wages would mean a continual brain drain. The reason I don't think as many people would go to medical school though if doctors would not get as much money is that there would not be as much prestige to being a doctor. Prestige is typically seen as having power, wealth is a form of power, if all people have equal wealth than all people have somewhat equal prestige(not taking into account undesirable jobs like garbage disposal). Equal prestige means that less people will care about getting the job and as such will not bother with all of the intense schooling and hard work to get easy jobs so that they will get to have fun. Med school is by all accounts hard work and most people do not like to study that much and would rather debate on internet forums or something like that. If their work is not rewarded then they probably won't bother with it.

And if the dude is willing to accept that, that's fine, but he shouldn't have to pick it due to a lack of good options. Well, every society will have to limit options. I don't want morons in top positions and society wouldn't either. In fact, a society that does not have any form of system that forces people to accept some options would not succeed, there is no magic formula in the human brain that simulates the market and therefore personal desires will not match with societal desires leading to too many wannabe artists and music stars and such and not enough people going into manual labor and engineering and stuff like that. The fact that our society limits options based on ability is a good thing, if the dude had 3 years of law school then he might not want to accept the job as a burger flipper due to a better opportunity defending the legal interests of another dude. It all falls down to you going to the position where your best interests are served as well as societies and the system that does this is relatively good as it is not a strictly defined caste system but instead is rather fluid. Today's burger flipper can be tomorrow's accountant or computer scientist.

I don't agree that society would take a large jump backwards; everyone doing the work they enjoy and being able to make a living off of it is a step forward. It would be preferable if they could and perhaps capitalism will be able to evolve in such a manner to allow that. However, society has certain jobs that need to be done, it does not matter if nobody wants to be a firman we still need firemen. The human brain does not have a market function that allows us to adapt to where we are needed like ants do in an ant colony. Our colonies are too complex to allow for such simplicity.

If someone isn't willing to do those other jobs for a living, then people can do them themselves if those jobs are so necessary.
This leads to greater economic inefficiency and mismanagement of resources. Why would we want to do this if there is a better way? I mean, you want society to go around its elbow to get to its hand because you simply don't like a current system that has worked extremely well for everyone compared to previous systems. Capitalism is not a caste system and your improvements would be reverting to primitivism and would lead to greater inefficiency, less economic growth and less improvement. Society is all about trade-offs and the trade-off that you would wish to make would be worse for everyone, garbagemen benefit from being garbagemen.

THE US LETS ANYTHING BE SAID ABOUT HIM!

It doesn't matter if you watched the History channel, they have reported false things before, and any book written about him in the US that is not showing him in a terrible light will not be published.
Nikita Krushchev, A PERSON WITHIN THE DANG SOVIET UNION, denounced Stalin for his crimes and most evidence points towards Stalin's role as a despot and a bloodthirsty one. Lenin even recognized Stalin's bloodthirsty nature and wanted Trotsky to take over the USSR when he(Lenin) was gone. It is almost undisputed historical fact among all people that Stalin was a despot, even most socialists except this do I really have to defend the fact that Stalin did kill people beyond what was warranted to you? I mean, most other people would agree with my standpoint no matter where they come from or what they believe in(except maybe authoritarians would back him but that is to be expected)

You've "heard stories"? That is your defence?

Well, your liberal argument doesn't stand up. Americans kill billions a year through their imperialist ambitions, they don't do anything to stop it, so they are responsible. Stalin killed enemies of the people, and defended the people. He industrialized the entire nation in a few years what took other nations decades. Without him Russia would have been destroyed by the Nazi's, as it almost was.
BILLIONS??? There are only 6 billion people in the world! We would have destroyed the entire world by now if what you said was true. Stalin killed people that he thought were threats to his power, he did to some extent make things worse for the USSR in terms of warfare by killing off all of the top military leaders within the nation. He did industrialize his nation very quickly but he did so brutally and his methods led to the deaths of many people as he clamped down quickly on the economy. He preferred to let his own people starve by his direct actions than to slow down the economic growth and as such the soviet union grew both quicker and more brutally than any other nation had.

For me, as a communist, the problem is pretty basic, here [having ignored most of the thread, because what-the-hell-does-Kruschev-have-to-do-with-anything?]. Redistribution is a fundamentally disinteresting term, for me. The problem is all of these ruddy Marxists ruining communism, and everyone thinking that they invented and finished it.

I can not for the life of me understand how, in this day and age, there can be such a thing as a Marxist, given that, to be such a thing, one would have to read Marx and know him, and in doing so, as an intelligent being, one could not fail to realise that Marx died knowing that he was wrong, after years spent trying to back-track, failing utterly to work his way out of the corner into which he had painted himself. It's just upsetting.

It is too late for revolution and redistribution, but there's millions of square kilometres of perfectly hospitable earth left totally uninhabited and almost entirely ignored. Communists, if others existed, would be swarming all over the world's many uninhabited islands and suchness, founding communes and building right societies. There's no need to redistribute from an even slate.

Alas, the fight is always between wrong and wronger, and right never does more than raise its hand to a storm of silence, and then get really fricking drunk and whine about it.

[Pours another]

Ok, to the last poster, we cannot allow the people to do what they want otherwise they will not do what we need. Certainly Arty might be a better artist than a hamburger flipper but that does not mean anything if we have enough artists and need more hamburger flippers. The market tries to get people into the positions where they are needed not necessarily where they want to go(if they do well enough to get a position that they want or those positions are abundant than good for them) seriously though, we can have too much of one type of position and not enough of another and this can lead to bad things.

Here is the reason for that, if they produce too much then we obviously dont' need that many farmers. The poor wages are a sign to get out of that field. What is supposed to happen is that farmers will leave that field and go into other more desirable ones thus making things work. I mean, if we have too many farmers then we have too many farmers, overproduction is not efficiency and the market knows this.
[quote]

Yet thousands of people starved yearly... They were hard working and industrious, so there was abundant production (their produce, I might add). Yet prices on goods were extremely high and average wage was very, very low. Working conditions were disgusting... ...This is the net result of capitalism: the centralization of wealth within the hands of the few, and the general economic exploitation of the many. It discourages productivity in general.

And there is no reason why the market SHOULD discourage this overproduction... People, in the US and abroad, still starve. 15,000 children a year die of malnutrition in the US alone, yet farming is still not a lucrative career and minimum wage is still below what most economists claim is 'capable of sustaining a small family'. Why should goods be priced so high and wage so low? Because capitalism discourages an economy large enough to employ the entirety of the country.

[quote]
Yeah, that is due to the labor market. There were millions of people who wanted jobs and not enough jobs for all of those people. If there is a massive supply of laborers and a small demand then prices go down for the labors because of this. You are obviously referring to the industrial revolution which was a massive period of change in which the market absorbed a massive influx of workers and given those conditions it would have been hard for any economic system to adapt to the problem. However, in favor of capitalism I must say that it was able to grow very rapidly in response to these conditions and they continued to adapt. Let's just look at it this way, we could have tried to solve the problems of that system through massive government intervention and ended up hurting future growth or we could have just taken the blow and the future growth, we did the latter and it has paid off. Certainly your status may be bad now but there is a chance for a better future, just remember, our American forefathers sold themselves into slavery for a chance at a better life, flipping hamburgers is probably better than what they did(well, it wasn't real slavery, it was indentured servitude for a few years for passage over to the new world but still it was pretty much temporary slavery)

WE could've just taken the blow?! Excuse me, but the industrial sector could've easily employed the entire nation via creating new enterprises (i.e. jobs) had the majority of the wealth (and, therefore, power to produce new jobs/industries) not been concentrated in the hands of a very inefficient few.

As far as I'm concerned, a country producing enough food per year to feed itself AND its closest neighbor, holding nearly 40% of the entire planet's wealth, with the productivity capacity to REproduce another bullet for every person on the planet, that doesn't feed its citizens (especially the ones actually producing the food), doesn't house them (the ones making the houses), doesn't provide health care (those producing the materials for said care), and doesn't even educate them (those educating and developing the concepts/technologies that they require such education) is a country with a FAILING economic system. I don't care if the corporations and elitists that own them made huge profits; they produced nothing! It was the working-class' produce, not theirs. Yet the working-class, as a whole, was not even provided the means by which to acquire even a third of the proverbial pie (a pie, I might add, large enough to support the hemisphere, compared to what nations currently run on per citizen).

And, for the record, there was massive government intervention. Capitalism has a tendency to decline anyway, but the government intervention (minimum wage, child labor laws, farming subsidies, anti-monopoly laws, et al) was the only thing keeping absolute revolution for breaking out. The population had to unionize, riot, picket, boycott, strike, and protest just to ensure the government wouldn't allow your 'wonderful' free-market economy to force a child to work in a textile mill for 16 hours a day... That's a system of exploitation for the benefit of a very few, no matter what way you look at it.

The North American indians did not have very advanced societies and the fact is that I don't think anyone doubts that small groups of communists can exist but communism cannot work for cities and nations because of the fact that the community is too large to actually feel close to. I could work in a communist society with my family or even a small city but I could not do that with few million other people.

The Aztecs are not a group that you are looking at because they had a caste society and well, liked killing people and really are not an ideal society to emulate.

