Is Communism misunderstood?

How much more inefficient would they have been if they had engaged us in an industrial automation race instead of a Cold War, along with the Space Race?

 

I would say probably about as inefficient as they otherwise were

 

Advances in robots has not borne out your contention.

 

Sure it does

 

no, it doesn't.

 

Yes it does

 

no. it doesn't.

 

Are you sure?

 

That is because the consumption of meat rose significantly. It takes 10 times as many resoures to produce meat than it does to produce vegetables and grains for direct consumption. The Soviet Union has a far smaller percentage of arable land than the U.S. does. It's just pure propaganda that agriculture failed in the Soviet Union.

 

How would we know? What if the U.S. chose to spend 20% of the economy on the military? Do you really think the U.S. would have grown as fast if they did that? The failure of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the inefficiency of central planning. It had to do with putting too many resources into the military, then becoming more capitalist to reduce confidence in the Soviet Union's original thinking. A capitalist country can put too many resources in the military, and they will fail to grow economically, just like the Soviet Union.

 

Production is skewed just as much in capitalism. The GDP numbers are from the CIA. The GDP decreased because the economy collapsed and production was a mess during the switch to capitalism. It wasn't instant, but it was very fast because production declined so much. Why did you bring up GDP at all then if it doesn't matter? The Soviet Union was growing faster than 3% during the "Era of Stagnation". There's no reason why developed countries can't grow that fast too.
1. Pick me.

2. This is no different than capitalism, where company leaders decide what people want and have experts helping them.

3. Again, no different than capitalism. And there is money in a centrally planned economy too.

4. They wouldn't be wrong if they were competent. What stops people from being wrong about what people want, and worse off than they otherwise would have been?

5. The purpose of government is to benefit citizens. This seems like more of a problem in a capitalist society than a command economy.

 

Precisely what are the "evils" of communism. Please describe in detail and feel free to quote Marx as needed to demonstrate your premise.

 

I think it is important to differentiate the writings of Marx from various socialist state across the last 100 or so years.

I think Marx like others before him was promoting a utopian society that can never exist because the humanity necessary for his utopia, like all the others, does not exist.

Communism, as imagined by Marx is humanity's evolutionary destination. It cannot be created or forced into existence and is not a part of some political system (since any political system is necessarily anti-communist).

Now the evils of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoist and the groups who've claimed the title of "communist" (or been ridiculously assigned the title) are well documented but as Hitler and Mussolini cannot be declared the true representatives of capitalism these people and systems cannot rightly be said to represent communism.

 

Man, it's good to see another reasonable voice around here.

 

Well, that one-liner by Ronald fu*king Reagan clearly disproves all of us commies.

Grow up, kid. Try to actually formulate an argument.

 

GDP is based off of prices. Prices only mean anything in a market economy, since in a centrally planned economy one can say that anything is worth anything. If no markets existed and someone asked you how much your shovel was worth on the market then you could respond that it was worth millions of dollars, and since a market doesn't exist then others would have no way of determining that you were wrong. Even if these numbers were wholly accurate, they would still be totally arbitrary since the government can produce whatever it likes. The government could massively overproduce pretzels that the citizens don't particularly care for and this would still contribute to GDP, while in the capitalist society no company could persist if people didn't value the pretzels more than what was used to produce the pretzels, and the input would be taken off of the next year's GDP input after that company goes out of business. The numbers that I was originally citing were also around a decade after the fall of the USSR, not during the direct economic madness immediately ensued. Even two decades later and after exploiting oil money, the world's commodity, the United States still surpasses Russia by 350% in per capita GDP.

Also, insofar as production is skewed within capitalism it is precisely because the government skews it away from where individuals actually desire it. This is an admission that, at best, central planning skews economic production, and more likely an admission that capitalism doesn't.

1. That's a non-answer. You're some guy on the internet. You have no way of knowing that in the centrally planned economy you'd be chosen, nor that anyone who was chosen would be any good at the job.

2. This is false, is a non-answer, and shows poor economic thinking. In the market economy goods are bought and sold in exchange for money, and by seeking discrepancies where inputs can be more gainfully employed businesses can reap profits. Through consumer preference and prices companies can determine where things are most desired. This does not exist within the centrally planned economy since prices which do not actively buy and sell are useless and arbitrary. The central planner therefore has no common denominator by which to determine the utility of a hospital or a school. Because there are finite resources in the economy and many projects conflict with one another there is therefore no way of telling where resources should be allocated. All production is chaotic, arbitrary, and inefficient.

There's also the obvious fact that in capitalism massive numbers of firms handle the economic system. Therefore the dissemination of knowledge found with that can manage the economy very effectively. There is far too much information for a handful of central planners to understand and decide upon.

3. How, exactly? If money can't buy and sell things then why is it there? And even if it is there, then what importance does it have?

4. Are you serious? A handful of supreme dictators are more likely to know what hundreds of millions of people they don't know want than these people themselves? What kind of superhuman abilities do you have to have to qualify as "competent" in this capacity? People can always be worse off than they would have been, but they have a direct way of testing this for themselves. If I buy some food and I don't like it then I can never buy that food again and I'm not forced to have it just because many other people do. Furthermore I can judge my own situation far more effectively than someone looking at aggregate numbers for hundreds of millions of people ever could. Seriously, how exactly do you expect a small group of people to determine exactly what combination of the several thousands of goods I use in a year would make me best off, find out exactly how much I want this, decide upon the best and most efficient way of producing this, and manage through the affairs of millions? That is literally superhuman.

5. That is an assertion on your part, and once again it is a total non answer. Saying that governments are there to benefit their citizens doesn't explain how they will benefit their citizens. Stalin certainly didn't benefit the millions who died under him, nor did any of the other greatest examples of dictators in history. So we should give a group of people unlimited power and then they'll just benefit all citizens within society? This is like putting an unchained tiger a room with a baby, and then when someone asks how we know the tiger won't eat the baby you just respond with "tigers don't eat babies".

 

It didn't help that the quote contained improper grammar.

 

Ya, talk about needing to grow up

I'm sure you'll grow out of communism when you get a job.

 

Quoted word for word. Take it up with the dead guy.

 

Actually it appears to be a misquote

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Ronald.Reagan.Quote.717A
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/communism
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33746.html

There's not a big problem with paraphrasing something and having it include improper grammar, it just makes you look a little foolish. It's another thing when when you then lie and say it's a precise quotation... Seriously, why would you bother lying?

 

Hey jerk off, I took the quote off http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ronald_reagan.html.

 

Actually, if you open up to the second page of that website then you can find this quotation:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/ronaldreag183967.html

None of the other pages on the Reagan section of that site appear to include the word "communist". You should note that this quotation is not the same thing which you originally quoted:

But it is exactly the same as what I claimed to be the correct quotation:

If you're trying to troll, then you're doing a damn fine job.

 

You obviously don't know anything about how a centrally planned economy works, so I'm done debating with you.

 

Uh sorry no. The consumption of meat grew because hogs and cows don't rot in the field when the central planners guess wrong about when they are ready to harvest. This happened with frequency with crops. Russian tech was notoriously bad. The first T-62's that came out possessed an auto loader that would load the bag and the round in reverse order destroying the tank and killing the crew. Russian tech remains considerably behind that of Europe and the US. even the plumbing according to many visitors during the time sucked balls. And during the seventies you could get rich smuggling Levis into the country.

 

We only need look to govt employees and services for self motivation, efficiency, productivity and waste - clearly the model on which to build a society.