6 ms·

> Why not just seize the means of production? I wonder if anyone has tried that before. I guess I will go read a history book and find out.

anigbrowl 9y ago
I could say exactly the same thing about capitalism's boom & bust cycles or the mounting problems of environmental externalities. You might eb surprised by the relatively steady rate of economic growth in the former Soviet bloc, contrary to popular stereotypes of a collapsing economy. The wiki article below is an OK summary as a) I don't want to demand you read a long paper on the subject, and b) I definitely don't want to advocates for the authoritarian central planning approach that prevailed under Stalin and for decades afterwards, at tremendous cost to human life, liberty, and dignity. Lefty types like myself often refer to that dreadful approach as state capitalism. I cite it here to suggest that slow & steady growth might be better than highly disruptive unstable maximum growth. Of course, graphs of aggregate or per-capita GDP suffer from inaccuracy in that they conceal the distribution of economic benefits; as we know you can have a country that's very rich on paper and still has catastrophic poverty problems when you dig farther down into the data. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to easily synthesize data on distribution, economic mobility, the value of public goods, and so forth within a simple metric. Perhaps using multiples of the median rather than currency units would be a better yardstick, but I'm not an econometrist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
It's depressing how many people aren't interested in understanding how and why communism failed, and what we can learn from that. The conclusion is always just "capitalism and communism are the only two systems that exist; communism didn't work; therefore capitalism is the best and only way to run things."
- explainplease 9y ago
  I think it's helpful to look at it in terms of control vs. freedom. Communism means more state control of people, capitalism means less. In these terms, what if capitalism is simply the natural outcome of x amount of freedom? Therefore, shifting away from capitalism means shifting toward either anarchy or communism (even if both of those options are far away in absolute distances). This makes it hard to discuss things calmly and rationally, of course: Few people want actual anarchy, and few people want actual communism, but a move in either direction is a move toward one of them, even if it's not intended to go all the way. And if you do move one way or the other, some of those few people who do want to go all the way will try to capitalize (ha) on the opportunity. Incidentally, this may be an argument for leaning more toward capitalism, i.e. toward less state control: because people as a whole will never agree on a single course of action, and because there will always be those among us who want to achieve more power and wealth for themselves at others' expense, leaning toward less state control reduces the potential damage and power/wealth accumulation that "rogue" actors can achieve. Or, to put that another way, it reveals an inherent weakness of leaning toward more state control: that power corrupts, and humans desire power, therefore using the force of law to concentrate power in the hands of fewer people (ultimately backed by the use of force, as all government power is) results in more corruption, and therefore results in more suffering for those not in power. Capitalism certainly causes suffering as well, as the robber barons demonstrated many years ago, but at least that suffering is not enforced by the state--it merely arises opportunistically, and each instance is temporary and localized, not permanent and universal. Of course, globalism greatly increases the scale of that localization, which demonstrates that theories about economics, government, etc. must be revised and kept current with the times. Our governments and economies are largely built upon ideas whose foundations were laid centuries ago, before any of today's technologies could have even been conceived of. For example, the American Founders could not have foreseen the kinds of rapidly changing, global corporations that exist today, and so we should expect their ideas to have some vulnerabilities which may be exploited by newer technology (to think in infosec terms). Anyway, if you are wanting to move away from capitalism and not toward anarchy, you necessarily are moving toward less freedom and more state control. I think the important point to note is that state control of economic means cannot be isolated from other facets of life. It necessarily influences all other parts of life, for the economy is that from which human sustenance flows. To look at it another way, capitalism allows for greed, which has very negative effects--but it also accounts for greed, which is part of human nature, and which motivates. Specifically, it accounts for it by allowing everyone to be motivated by it. In contrast, giving the state more control concentrates the greed in fewer people, by law. And I think it's better to allow the evil of greed to be evenly distributed (which does not guarantee the even distribution of wealth, health, or happiness, but allows it to be pursued), than to use the force of law to concentrate it in fewer people, expecting them to rein it in for the sake of the greater good, because that fails to account for human nature--it's essentially a GIGO system. Food for thought. :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