The incans also had a classed society.

Really, what the native Americans show is that classed society is required for advanced society. Indians are not advanced and they are communist, Incans and Aztecs are advanced and they have caste systems(which are worse than capitalism which also has classes but greater class mobility as well)

North American natives were, by population, as advanced as many European societies. They were distributed over a larger area and focused on social/agricultural development rather than imperial/military development. They understood ecology long before we thought of our effect on nature; and keep in mind they arrived to the continent very late, and were in an ice age for much of the rest of the world's (Incans, Aztecs, Mayans, Chinese, Egyptian, Sumerian) development. Yet their societies were stable and the population growth was comparable to that of many European societies. They were a sound society, not a destructive, oppressive one like many others (European and Meso-American). And the Aztecs were behind much of the world, many parts that 'started' their 'civilized' development at the same time if not later.

By the way, communism, pure communism, is supposed to work on a city by city basis. The end result, after a socialist national government, is a large number of essentially autonomous cities/regions, collectively producing wealth for the local population.

Because of the fact that each individual deserves a different slice for what they do. This is based upon the fact that certain jobs are more important than others, knowing how much material needs to be ordered is a quality that is rarer and more important than just fixing the material. The fact is that the problem with redistributing is making sure that it is a fair and effective distribution, it really is more effective to just let the market distribute and just skim off the top for whatever is required for society.


Importance, as perviously stated, is not the emphasis of capitalism; demand is. As history shows, through the capitalist perspective, it doesn't matter if a tenth of your population is malnurished, that doesn't make farming a profitable or 'important' career.

The market distributes as such: 10% with about 50-60% of the wealth; 60% with about 20-30%; and 30% with about 10-20%. Yet that's the order of productivity, from least to greatest. The vast majority of the pie is produced by the lower 30%, yet they recieve less than a third of said pie.

To take that anology and your statement beyond what was intended, here's a literal hypothetical you could derive from your basis. If a friend gave me a recipe for a pie, with the agreement that he got to eat some of the pie too, and I baked 10 pies, would it be proper for him to take 8 of the pies for himself, even though I spent hours baking the pies?

And no, knowing how much material is required for a certain good is not as important as producing the good; one could reasonably argue that it is AS important, but not more. That's equal to saying that a doctor shouldn't get paid squat, only the ones that provide medical discoveries and/or manage a hospital monetarily.


This is still part of economic incentives and really a part of capitalism itself. The fact of the matter is that harder work will discourage some people so therefore the reward must pay off. I would honestly prefer to not go into engineering if the pay was the same, but the pay is not the same so therefore I go into engineering which due to pay difference will benefit myself as I get more pay as an engineer and society will benefit from my efforts to improve whatever the heck I work on, it creates a win-win situation. Just face it, not everyone will want to get certain jobs, I mean, seriously we would probably experience a decline in the number of doctors and many things like that.


But, as stated over and over with justification, capitalism does not pay you for harder work. See: working-class farmer. See also: child-labor. For further resources, see: industrialist, CEO, teacher.

I mean, come on... In one day, I could very well work harder as a burger flipper than the manager at my store, even though at least half my managers do nothing but sit around. As a general rule, the more you make under a capitalist society, the less you have to work.

[/quote]
This means that there is greater inefficiency and waste just to support some stupid ideal. I would rather just pay some dude to flip my burgers for me because it wastes less of my time, it gives the dude a job, and I get a burger. Besides, do you think there is a glut of people willing to do all of the other jobs too? I mean, I don't think that the average bike assembly line person loves their job but if we did not have them then society would take a large jump backwards.[/QUOTE]

No, this means less obsessively commericalist driven waste; this means the destruction of essentially useless and certainly harmful (heart disease, anyone) careers that no one really wants to work anyway. And, when you 'pay the flipper', all you do is pay the CEO, who does next to no work. Those actually producing the burger, whether they raise the cattle, grow the onions/tomatoes, or grow the wheat, recieve next to nothing in the way of salary. This discourages productivity in those fields because A) I can slack off and get paid the same per hour, and B) I can get into a higher position, do less work, and get paid much, much more.

Anyway, those without a particular ambition as far as a particular field would be organized into an unskilled labor force. From their perspective, you do the odd/unpleasent jobs for society and recieve a living wage. From the ambitious person's perspective, they do those jobs and I can persue the career I wish while making a living wage also. After all, why would A) I want that crappy job, and B) why should they have to live in poverty just because 'normal' jobs don't necessarily interest them?

Well, it is quite simple, Communism cannot work on a national level because it requires a level of moral strength that is not likely to be mass produced. The mass production of morality would require a fascistic state in order to accomplish this goal, because that type of state is one that we would not want we end up with just a large, bureacratic corrupt state to deal with our problems. No matter what you have to deal with the problem of incentives, small societies can deal with this problem with social incentives, large societies are too large to provide the same social incentives and thus money has to arise to give these incentives. Because of the complexities in incentizing people to do things different levels of money must go to different folks. Avoiding incentives is impossible no matter what society you live in.

It doesn't require moral incentive... ...We are a social species; our basic nature is determined by what we observe others express. A child growing up in a violent home is, as such, violent. One growing up in a greedy home is, likewise, greedy. There are innate biological incentives that would drive a person to produce for society, along with the personal drive to succeed in your aspiring career. Those without strong urges similar to the aforesaid would make up the general laborers, as it would be the easiest, most direct way to make a living. It's win-win without the need for child-freakin'-labor (since it's just oh-so profitable for capitalism).

As I said before, it is against most species 'natures', and all social species 'natures', to murder another of its race. However, it has been done by whole societies on mass scales based on ideals which were not beneficial for the whole of society; ideals beneficial to all within a society, such as equal opportunity and equal wealth distribution, should be much easier to proliferate within society, especially since they have an original, biological basis.

BILLIONS??? There are only 6 billion people in the world! We would have destroyed the entire world by now if what you said was true. Stalin killed people that he thought were threats to his power, he did to some extent make things worse for the USSR in terms of warfare by killing off all of the top military leaders within the nation. He did industrialize his nation very quickly but he did so brutally and his methods led to the deaths of many people as he clamped down quickly on the economy. He preferred to let his own people starve by his direct actions than to slow down the economic growth and as such the soviet union grew both quicker and more brutally than any other nation had.

I think he meant millions... However, the US has murdered millions (Philipines, Korea, Vietnam, Japanese-Americans, Native-Americans, Centeral and South-Americans, even Russians during the revolution). Truth be told, Stalin was an unstable, violent leader, with little respect for life. America does it over-seas, he did it in Russia...

His industrialization of Russia was necessary, however, his murdering of top military advisors, in order to prevent some sort of coup, was the indirect cause of many millions of deaths. Directly, it's probably between 5-7 million. To claim that deaths due to various disease that Russia hadn't the capability to fight, the Nazi invasion, US military 'intervention', and a generally necessary shift toward industrial labor in the Soviet Union was Stalin's fault is a stretch. In his words, "The advanced nations are 50 to 100 years ahead of us; we must close this gap in 10 or be destroyed."

After all, Hitler did see Slavs as an inferior race, culpable only for slavery or execution. The Ukraine was supposed to become part of the Aryan race's living space, and, thusly, needing some 'cleaning' in order to make room. To say that the massive deaths caused by Hitler on Russian territory were Stalin's fault, due to military incompetance, is like claiming WWII was the US's fault for diplomatic incompetance (blaming Germany, impoverishing them, without consent taking Russian land in Europe, et cetera).

In any case, I, for one, support democratic communism. I respect Lenin, since the vicious nature of the Whites (burning cities, raping and murdering thousands, and the like) necessitated a centralized democracy, but I think the Soviet Union would've been a much better example of socialism had Trotsky had taken power. However... Hitler probably would've walked all over a surely unindustrialized and pre-modern Russia, since I doubt Trotsky would've used such violent, and, morbidly ironically, effective methods by which to industrialize Russia. This, I suppose, would've led to a very, very bad situation for most of the eastern hemisphere. In a way, Stalin saved us from a Nazi east and possibly world, and, in the same frame, cursed us with a broken image of socialism and assumed stalinist platform for all communist (ergo the assumption that communism requires violent dictators).

Yet thousands of people starved yearly... They were hard working and industrious, so there was abundant production (their produce, I might add). Yet prices on goods were extremely high and average wage was very, very low. Working conditions were disgusting... ...This is the net result of capitalism: the centralization of wealth within the hands of the few, and the general economic exploitation of the many. It discourages productivity in general.

And there is no reason why the market SHOULD discourage this overproduction... People, in the US and abroad, still starve. 15,000 children a year die of malnutrition in the US alone, yet farming is still not a lucrative career and minimum wage is still below what most economists claim is 'capable of sustaining a small family'. Why should goods be priced so high and wage so low? Because capitalism discourages an economy large enough to employ the entirety of the country.

Yes, people do starve in the U.S, just like in most countries, even communist ones. In fact, all the communist countries on earth are usually poor.

Minimum wage does not equal more wealth. Poor people are poor because they have no work value, i.e unskilled. Having to pay more for someone who contributes little discourages business to hire those people. So, they higher the minimum wage, the higher the unemployment rate. Look at France, or Europe in general.

