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>And working your field doesn't provide for your life? Under communism, all surplus (or even the full total) is appropriated by the state. So working more and

>And working your field doesn't provide for your life? Under communism, all surplus (or even the full total) is appropriated by the state. So working more and harder nets no extra benefit on the peasant. The incentive then is to exert as little effort as you can. NPR's Planet Money had a really good podcast on this recently [1] I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord. >because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it Under certain communist regimes (Soviet Union and Mao's China), that wasn't necessarily true. The state appropriated everything. [1]https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/episode-337-the-secret-document-that-transformed-china https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/epis...

emodendroket 9y ago
The subject of this discussion is feudalism, so I'm not sure why you've launched into a rebuttal talking about China and the USSR in the 1960s. It isn't true that "everything that [peasants] produced belonged to the local lord."
- macspoofing 9y ago
  I literally just wrote: "I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord." You're the one who launched into some weird capitalist whataboutism.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Right, but that speculation is based on a misconception of the nature of feudal production. The capitalist comparison is relevant since it's the system we live under today and your original post strongly implied, although it did not outright state it, that the problem you were describing is unique to societies which aren't capitalist (in fact I can remember hearing in middle school the exact same argument as an explanation of the eventual triumph of the First World over the Second, which I think is at best a wild oversimplification).

emodendroket 9y ago

The subject of this discussion is feudalism, so I'm not sure why you've launched into a rebuttal talking about China and the USSR in the 1960s. It isn't true that "everything that [peasants] produced belonged to the local lord."

macspoofing 9y ago
I literally just wrote: "I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord." You're the one who launched into some weird capitalist whataboutism.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Right, but that speculation is based on a misconception of the nature of feudal production. The capitalist comparison is relevant since it's the system we live under today and your original post strongly implied, although it did not outright state it, that the problem you were describing is unique to societies which aren't capitalist (in fact I can remember hearing in middle school the exact same argument as an explanation of the eventual triumph of the First World over the Second, which I think is at best a wild oversimplification).