anigbrowl 9y ago

I could say exactly the same thing about capitalism's boom & bust cycles or the mounting problems of environmental externalities. You might eb surprised by the relatively steady rate of economic growth in the former Soviet bloc, contrary to popular stereotypes of a collapsing economy. The wiki article below is an OK summary as a) I don't want to demand you read a long paper on the subject, and b) I definitely don't want to advocates for the authoritarian central planning approach that prevailed under Stalin and for decades afterwards, at tremendous cost to human life, liberty, and dignity. Lefty types like myself often refer to that dreadful approach as state capitalism. I cite it here to suggest that slow & steady growth might be better than highly disruptive unstable maximum growth. Of course, graphs of aggregate or per-capita GDP suffer from inaccuracy in that they conceal the distribution of economic benefits; as we know you can have a country that's very rich on paper and still has catastrophic poverty problems when you dig farther down into the data. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to easily synthesize data on distribution, economic mobility, the value of public goods, and so forth within a simple metric. Perhaps using multiples of the median rather than currency units would be a better yardstick, but I'm not an econometrist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

It's depressing how many people aren't interested in understanding how and why communism failed, and what we can learn from that. The conclusion is always just "capitalism and communism are the only two systems that exist; communism didn't work; therefore capitalism is the best and only way to run things."

explainplease 9y ago
I think it's helpful to look at it in terms of control vs. freedom. Communism means more state control of people, capitalism means less. In these terms, what if capitalism is simply the natural outcome of x amount of freedom? Therefore, shifting away from capitalism means shifting toward either anarchy or communism (even if both of those options are far away in absolute distances). This makes it hard to discuss things calmly and rationally, of course: Few people want actual anarchy, and few people want actual communism, but a move in either direction is a move toward one of them, even if it's not intended to go all the way. And if you do move one way or the other, some of those few people who do want to go all the way will try to capitalize (ha) on the opportunity. Incidentally, this may be an argument for leaning more toward capitalism, i.e. toward less state control: because people as a whole will never agree on a single course of action, and because there will always be those among us who want to achieve more power and wealth for themselves at others' expense, leaning toward less state control reduces the potential damage and power/wealth accumulation that "rogue" actors can achieve. Or, to put that another way, it reveals an inherent weakness of leaning toward more state control: that power corrupts, and humans desire power, therefore using the force of law to concentrate power in the hands of fewer people (ultimately backed by the use of force, as all government power is) results in more corruption, and therefore results in more suffering for those not in power. Capitalism certainly causes suffering as well, as the robber barons demonstrated many years ago, but at least that suffering is not enforced by the state--it merely arises opportunistically, and each instance is temporary and localized, not permanent and universal. Of course, globalism greatly increases the scale of that localization, which demonstrates that theories about economics, government, etc. must be revised and kept current with the times. Our governments and economies are largely built upon ideas whose foundations were laid centuries ago, before any of today's technologies could have even been conceived of. For example, the American Founders could not have foreseen the kinds of rapidly changing, global corporations that exist today, and so we should expect their ideas to have some vulnerabilities which may be exploited by newer technology (to think in infosec terms). Anyway, if you are wanting to move away from capitalism and not toward anarchy, you necessarily are moving toward less freedom and more state control. I think the important point to note is that state control of economic means cannot be isolated from other facets of life. It necessarily influences all other parts of life, for the economy is that from which human sustenance flows. To look at it another way, capitalism allows for greed, which has very negative effects--but it also accounts for greed, which is part of human nature, and which motivates. Specifically, it accounts for it by allowing everyone to be motivated by it. In contrast, giving the state more control concentrates the greed in fewer people, by law. And I think it's better to allow the evil of greed to be evenly distributed (which does not guarantee the even distribution of wealth, health, or happiness, but allows it to be pursued), than to use the force of law to concentrate it in fewer people, expecting them to rein it in for the sake of the greater good, because that fails to account for human nature--it's essentially a GIGO system. Food for thought. :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]