Wages in U.S are the highest in the world, the average person makes around 40, 000 a year. Our goods are price lower the most countries( look at gas). So what are you talking about?

The U.S unemployment rate is lower than most countries, and the lowest for a country of it's size. You need to really look stuff up before you speak.


WE could've just taken the blow?! Excuse me, but the industrial sector could've easily employed the entire nation via creating new enterprises (i.e. jobs) had the majority of the wealth (and, therefore, power to produce new jobs/industries) not been concentrated in the hands of a very inefficient few.

Yes, industry could easily employ ALL people. But that is not how economics work. If everyone was employed at a factory or one industry then that industry would produce an abundance of goods, over produce. Then who would buy ALL of those goods? No one, becaue everyone would already have them! So then the businesses would have to lower prices in order to intice people to buy goods they already have, meaning less profits. So then how can that same industry employ those people? They can't. That is why there are many industries. People who are unemployed have no valuable skills, otherwise they would have work, makes sense?

I will mention that the U.S( I assume this is the representation of communism) Has a higher standard of living, the highest GDP, the one of the highest average incomes(top 3). Communist countries? All in the background. The lowest in everything. China wised up, and implemented capitalist ideas, and look what happened! You guys never learn....


As far as I'm concerned, a country producing enough food per year to feed itself AND its closest neighbor, holding nearly 40% of the entire planet's wealth, with the productivity capacity to REproduce another bullet for every person on the planet, that doesn't feed its citizens (especially the ones actually producing the food), doesn't house them (the ones making the houses), doesn't provide health care (those producing the materials for said care), and doesn't even educate them (those educating and developing the concepts/technologies that they require such education) is a country with a FAILING economic system.

First of all, how in the hell can someone who produces the food, starve? I would logically assume if they produce food, they would eat, or is it just me?

Where do you get this stuff from? U.S citizens do have houses, even the poor( they rent). Education here is free, so....... what?

If the U.S is a failing economic system, then what in the hell do you call North Korea?



I don't care if the corporations and elitists that own them made huge profits; they produced nothing! It was the working-class' produce, not theirs. Yet the working-class, as a whole, was not even provided the means by which to acquire even a third of the proverbial pie (a pie, I might add, large enough to support the hemisphere, compared to what nations currently run on per citizen).

Our Working class has an average yearly income of around 38 to 42 thousand a year. So, WTF?


And, for the record, there was massive government intervention. Capitalism has a tendency to decline anyway, but the government intervention (minimum wage, child labor laws, farming subsidies, anti-monopoly laws, et al) was the only thing keeping absolute revolution for breaking out. The population had to unionize, riot, picket, boycott, strike, and protest just to ensure the government wouldn't allow your 'wonderful' free-market economy to force a child to work in a textile mill for 16 hours a day... That's a system of exploitation for the benefit of a very few, no matter what way you look at it.

What? The U.S Spends over a trillion dollars on helping people year(about to be 2 trillion with the new laws). What other country does that?
Yes, the working class had to picket boycott and strike, and you know what happened? They got what they wanted. This happens in a lot of countries.

If you know U.S history, most of the strikes were for adult workers and their working conditions.

I will ask again, if the U.S has a terrible economic system, then cite a country that does better.

His industrialization of Russia was necessary, however, his murdering of top military advisors, in order to prevent some sort of coup, was the indirect cause of many millions of deaths. Directly, it's probably between 5-7 million. To claim that deaths due to various disease that Russia hadn't the capability to fight, the Nazi invasion, US military 'intervention', and a generally necessary shift toward industrial labor in the Soviet Union was Stalin's fault is a stretch. In his words, "The advanced nations are 50 to 100 years ahead of us; we must close this gap in 10 or be destroyed."

History lesson: Stalin Directly murdered millions. He murdered more than 12 million people. His attempts to make everyone equal failed. In fact there was great dissent in Russia against his policies, and that is why he had to kill 12 million. There was still wide spread poverty. Most of the people were in fact poor. So much for "industrialization", or what we like to call forced labor in capitalist world.


After all, Hitler did see Slavs as an inferior race, culpable only for slavery or execution. The Ukraine was supposed to become part of the Aryan race's living space, and, thusly, needing some 'cleaning' in order to make room. To say that the massive deaths caused by Hitler on Russian territory were Stalin's fault, due to military incompetance, is like claiming WWII was the US's fault for diplomatic incompetance (blaming Germany, impoverishing them, without consent taking Russian land in Europe, et cetera).

Umm, Germany impoverished itself, you know, the whole war thing. Are you making excuses for Hitler? Wow.

In any case, I, for one, support democratic communism. I respect Lenin, since the vicious nature of the Whites (burning cities, raping and murdering thousands, and the like) necessitated a centralized democracy, but I think the Soviet Union would've been a much better example of socialism had Trotsky had taken power. However... Hitler probably would've walked all over a surely unindustrialized and pre-modern Russia, since I doubt Trotsky would've used such violent, and, morbidly ironically, effective methods by which to industrialize Russia.

And stalin didn't use violent and brutal methods to rule Russia? 12 million people died. I guess that was just really mean.....

This, I suppose, would've led to a very, very bad situation for most of the eastern hemisphere. In a way, Stalin saved us from a Nazi east and possibly world, and, in the same frame, cursed us with a broken image of socialism and assumed stalinist platform for all communist (ergo the assumption that communism requires violent dictators).

Stalin didn't save Russia, mother nature and the Allies did. Remember? Germany was fighting a war on two fronts. It did not have the resources to deal with the other Allies and Russia. Then winter came, and supplies ran thin because most of them were going to a more threatening enemy.(The Western Front) Many Germans died. Before the pressure was on, Germany was kicking Russia's ass. Remember Stalingrad?(Russia barely won) Or what about the other battles leading up to that? Asses got kicked. So much for "industrialization".

It doesn't require moral incentive... ...We are a social species; our basic nature is determined by what we observe others express. A child growing up in a violent home is, as such, violent. One growing up in a greedy home is, likewise, greedy. There are innate biological incentives that would drive a person to produce for society, along with the personal drive to succeed in your aspiring career. Those without strong urges similar to the aforesaid would make up the general laborers, as it would be the easiest, most direct way to make a living. It's win-win without the need for child-freakin'-labor (since it's just oh-so profitable for capitalism).

Psychology lesson: People from violent homes do not always become violent. Children that are abused usually are reserved with deep emotional problems. Some people deal with these problems with anger, others depression others get through it. There are many people who grow up rich and give back, and many poor people who become greedy.

Communes have a history of failure. You are too idealistic. People who contribute to society do so for two reasons, it makes them feel good, or they don't want to feel bad. There is no such thing as being unselfish. Your scenario would only work if every is doing the same job, which would be impossible. Who is to determine what is more work, back breaking field work( someone has to do it) or milking a cow? Why should the person who just sits there and milks a cow get the same as the person who does the back breaking field work? Who decides? That is why communes fail.


As I said before, it is against most species 'natures', and all social species 'natures', to murder another of its race. However, it has been done by whole societies on mass scales based on ideals which were not beneficial for the whole of society; ideals beneficial to all within a society, such as equal opportunity and equal wealth distribution, should be much easier to proliferate within society, especially since they have an original, biological basis.

It is not against "social" nature to kill. There were tribal wars way before capitalism and communism. People will kill to protect themselves and others, just as cavemen did, just as people do today when they are threatened. Not to mention animals do it to survive.

Equal opportunity and equal wealth distribution were never biologically innate. Women were not biologically and physically equipt to hunt as well as men, so men unfairly took more wealth and more opportunity. This goes back to ancient times. So, even then people thought that those who do more work should get more. So your theory is completely whacked. (I would like to point out women are more than 10 percent smarter, just thought you should know).

Communism has got the right idea with equality, but it tends to attract the bad leaders, (*coughstalin*) which is probably why it has such a bad reputation.
agree there's been quite a few, shall we say below par communist leaders. on the other hand, for example Russia has only been communist for 70 years of it's history, and I can't think of a single good russian leader. stalin and most of his pals were obviously awful, Jeltsin was drunk an corrupt, Putin is somewhat paranoid-dictatoric, and most of the tsars were raving mad and totally uninterested in the situation of their subjects! where there's no tradition for civil rights and descent government you can't expect a mere change of government form to turn things upside down overnight. russian leaders, as well as chinese etc. have always been dictatoric and probably will be in the overseeable future.... there's no reason why a communist state(however you define that) has to delegate it's power to a single leader, that's unfortunately just the way things are done some places.

You can't just throw a random number around as the "Factual" number that Stalin "killed".

Moscow says that around 4 million were killed, directly and indirectly as a result of Stalin's actions.

The original assertion was wrong. Communism means that the economy is controlled by the people. In large societies, the people may employ others to regulate the economy in their favor. However, this government must be democratic for the people to remain in control. Your friend had a somewhat decent point, but he did not mention the idea of democracy to accomplish common ownership.

Farming is already largely subsidized, and it's still hard to make a living wage through it

I call BS. The average income for a farm household in 2002 was around $60k (1 (http://www.agecon.ucdavis.edu/uploads/update_articles/v5n4_2.pdf)). This also invalidates several other statements you made, but I won't bother quoting them all.

