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The murder thing gets brought up a lot, and it seems nonsensical to me for two reasons: First off, Russian communism gets blamed for millions of deaths, while A

The murder thing gets brought up a lot, and it seems nonsensical to me for two reasons: First off, Russian communism gets blamed for millions of deaths, while American capitalism has never killed anyone. How many thousands of Americans die every year from lack of medical care? How many workers had their lives shortened (or ended) by unsafe working conditions? How many of those workers were children? How many millions will die of famine caused by runaway climate change that capitalists had no incentive to address? I'm not demanding answers, I just wanted to point out that if we're keeping score, we should consider both sides. The other part that I can never square up in my head, particularly as it relates to the Holodomor and gulags and whatnot, is that those things don't seem particularly related to communism itself -- the starvation of the Ukrainians is a travesty, but one that was enabled by an authoritarian government, not a communist one. Unimaginably terrible things happened in the USSR, but was that because of communism, or because of the communist rulers?

pfisch 9y ago
Historically most attempts to engineer society through force of law have had disastrous side effects, and have led to some of the most deadly atrocities in history. Communism is all about engineering society. The Great Leap forward is probably the most intense example of this. The Five Year Plans of the USSR are another. The one child policy, prohibition, the war on drugs. All of these policies go against human nature and while they are all at least somewhat effective at achieving their aims, they all have had massive terrible side effects. We are just not very good at predicting the outcomes when we try to engineer society and we should be very careful about its application, and probably we should attempt to not do it when possible. The natural state of man is capitalism, it predates recorded history.
- EGreg 9y ago
  The problem is that the natural state leads to a lot of death as well. Monogamy is not a natural state either by the way. Because after a war, there were far more women than men. Technology has caused unprecedented peace among man. It is technology, far more than capitalism, that has enabled plenty and endef slavery and feudalism. You think people couldn't own things before the 1800s? People owned tons of things. The ideology of free-market capitalism says that every era of human history that was miserable was that way because they didn't have free-market capitalism. But free-market capitalism as you conceive of it only became possible after a certain technological prosperity had been achieved. And it still doesn't exist today. The USA is more socialist than some other less prosperous countries. Look for example at Africa. There were never any large empires there and as a result the tribes engaged in endless fighting against one another. As a result the technological (and military) capabilities of the peoples fell behind and they were easily conquered by Europeans later. This would have happened whether they had capitalism or socialism, the political units (of unified language or religion, no fighting between inside the polity etc.) were just too small for any meaningful growth to take place and knowledge to be disseminated. If the natural state of man is capitalism and it predates recorded history, then it sure takes a long time to achieve anything. All the populaton explosion has happened in the last 200 years.
vixen99 9y ago
Poverty is the natural state of mankind. How many more millions would exist in dire misery were it not for the development of wealth creation in the West. You might want to look at Robert Conquest's The Great Terror - "Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors can hardly be lower than some fifteen million."
WalterBright 9y ago
Check out the book "The Black Book of Communism" by Courtois if you think the grim harvest of communism is restricted to the USSR.

pfisch 9y ago

Historically most attempts to engineer society through force of law have had disastrous side effects, and have led to some of the most deadly atrocities in history. Communism is all about engineering society. The Great Leap forward is probably the most intense example of this. The Five Year Plans of the USSR are another. The one child policy, prohibition, the war on drugs. All of these policies go against human nature and while they are all at least somewhat effective at achieving their aims, they all have had massive terrible side effects. We are just not very good at predicting the outcomes when we try to engineer society and we should be very careful about its application, and probably we should attempt to not do it when possible. The natural state of man is capitalism, it predates recorded history.

EGreg 9y ago
The problem is that the natural state leads to a lot of death as well. Monogamy is not a natural state either by the way. Because after a war, there were far more women than men. Technology has caused unprecedented peace among man. It is technology, far more than capitalism, that has enabled plenty and endef slavery and feudalism. You think people couldn't own things before the 1800s? People owned tons of things. The ideology of free-market capitalism says that every era of human history that was miserable was that way because they didn't have free-market capitalism. But free-market capitalism as you conceive of it only became possible after a certain technological prosperity had been achieved. And it still doesn't exist today. The USA is more socialist than some other less prosperous countries. Look for example at Africa. There were never any large empires there and as a result the tribes engaged in endless fighting against one another. As a result the technological (and military) capabilities of the peoples fell behind and they were easily conquered by Europeans later. This would have happened whether they had capitalism or socialism, the political units (of unified language or religion, no fighting between inside the polity etc.) were just too small for any meaningful growth to take place and knowledge to be disseminated. If the natural state of man is capitalism and it predates recorded history, then it sure takes a long time to achieve anything. All the populaton explosion has happened in the last 200 years.

vixen99 9y ago

Poverty is the natural state of mankind. How many more millions would exist in dire misery were it not for the development of wealth creation in the West. You might want to look at Robert Conquest's The Great Terror - "Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors can hardly be lower than some fifteen million."

WalterBright 9y ago

Check out the book "The Black Book of Communism" by Courtois if you think the grim harvest of communism is restricted to the USSR.