15,000 children a year die of malnutrition in the US alone

Again, BS. Credible source please.

If a friend gave me a recipe for a pie, with the agreement that he got to eat some of the pie too, and I baked 10 pies, would it be proper for him to take 8 of the pies for himself, even though I spent hours baking the pies?

If you signed a contract and agreed to give him 8 pies, or 80% of the pies you make, then yes, it would be "proper." That would be a more accurate analogy.

I mean, come on... In one day, I could very well work harder as a burger flipper than the manager at my store, even though at least half my managers do nothing but sit around. As a general rule, the more you make under a capitalist society, the less you have to work.

If managers are so useless, then why do the owners (the shareholders, not the CEO) allow them to be payed a higher salary? Granted, you "could" be a CEO, but you seem to lack business experience and education, so you'd suck at it (note: I would too). Neither of us, and very few others, would have any idea how to run a multi-billion dollar corporation, much less increase profits. A skilled CEO can add millions, possibly even billions to a corporation's earnings (see: Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric). A single, unskilled laborer can't do the same.

Edit: There is no such thing as being unselfish

That is the only reliable statement about "human nature" (I dislike the term)I've ever encountered.

The original assertion was wrong. Communism means that the economy is controlled by the people. In large societies, the people may employ others to regulate the economy in their favor. However, this government must be democratic for the people to remain in control. Your friend had a somewhat decent point, but he did not mention the idea of democracy to accomplish common ownership.


And theres the reason communism always falls over.
Who controls the ministries of planning , production and distribution? the government, which is alledgedly controlled by the people.

So the government comes up with its 5 year plans for food production and distribution, however in year 3 theres a drought and the farmers make just enough food to keep themselves alive, then the government comes along seizes the food, sends 1/2 the farmers off to prison camp for 're-education' for anti-communist behaviour, while the rest starve, the following year there are'nt any farmers to even grow any food, so the government seizes any food that might be about and sends it to the military/police to suppress all the others in its population who are starving.

Stir in a culture of corruption ( "I'll give you some food if you give me your TV/I-pod/Daughter" ) and communism falls flat, and becomes just another dictatorship.


Communism maybe an ideal system but planet Earth is not an ideal world

Yet thousands of people starved yearly... They were hard working and industrious, so there was abundant production (their produce, I might add). Yet prices on goods were extremely high and average wage was very, very low. Working conditions were disgusting... ...This is the net result of capitalism: the centralization of wealth within the hands of the few, and the general economic exploitation of the many. It discourages productivity in general.

And there is no reason why the market SHOULD discourage this overproduction... People, in the US and abroad, still starve. 15,000 children a year die of malnutrition in the US alone, yet farming is still not a lucrative career and minimum wage is still below what most economists claim is 'capable of sustaining a small family'. Why should goods be priced so high and wage so low? Because capitalism discourages an economy large enough to employ the entirety of the country.
People do starve but not in droves and there are most certainly ways for the majority of people to find jobs. If a stupid high school student could find work than many others could do so as well. Also, the fact that top positions make so much actually encourages people to work harder. The average crack seller makes less than minimum wage and has a higher chance of getting shot than a burger flipper and yet he still tries, do you know why? He wants a shot at the top, he wants to be a big drug lord and make the big bucks(by the way, the drug thing was taken from "Freakonomics"). Everyone wants to be a top basketball star or Bill Gates and that causes some of them to push harder to become a figure like that causing even greater productivity.

The reason why the market does not want to encourage overproductivity is inefficiency, the people that starve in the US are small and number and we try to take care of them and the people that starve abroad are the responsibility of their own country's rules. Africa is screwed up because its leaders are horrible and because of the lack of economic freedom. If Africa had more economic freedom there would be less starvation because their countries would catch up to us like the countries in Asia have done. Goods are priced high because that is how they are efficiently priced, pricing them lower may mean that we do not account for the cost of the good, or the fact that society needs other things at that moment. The reason why wages are so low is because there is a trade off between minimum wage and employment, raising the minimum wage hurts employment and keeps people from getting the work experience that would help them get better jobs. Besides, minimum wage really shouldn't be sustaining a small family anyway, most jobs are above minimum wage and most people can get jobs above minimum wage, trying to support a family in a situation where the time is not right and the economic situations are poor is stupid in any society.

WE could've just taken the blow?! Excuse me, but the industrial sector could've easily employed the entire nation via creating new enterprises (i.e. jobs) had the majority of the wealth (and, therefore, power to produce new jobs/industries) not been concentrated in the hands of a very inefficient few.

Inefficient few? What do you think they did with the wealth? Stuffed it into a sack? No, they invested it back into their companies and the economy. This reinvestment of wealth allowed for more jobs to be formed and made things better. A massive government redistribution of wealth would have stifled the desire to improve things, it would kill incentives which is something that no society wants if it wants to stay above the stone age.

As far as I'm concerned, a country producing enough food per year to feed itself AND its closest neighbor, holding nearly 40% of the entire planet's wealth, with the productivity capacity to REproduce another bullet for every person on the planet, that doesn't feed its citizens (especially the ones actually producing the food), doesn't house them (the ones making the houses), doesn't provide health care (those producing the materials for said care), and doesn't even educate them (those educating and developing the concepts/technologies that they require such education) is a country with a FAILING economic system. I don't care if the corporations and elitists that own them made huge profits; they produced nothing! It was the working-class' produce, not theirs. Yet the working-class, as a whole, was not even provided the means by which to acquire even a third of the proverbial pie (a pie, I might add, large enough to support the hemisphere, compared to what nations currently run on per citizen).
No, we do feed our citizens, the ones who don't produce the food don't get fed. I really doubt that most of our health care system relies on common workers, the most important part of healthcare is the doctor and the rest of it is highly technical equipment, our healthcare is supported by thinkers not simple workers. Doesn't educate? What the heck? We offer free education up until about people are 18 years of age and then they can go to college if they want it, our public schools are not excellent on average but still they do some work and some are very very good. Worker's class produce my behind! The growth in the economy has been driven by thinkers for the most part, the boom during the clinton years was driven by internet technology which was not developed by "the workers" but instead by hard working thinkers who did it for profits. The working class does have a way to get a bigger piece of the pie, they just need to work harder or smarter, there are ways of getting the tools required to succeed and make a relatively good salary most people don't want to take it.

And, for the record, there was massive government intervention. Capitalism has a tendency to decline anyway, but the government intervention (minimum wage, child labor laws, farming subsidies, anti-monopoly laws, et al) was the only thing keeping absolute revolution for breaking out. The population had to unionize, riot, picket, boycott, strike, and protest just to ensure the government wouldn't allow your 'wonderful' free-market economy to force a child to work in a textile mill for 16 hours a day... That's a system of exploitation for the benefit of a very few, no matter what way you look at it.
Are you talking about the Great Depression? The cause of that was war loans and a lack of free trade so that those loans could be paid off. It really was caused by non-capitalistic things. Really, communism tends to decline more than capitalism, the soviet union died well before the US ever did and China gave up the socialist experiment to become more capitalist seeing the benefits of that system. The problems with the industrial revolution was the sharp change in things and government intervention would exist in any system, just capitalism requires much less. The "system of exploitation" has brought the US a good standard of living and great personal freedom, capitalism does not exploit really, it makes deals between 2 beings, a trade if you will and one that is kinder than the true slaveries of the past.

North American natives were, by population, as advanced as many European societies. They were distributed over a larger area and focused on social/agricultural development rather than imperial/military development. They understood ecology long before we thought of our effect on nature; and keep in mind they arrived to the continent very late, and were in an ice age for much of the rest of the world's (Incans, Aztecs, Mayans, Chinese, Egyptian, Sumerian) development. Yet their societies were stable and the population growth was comparable to that of many European societies. They were a sound society, not a destructive, oppressive one like many others (European and Meso-American). And the Aztecs were behind much of the world, many parts that 'started' their 'civilized' development at the same time if not later.

By the way, communism, pure communism, is supposed to work on a city by city basis. The end result, after a socialist national government, is a large number of essentially autonomous cities/regions, collectively producing wealth for the local population.
What you are saying is that they were primitive farm societies and that is something I already know. The really had nature worship, not what I would really call "ecology" as it was not based scientifically but rather on the appeasement of spirits and such. They were a primitive society and no amount of messaging the facts will hide that and primitive societies are horrible representations of modern ones. I mean, I could say that absolute monarchy is a viable option for a government and point at Europe at that time for my model, that still would not hide the fact that absolute monarchy is a horribel system.

Then pure communism is horribly inefficient. It would fail to provide a good economy of scale if it was based on a city by city basis, one of the major strengths of the US economy is the fact that it is so large and interconnected by common currency and culture. Communism would fail at this, how would a society build cars efficiently if they only were making enough for one town? How about air travel? Will each city have their own jet airliner? A city by city basis fails miserably in terms of economies of scale and causes great inefficiency and greater poverty relative to the current system(greater because I doubt it could even provide computers).

Importance, as perviously stated, is not the emphasis of capitalism; demand is. As history shows, through the capitalist perspective, it doesn't matter if a tenth of your population is malnurished, that doesn't make farming a profitable or 'important' career.

The market distributes as such: 10% with about 50-60% of the wealth; 60% with about 20-30%; and 30% with about 10-20%. Yet that's the order of productivity, from least to greatest. The vast majority of the pie is produced by the lower 30%, yet they recieve less than a third of said pie.
The lower 30 does not produce the most things, most of our modern conveniences were produced by clever people closer to the top, the lower 30 do work that could largely be done by monkeys(it does not take too much intelligence to flip hamburgers and probably not too much to work on an assembly line) My computer that I am using is more of a product of the top people than the bottom.

To take that anology and your statement beyond what was intended, here's a literal hypothetical you could derive from your basis. If a friend gave me a recipe for a pie, with the agreement that he got to eat some of the pie too, and I baked 10 pies, would it be proper for him to take 8 of the pies for himself, even though I spent hours baking the pies? If that is part of the agreement then yes. You would get less of those pies if you didn't agree with him and if you were offered a better deal then you would be motivated to take it. The thing is that both groups benefitted from the pie thing and if either group didn't then they could back out of the deal and really though in a more capitalist situation your friend would actually be giving you the oven, the ingredients, and so on and you would just do the simple physical work. Your job as pie maker is really the most expendable, if your friend really wanted to do it he possibly could and if he was too busy he could find another friend.

And no, knowing how much material is required for a certain good is not as important as producing the good; one could reasonably argue that it is AS important, but not more. That's equal to saying that a doctor shouldn't get paid squat, only the ones that provide medical discoveries and/or manage a hospital monetarily.Well, the doctor is being paid for his rare knowledge, a hospital is a different example than simple laborers because doctors are being paid for knowing a special process while workers are being paid for simple labor. In the doctor's case he is probably rarer than the person ordering the goods and he is probably part of the decision process as well to some extent. If we go back down to labor then no the laborers are not nearly as important as the material orderers because they are more expendable and stuff like that. It goes down to the labor market, not what these people physically do really.



But, as stated over and over with justification, capitalism does not pay you for harder work. See: working-class farmer. See also: child-labor. For further resources, see: industrialist, CEO, teacher.

I mean, come on... In one day, I could very well work harder as a burger flipper than the manager at my store, even though at least half my managers do nothing but sit around. As a general rule, the more you make under a capitalist society, the less you have to work.
Well, if those people wanted to they could get jobs that paid more. We do have programs that allow for people to get college, they just require some sacrifice, even up to a few years of your life if you really want to get ahead. Capitalism pays you for working harder in a more productive direction, the hard working farmer won't get as much because he is not doing something that society really needs him to do, but the hard working med school student is likely to get high pay to reward him as is the hard working entrepreneur. Burger flipper is such a stupid job that a monkey could do it, but managers need to have some degree of ability to make sure that none of those monkeys does something stupid, it goes down to the fact that managers are rarer than burger flippers and managers are required for this process.


No, this means less obsessively commericalist driven waste; this means the destruction of essentially useless and certainly harmful (heart disease, anyone) careers that no one really wants to work anyway. And, when you 'pay the flipper', all you do is pay the CEO, who does next to no work. Those actually producing the burger, whether they raise the cattle, grow the onions/tomatoes, or grow the wheat, recieve next to nothing in the way of salary. This discourages productivity in those fields because A) I can slack off and get paid the same per hour, and B) I can get into a higher position, do less work, and get paid much, much more.

Anyway, those without a particular ambition as far as a particular field would be organized into an unskilled labor force. From their perspective, you do the odd/unpleasent jobs for society and recieve a living wage. From the ambitious person's perspective, they do those jobs and I can persue the career I wish while making a living wage also. After all, why would A) I want that crappy job, and B) why should they have to live in poverty just because 'normal' jobs don't necessarily interest them?
Well, if their individual skills were so necessary then they would be paid more. If the world only had one farmer he could get everyone to pay whatever the heck he wanted for his crops. It is not what these people do it is the fact that so many of them do it that this salary is one that both sides agree on. If the farmer disagreed then the CEO would go to another farmer who would agree so the problem is the farmers, if there were less farmers and less supply then the prices would go up and the farmers would get paid more. Some jobs need to be done for society to work and that is what you are not getting, we need heart doctors despite the stress of that job, we need all sorts of different jobs for society to work, some will be very desirable and some aren't but if they are not done then we have inefficiency we do not have supply and demand internally built and a society that refuses to let individuals deal with the consequences of their actions on society is one that will not work. It does not discourage productivity because unproductive people will be paid less if they are noticed to be unproductive and unproductivity exists in any system where peopel realize that they can do less to get the same benefits and the B for the first paragraph is a GOOD THING! They should go to that better field and get that better job, if they get it then they will do better, society will take advantage of their abilities and so on and so forth and it helps everyone if they pursue their rational self-interest in the context of our lawful system.

So the organization, would that be a labor camp? Dude, the reason why the jobs that are odd are crappy is because they are less important, we don't need as much of them. This goes to the fact that there is some dude offering the same services for less. It is part of the labor market which functions similarly in someways like any other market(there are differences of course but it can be looked at similarly). Just think back to supply and demand in economics, I think I was required to take economics, just think about the supply and demand and the fact that forcing a minimum wage for a job is pretty similar to me putting a minimum price on food products, you need food, companies need certain services, putting a minimum wage is like putting a minimum price and such things tend to hurt the entire market including all of the consumers. Look at the greater market.

It doesn't require moral incentive... ...We are a social species; our basic nature is determined by what we observe others express. A child growing up in a violent home is, as such, violent. One growing up in a greedy home is, likewise, greedy. There are innate biological incentives that would drive a person to produce for society, along with the personal drive to succeed in your aspiring career. Those without strong urges similar to the aforesaid would make up the general laborers, as it would be the easiest, most direct way to make a living. It's win-win without the need for child-freakin'-labor (since it's just oh-so profitable for capitalism).

As I said before, it is against most species 'natures', and all social species 'natures', to murder another of its race. However, it has been done by whole societies on mass scales based on ideals which were not beneficial for the whole of society; ideals beneficial to all within a society, such as equal opportunity and equal wealth distribution, should be much easier to proliferate within society, especially since they have an original, biological basis.
You overestimate our socialness. Considering the fact that whether or not children will pass on their parents values is variable I do not think that any force outside of complete thought control will be able to do what you desire. Human beings will do what they feel to be in their best-interests, there is always and always has been the problems with incentives and the fact that we cannot control every aspect of the culture of people within society. Besides, there is no need for mentioning child labor, it does not happen in any well-to-do country and has not happened in 1st world countries since the late 1800s. It may happen in other countries but this is not the overriding goal of capitalism and it is shown that if consumers are morally opposed to the actions of a company they can and do boycott.

Murder exists in the human species and will probably always exist, I do not claim that I can stop the spread of thought harmful to society and neither could you. The entire culture argument used by socialists and communists is really a few steps away from fascism in which the entire identity is stripped away for the benefit of the state. Capitalism does not rely on social engineering and it is easier for a socialist to exist in a capitalist society than vice versa. Socialism is no panacea for the world's problems and likely does not work at all due to the fact that it is invariably promoted by people with little understanding of economics and much more outrage at what they do not understand.

Pure Metal
DHomme
Kanabia
Glitziness
So..something or other
Letila
Etc. Will attack the quote because they're Reds.

Undelia
AB Again
Vetalia
Etc. Will say a bunch of shit because they're Capitalist pig dogs

Tribes
HN Fiddlebottoms
Myself
Etc. will contribute nothing useful.

Just a heads up.

I take offence. I have never once contributed anything useful to this forum. :mad:

There is no doubt that fixing the material is important, if it weren't then nobody would pay for it.And since it is necessary to complete the job, I see no reason why it should be compensated less.

Perhaps not but the difference will not be enough to really cause problems. Besides, I recently read in a book called "Just Capital" by Adair Turner, an economist that a good tax rate was around 40-45%Would you be able to to give a list of his reasoning for this belief in a few sentences?

The easiest one, it will stress me less and not weigh on me after the work is done. Easiest physically or easiest mentally? You'd probably say both, but if you had to pick one, which would it be?

I really don't want to work, I would really prefer to sit back, relax, and have fun with some friends. This may not tell you much in terms of what field I will go into but it does tell you something about my nature, I would take an easy job just so I would have an easy life and this nature would not be very favorable to a socialist society because not all jobs can be equally easy. Not everyone is going to go for the easiest job, some people thrive on challenges.

If we included the aspect of monetary incentives then I would go for the job that pays the most for simple reasoning, more pay means that I have more prestige and that I can do more with what free time I have because money allows for more value to be taken from free-time. I mean, really what is better: a trip to a neighboring small town or a trip to Paris or Rome or something to see amazing sights? I think most people would prefer amazing sights and those are only available if one has the money to pay for that improvement.Why should those amazing sights only be available to some people?

Medical school is known to be incredibly tough, I am not sure that they would go there if they did not have economic incentives and I definitely don't know that they would stay within our nation if we did not have different wages for different jobs. Brain drain would represent a loss of investment for a nation that has free medical school and a lack of competitive wages would mean a continual brain drain. If people were as concerned with monetary incentives as you think, then why is there Doctors Without Borders?

The reason I don't think as many people would go to medical school though if doctors would not get as much money is that there would not be as much prestige to being a doctor. Prestige is typically seen as having power, wealth is a form of power, if all people have equal wealth than all people have somewhat equal prestige(not taking into account undesirable jobs like garbage disposal). Equal prestige means that less people will care about getting the job and as such will not bother with all of the intense schooling and hard work to get easy jobs so that they will get to have fun. Med school is by all accounts hard work and most people do not like to study that much and would rather debate on internet forums or something like that. If their work is not rewarded then they probably won't bother with it.
1) Why should people have different amount of power?
2) Why couldn't prestige be awarded based upon the difficulty and undesirability of the job being done?

Well, every society will have to limit options. I don't want morons in top positions and society wouldn't either. In fact, a society that does not have any form of system that forces people to accept some options would not succeed, there is no magic formula in the human brain that simulates the market and therefore personal desires will not match with societal desires leading to too many wannabe artists and music stars and such and not enough people going into manual labor and engineering and stuff like that. What market? I'm not talking about market socialism, although that theory is perfectly valid.

The fact that our society limits options based on ability is a good thing, if the dude had 3 years of law school then he might not want to accept the job as a burger flipper due to a better opportunity defending the legal interests of another dude. It all falls down to you going to the position where your best interests are served as well as societies and the system that does this is relatively good as it is not a strictly defined caste system but instead is rather fluid. Today's burger flipper can be tomorrow's accountant or computer scientist. Today's burger flipper can be tomorrow's accountant or computer scientist only with access to education; admittedly you seem to advocate free education, so this point isn't against you in particular.

It would be preferable if they could and perhaps capitalism will be able to evolve in such a manner to allow that. However, society has certain jobs that need to be done, it does not matter if nobody wants to be a firman we still need firemen. The human brain does not have a market function that allows us to adapt to where we are needed like ants do in an ant colony. Our colonies are too complex to allow for such simplicity.I disagree. Firstly, there is a such thing as a volunteer firefighting service. Secondly, if nobody was to volunteer, then this would indicate that people would have to be willing to put out their own fires.

This leads to greater economic inefficiency and mismanagement of resources. Why would we want to do this if there is a better way? The way I'm suggesting is a better way than the one we currently have.

I mean, you want society to go around its elbow to get to its hand because you simply don't like a current system that has worked extremely well for everyone compared to previous systems. And the system I suggest, if implemented, will work extremely well compared to previous systems.

Capitalism is not a caste system and your improvements would be reverting to primitivism and would lead to greater inefficiency, less economic growth and less improvement. Society is all about trade-offs and the trade-off that you would wish to make would be worse for everyone, garbagemen benefit from being garbagemen.Garbagemen would benefit more if they chose it out of dozens of options; picking that job isn't much benefit if it's simply the least undesirable out of a bunch of undesirable options.

And since it is necessary to complete the job, I see no reason why it should be compensated less. It is compensated less because there are more people willing to do it and more people who can do it. Pretty much businesses hire labor based upon how they can get the best deal, they put out a job offer and if there are too few people they raise the wage and continue on until they have enough people. These people are not partners but rather employees and are there only as labor, not as business partners. The deal is to benefit both parties, the guys with the ideas want to be rewarded for this idea and the laborers need money too. The system is fair because both sides agreed to it, it benefits both sides. If either side did not agree with it then they would go with their better option.
Would you be able to to give a list of his reasoning for this belief in a few sentences?His reasoning is that taxes that are too high tend to stifle the economy and cause inefficiency but that some services still need to be provided which means that we still need some taxes. He pretty much supported the idea that individuals should not be forgotten in the capitalist system but that regulated capitalism was the most efficient way to deal with these problems. The focus of the book was mostly on European economies and how to make them better, mostly through liberalization in order to have markets provide due to their efficiency.

Easiest physically or easiest mentally? You'd probably say both, but if you had to pick one, which would it be?I honestly don't know, I have done some very mentally challenging things that have driven me to great stress and frustration, physical challenges are a physical struggle and mental challenges can be a big mental struggle... I would probably pick easiest physically because I do not have great physical skills but do have great mental skills, if the opposite were true then I would pick the opposite.

Not everyone is going to go for the easiest job, some people thrive on challenges.They will go for the job that gives them the most benefits. Most people though want the easiest job and although they will take the occasional challenge typically do not seek it out so much. Also, some jobs are not enjoyable anyway, like dealing with mail is not going to interest most people yet we still need people to do this.

Why should those amazing sights only be available to some people?Because we need to ration such things out. Not everyone wants to see those sites and giving this to everyone would be very costly. The market rewards those who do as it wants them to do and this is part of the reward. We need to have incentives for the guy who works hard to push his way through highschool, college and medschool compared to the guy who does not get through any of them just so that the first dude does not feel cheated for all of his labor. There needs to be rewards to encourage people to do well for society and capitalistic systems do this relatively well.

If people were as concerned with monetary incentives as you think, then why is there Doctors Without Borders?Not everyone is completely concerned with monetary incentives, money is just a large part of many incentive systems because money is linked to many desirable things. Those doctors do this because they want to help people to some extent and this is a human desire that the capitalist system accounts for, after all, have you not seen private charities and the like? They exist for people who want to do these things, but I do not think that every doctor is without borders and we have to account for people who are selfish and such and make sure that the system benefits them too so that way they can still serve societal interests. Besides, money is just our distribution system anyway, that is why it is so valuable for our society, we just need a way to distribute goods and services based upon how we value what they do for society.


1) Why should people have different amount of power?
2) Why couldn't prestige be awarded based upon the difficulty and undesirability of the job being done?People tend to seek power because of how it is required for greater control over their lives. People cannot have absolute control over their own lives because their decisions affect so many people other than themselves. If the farmers all stopped farming then we would have a famine, so what we do is we give them power based upon their importance, money is a form of power and using this power they can change the world however they want, this could be charity, this could be a retirement fund so that way they can retire earlier, this could be pornography to satisfy certain desires but they need power in order to have what they want. Different levels of power are required for societal structuring because different levels of work exist we need different levels of pay otherwise people will follow their rational self-interest and leave a system. All we are talking about in this capitalist vs socialist system discussion is the distribution of power especially in the form of money, and capitalism is good because it allows for people to acquire power if they want it, the desire for power is a natural one that has existed since the beginning of time and to neglect it is to cause great societal problems as uneven power distributions will still form based upon differing human abilities and desires. Each man wants to do well compared to his peers and capitalism captures this desire and uses it to do things that benefit the whole of society, socialism ignores this desire and as such results in stagnation and poorer societies.

Prestige is based upon power because power is what people want, it is what has always decided what is good and what is bad. Trying to create this cultural ideal though artificially is the idea of fascism and other forms of totalitarian government and the problems with those systems is apparent to most people. Culture mostly grows by itself and in reaction to the environment and as such is pushed by our needs and desires, we cannot create the proper needs and desires for the idealization of those jobs because of the fact that they would not reflect our needs and desires accurately and as such they would have to be artificial and require 1984-esque brainwashing to attain. What you really seek is a massive social engineering project that would require a lot of brainwashing and quite a few deaths to be even be slightly close to possible. That is why I am not a socialist, the costs to create this ideal world would be too high because some of our current desires and such conflicting with what we want, he have problems with criminals even in a society that seeks to capitalize off of our simpler instincts, one that relies on higher moral concepts would fail.

What market? I'm not talking about market socialism, although that theory is perfectly valid.I probably should have said supply and demand as such exists in all societies. Market may have not been the ideal word but supply and demand exists in all societies no matter what economic system they have, and it cannot be ignored. Doing something that does not match with supply and demand leads to great economic problems such as scarcity and overproduction, both of which are problems because either people cannot get something they do want or they have too much of something they don't want or need reflecting overallocation of resources and waste. The reason I said the brain comment is to say that what people want to be does not reflect what society needs, they can do what they want of course but society tries to get them to fill the positions that are needed to keep things working. Lets just say that Billy wants to be a philosopher but is really good at math and lets just say that we are not doing well with technology and society is hurting because of that. In your system he would become a philosopher anyway because there is no reason for him not to, in a capitalist system he may or may not, he might hear about the high demand for technology experts and go into that field for the money which he can turn into Paris vacations or whatever he wants or he could go on into being a philosopher if he wanted. Individuals get to choose their place in society but the effectiveness of the capitalist model in involving supply and demand means that individuals and companies are encouraged to go into fields that benefit society through incentives, it is still their choice but this way we can have a working society rather than one that consistently overproduces somethings and underproduces others.

Today's burger flipper can be tomorrow's accountant or computer scientist only with access to education; admittedly you seem to advocate free education, so this point isn't against you in particular.I advocate accessible education, free education leads to overconsumption, the problems with this can be seen with Germany in an article that Neu Leonstein posted in another thread, I just don't remember the thread. Accessible education means that people can get education if they want to get it but it may require some effort. Pretty much we need to make sure that our best students can get education along with other people that want it. Really though, the US has a high number of college graduates(1/4 of the population graduates from college) and really I do recognize that college is not for everyone. I just promote education because an educated workforce helps the economy and education is a good and worthwhile investment(so long as you make rational decisions involving it)

I disagree. Firstly, there is a such thing as a volunteer firefighting service. Secondly, if nobody was to volunteer, then this would indicate that people would have to be willing to put out their own fires.I know that firefighting is not an ideal example but I thought it would be something that we need. If nobody volunteers then what this means is that if Johnny's house catches on fire and his darling children are trapped within the blaze then the little darlings are as good as dead. We need firefighters and even though they may not be privatized the field must still be somewhat competitive within the market to avoid the risk of massive deaths due to fires. What this really indicates if such did happen is a horrible system, not any desire to put out your own fires because nobody can put out their own fire effectively due to the equipment needed and lack of manpower. What you advocate is a horrible system that could not effectively work unless there were black market firemen or something

The way I'm suggesting is a better way than the one we currently have.No it will not. It would be a massive step down from the current system because there is no logical binding factor to this system. I mean, it will just result in quick economic collapse if nobody wants to be mailmen, or telephone operators, or anything like that. Most people do not have their dream job(we can only have a certain number of basketball stars and actors) or would not know what their dream job was we need a working system. Your system would not work at all even theoretically but is instead an idealist's pipe dream. I don't think that any economist would back your system.

And the system I suggest, if implemented, will work extremely well compared to previous systems.No, it will not, your system has massive flaws and although it may work on a small village scale once we add in a few hundred million people it would collapse brutally and horribly for those who were involved in such a system. I don't think that your system could last a month much less a year and would even rate it below Stalinism in terms of practicallity and effectiveness.

Garbagemen would benefit more if they chose it out of dozens of options; picking that job isn't much benefit if it's simply the least undesirable out of a bunch of undesirable options. Not all of our options can be gloriously desirable and the garbage man is probably not qualified to be a VP of Sales or anything like that, options are given based upon the person and sometimes we must pick the lesser evil, that is life and that is something that no system could effectively correct as all people do have to pick the lesser of x number of evils at some point. Garbagemen do benefit that their job pays more than other jobs though and society benefits because they can take care of their garbage with less money wasted on gas, less garbage traffic, and greater efficiency. Pretty much garbagemen have a choice to be garbagemen and this choice is affected by all the choices they made before this point, nobody is forced to be the garbageman.

Yes, people do starve in the U.S, just like in most countries, even communist ones. In fact, all the communist countries on earth are usually poor.[quote]

As noted, there never has been a communist country. No country equally distributed wealth, they merely worked their population, then reaped the profits of said labor to primarily support the propaganda tactics used and support their generally large militaries. And the socialist and pseudo-socialist countries all started way poorer anyway.

[quote]
Minimum wage does not equal more wealth. Poor people are poor because they have no work value, i.e unskilled. Having to pay more for someone who contributes little discourages business to hire those people. So, they higher the minimum wage, the higher the unemployment rate. Look at France, or Europe in general.

Wages in U.S are the highest in the world, the average person makes around 40, 000 a year. Our goods are price lower the most countries( look at gas). So what are you talking about?


A teacher doesn't count as unskilled, and they sit just above the poverty line. And it discourages them because then the profits of the transactions go to those actually producing the products, rather than the CEO. Also, businesses aren't going to flourish in a free-market economy since, as the industrial revolution showed, the disparity rate increases exponentially in a capitalist society. If the workers are being paid $1-2 and hour for 16 hour days, they aren't going to have much capital with which to purchase goods from the corporate distributors. As their total capital decreases, so does the activity within the economy, hence wages fall further.

The US has over a third of the planets wealth with less than a tenth it's population, of course its wages are higher! Yet we have the second highest disparity rate in the world, and the number of malnourished citizens compared to the GDP is one of the world's highest. And the consumer price index is actually higher in the US then a lot of other parts of the world.


The U.S unemployment rate is lower than most countries, and the lowest for a country of it's size. You need to really look stuff up before you speak.

Yes, industry could easily employ ALL people. But that is not how economics work. If everyone was employed at a factory or one industry then that industry would produce an abundance of goods, over produce. Then who would buy ALL of those goods? No one, becaue everyone would already have them! So then the businesses would have to lower prices in order to intice people to buy goods they already have, meaning less profits. So then how can that same industry employ those people? They can't. That is why there are many industries. People who are unemployed have no valuable skills, otherwise they would have work, makes sense?


The US is 12th for unemployment, and it's GDP, expressed as percent growth, is not the highest in the world. Not to mention it's been declining since the 60's.

Not a particular industry, industry, the economy, in general could have. So, capitalist economies work on the principle that if you produce just less than what is needed, people will have to compete with each other to buy the product, thusly increasing prices and the corporate executives' wages. That's wonderful; how about, we offer everyone a job, and not have under-production encouraged in order to yield a profit for a person who is not actually producing anything?

And, back to the industrial revolution (re-hashed, I know, but it's the best example of a free-market economy on a large scale), somewhere around 15-20% of the nation was unemployed. Somehow I doubt these were totally unskilled, not that unskilled labor isn't necessary anyway. Aside from that, it would've been a lot easier to give them skills if higher-education wasn't beyond the statistical economic reach of just about everyone that's below middle-class.


I will mention that the U.S( I assume this is the representation of communism) Has a higher standard of living, the highest GDP, the one of the highest average incomes(top 3). Communist countries? All in the background. The lowest in everything. China wised up, and implemented capitalist ideas, and look what happened! You guys never learn....


First and foremost, as the richest country on the planet, we'd better have a higher standard of living. The US, with this portion of the world's total wealth yet a comparitively small population, couldn't really avoid high standards without obvious wide-spread abuse (...Industrial revolution, again). Despite our overwhelming economic dispurportion (making comparisons with most other countries less than arbitrary), we still have the second highest disparity rate and a declining GDP.

Oh, and for the record, take a gander at this here picture... (at bottom) ...Note the decline in the Chinese GDP around 1994. Yeah, I'm looking at what happened.

EDIT: Once again, not working (attachements). Didn't notice on this one till after the following post...
http://dirtyglasses.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/bric_fdi.gif


First of all, how in the hell can someone who produces the food, starve? I would logically assume if they produce food, they would eat, or is it just me?

Where do you get this stuff from? U.S citizens do have houses, even the poor( they rent). Education here is free, so....... what?

If the U.S is a failing economic system, then what in the hell do you call North Korea?


Um... Since when can you survive solely on wheat. Hoorah, we got bread... ...Now all we need is the rest of the pyramid. The percentage of people that own a home is lower in the US than many others (somwhere around 65%, about 10-15% others), education (not even in the top 20 internationally) does cost (my friend had her diploma held until she could pay the school's fees), you ignored health care, and over the last 30 years the bottom 30% of society has seen a net decrease of about 5% wage, the middle-class getting about 10% increase, and the upper 10% getting a 75% increase. With an increasing CPI and international competition, it doesn't look like it's getting too terribly better. For the record, my family would've been homeless had a relatively well-off friend not given us a trailer. And, again, for the richest (not to mention largest, in this case) country on the planet, we have quite a few homeless.

For the record, I call North Korea an exploitative dictatorship with no grounds in ANY real ideology, much less a functioning one.


Our Working class has an average yearly income of around 38 to 42 thousand a year. So, WTF?


Um, they produced the wealth. They made it. Yet they still have a dispurportionately small piece of the pie.


What? The U.S Spends over a trillion dollars on helping people year(about to be 2 trillion with the new laws). What other country does that?
Yes, the working class had to picket boycott and strike, and you know what happened? They got what they wanted. This happens in a lot of countries.

If you know U.S history, most of the strikes were for adult workers and their working conditions.

I will ask again, if the U.S has a terrible economic system, then cite a country that does better.

Yeah, they got a step toward socialism; a step away from a free-market economy. The free-market that is praised by many caused the abuse of millions until the took a stand against the government supported economic elite. Yes, most of the strikes were for adult rights, and that's sad... What's your point?

Give me a country with a third the planet's capital that doesn't support free-market socio-economic systems, and I'd more than likely be able to.

Psychology lesson: People from violent homes do not always become violent. Children that are abused usually are reserved with deep emotional problems. Some people deal with these problems with anger, others depression others get through it. There are many people who grow up rich and give back, and many poor people who become greedy.


It was a general statement, and it is general true. Those with violent histories act violently in general; we learn our manners of parenting from the manner in which were raised.

The poor, in my experience, are generally more giving unless it concerns necessities that may be threatened (I don't think anyone is willing to give when it could potentially starve them). This, however, is an opinion. And the statements you made are too general to argue with, even if I wanted to.


Communes have a history of failure. You are too idealistic. People who contribute to society do so for two reasons, it makes them feel good, or they don't want to feel bad. There is no such thing as being unselfish. Your scenario would only work if every is doing the same job, which would be impossible. Who is to determine what is more work, back breaking field work( someone has to do it) or milking a cow? Why should the person who just sits there and milks a cow get the same as the person who does the back breaking field work? Who decides? That is why communes fail.


In a larger, organized system, those without specific aspirations career-wise would perform those jobs. They would cycle, so as to avoid involuntarily dispurportionate labor.


It is not against "social" nature to kill. There were tribal wars way before capitalism and communism. People will kill to protect themselves and others, just as cavemen did, just as people do today when they are threatened. Not to mention animals do it to survive.


Within the species, one must be trained and desensistized to kill, especially without direct threat to one's self. If an individual's life is threatened, it obviously requires a much higher level of conditioning to prevent them from carrying out whatever means necessary to survive, but premeditated murder is something that must be taught. Human 'nature' is determined through those psychological traits that are either supported or inhibited by natural selection. Killing is extremely negative for a social species, and would, therefore, not be supported, logically, by our natural environment.


Equal opportunity and equal wealth distribution were never biologically innate. Women were not biologically and physically equipt to hunt as well as men, so men unfairly took more wealth and more opportunity. This goes back to ancient times. So, even then people thought that those who do more work should get more. So your theory is completely whacked. (I would like to point out women are more than 10 percent smarter, just thought you should know).

Equal opportunity within biological capabilities, and equal wealth distribution according to necessity. The excess is what was disputed; females were fed enough to live well. I was mostly referring to post-nomadic society, however. Prior to agriculture, the threat of death was such an ever-present influence that self-preservation was almost always paramount.

Oh, and, again, below... The left hemisphere's development, in utero, is accentuated by the pressences of testosterone. Thus, males tend to excel in spatial-mathematical activities and logical sequence, whereas females tend to be moreso verbal linguistic. However, I believe the total difference in society is due to socio-culture differences, and that the neuro-biological differences are too minute to greatly affect such performance when personal drive is accounted.

EDIT: No attachments are working right now, so... http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;jsessionid=giv339fb3vep?dsname=Wikipedia+Images&dekey=SAT+by+sex.png&sbid=lc05a&linktext=

agree there's been quite a few, shall we say below par communist leaders. on the other hand, for example Russia has only been communist for 70 years of it's history, and I can't think of a single good russian leader. stalin and most of his pals were obviously awful, Jeltsin was drunk an corrupt, Putin is somewhat paranoid-dictatoric, and most of the tsars were raving mad and totally uninterested in the situation of their subjects! where there's no tradition for civil rights and descent government you can't expect a mere change of government form to turn things upside down overnight. russian leaders, as well as chinese etc. have always been dictatoric and probably will be in the overseeable future.... there's no reason why a communist state(however you define that) has to delegate it's power to a single leader, that's unfortunately just the way things are done some places.

Yeah, and due to his effecient use of propaganda, in the eyes of most, stalinist and moaist dictators and communism are intimately intertwined. Bleh...

History lesson: Stalin Directly murdered millions. He murdered more than 12 million people. His attempts to make everyone equal failed. In fact there was great dissent in Russia against his policies, and that is why he had to kill 12 million. There was still wide spread poverty. Most of the people were in fact poor. So much for "industrialization", or what we like to call forced labor in capitalist world.

Forced like... Working off a debt mandatorily on a mining facility? Like... The US? Yeah, anywho, Russian archives claim 4 million, and I'm more inclined to believe Russian statistics than American ones (70% of the American media, at the time, was owned by a wonderful ultra-rightwing conservative who had referred to Hitler as a friend. I don't trust him as far as I can through him, especially since Hitler wanted to trash Stalin's image in order to internationally justify his invasion of the Ukraine).

In any case, I've already said Stalin wasn't exactly the paradigm of working-class leader, to put it very, very politely. I've always been a trotskyist.


Umm, Germany impoverished itself, you know, the whole war thing. Are you making excuses for Hitler? Wow.


Ok... Totally my fault and certainly a faux pau. I meant WWI, not II. NOt defending Hitler... ...Just want to restate that, NOT defending Hitler. Not... As in, at all... WWI was started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, it wasn't directly Germany's fault (though I don't think they were wetting themselves over the idea of a war).


And stalin didn't use violent and brutal methods to rule Russia? 12 million people died. I guess that was just really mean.....


I already said he did... ...?


Stalin didn't save Russia, mother nature and the Allies did. Remember? Germany was fighting a war on two fronts. It did not have the resources to deal with the other Allies and Russia. Then winter came, and supplies ran thin because most of them were going to a more threatening enemy.(The Western Front) Many Germans died. Before the pressure was on, Germany was kicking Russia's ass. Remember Stalingrad?(Russia barely won) Or what about the other battles leading up to that? Asses got kicked. So much for "industrialization".

No, Stalin saved Russia... ...I don't see how you could claim that Russia would've been sufficiently industrialized had it not been forced (50 years in 10?... Not going to happen). That being said, I did state that Stalin, the wonderful (sarcastic) double-edged sword like always, made the military much less efficient through his 'purging'. Nonetheless, I couldn't see Russia having had held its own during WWII had Stalin let free-market economies determine its economic growth. Nor could I see it facing a candle in a hurricane's chance under Tsarist rule, but I don't think anyone is really arguing that...

And, just for the record (lost of carp is going on this proverbial record... I don't think anyone's keeping track anyway), The other industrialized nations of Europe weren't doing much better. Per person they did better, but, as I stated now multiple times, Stalin's fault (paranoid bastard). I mean, honestly, Germany was kicking EVERYONE'S ass... ...US to German losses favored the German forces.

I call BS. The average income for a farm household in 2002 was around $60k (1 (http://www.agecon.ucdavis.edu/uploads/update_articles/v5n4_2.pdf)). This also invalidates several other statements you made, but I won't bother quoting them all.


No, I call BS. The greater majority of the earnings are off-farm. I.e. not from farming. They are not exclusively farmers. That's like claiming I could make 600k a year as teacher, if I also held a job as a doctor.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/WellBeing/incomeinperspective.htm


If you signed a contract and agreed to give him 8 pies, or 80% of the pies you make, then yes, it would be "proper." That would be a more accurate analogy.


And if I had no other way of making said pies, yet he demanded said contract, what?... I go without pie?... ...Ok, that last sentance made all this sound very trivial, :P.


If managers are so useless, then why do the owners (the shareholders, not the CEO) allow them to be payed a higher salary? Granted, you "could" be a CEO, but you seem to lack business experience and education, so you'd suck at it (note: I would too). Neither of us, and very few others, would have any idea how to run a multi-billion dollar corporation, much less increase profits. A skilled CEO can add millions, possibly even billions to a corporation's earnings (see: Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric). A single, unskilled laborer can't do the same.


No, they just allow the CEO to do such. I could learn, probably without much trouble (if I can manage trig, physics, and gov in one semester, I could be a CEO), that doesn't mean they do more work. Nor does that make them more important to the overall system of production. I only respect the rich who have worked from the bottom up, by the way... ...The others, I would doubt have any clue how to do my job nor would have the mental conviction not to be a pathetic worker.

A CEO can do whatever he wants, but without the producer, he is nothing. However, in reverse, a worker is still valuable. Workers, without organization, just self-organize. To make this more efficient, executives were designated. Executives depend on the worker, not vice versa; those producing the goods deserve the general majority of the profit. A worker is always more important than a CEO, it doesn't matter if their skilled or not; if America had no CEO, yes, it would suck. Our economy would definitly crumble, but we could move on. If society had no workers, we would all starve very, very quickly. Workers are the foundation of society, and a structure that neglects its foundation is sure to fall.


Edit:

That is the only reliable statement about "human nature" (I dislike the term)I've ever encountered.
[/quote]

Nor do I, and yes, that statement is true. However, working for the benefit of society as a whole is not an unselfish act if one understands the total effect of such mannerisms.

And theres the reason communism always falls over.
Who controls the ministries of planning , production and distribution? the government, which is alledgedly controlled by the people.

So the government comes up with its 5 year plans for food production and distribution, however in year 3 theres a drought and the farmers make just enough food to keep themselves alive, then the government comes along seizes the food, sends 1/2 the farmers off to prison camp for 're-education' for anti-communist behaviour, while the rest starve, the following year there are'nt any farmers to even grow any food, so the government seizes any food that might be about and sends it to the military/police to suppress all the others in its population who are starving.

Stir in a culture of corruption ( "I'll give you some food if you give me your TV/I-pod/Daughter" ) and communism falls flat, and becomes just another dictatorship.


Communism maybe an ideal system but planet Earth is not an ideal world


Or, the farmers producing less than enough to make a living wage on the market due to said drought; due to a lack of wheat in the market, wheat prices skyrocket; a good portion of the urban population starves; wheat prices drop and everything's fine, capitalism works again... ...Well, minus the famine.

Your last statement is as much a cop-out as claiming human nature. I don't want to support the millions of impoverished people around the world and at home because I want a new TV! Wah, wah, wah... ...It doesn't need to be ideal for communism, just self-fraggin'-conscious.

Alright, lets see if this works... PAUSE ...Probably not.

Oh well, I have to go to bed, I have work in the morning and I'm tired (13 hours today, just so I can go to a wonderfully appropriately priced college), and my hand hurts (because I can't afford medical care... Not that I deserve it, I should just work harder... That fixes everything under capitalism).