7 ms·

Marx of course came up with these ideas, and much of the 20th century was filled with the unimaginable horror that the people of the world suffered as leaders s

by cubano 8y ago

Marx of course came up with these ideas, and much of the 20th century was filled with the unimaginable horror that the people of the world suffered as leaders such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol-Pot, to name of few, implemented them on a national scale. I am totally unconvinced that any leader seduced by Marx would ever be someone I would care to live under.

Nasrudith 8y ago
He didn't come up with it on his own - it was based on previous fallacies which also caused millennia of suffering. Bad economics taken seriously does that in general - many wars were fought under the gold standard to boost the effective economic cap imposed by deflation. Falling for a model of thinking is certainly a sign of a poor leader.
ConceptJunkie 8y ago
I'm totally convinced that any leader seduced by Marx would be someone I would not care to live under. Marx's ideas, aside from being wholly unrealistic, inevitably result in tyranny and misery because man cannot be perfected. If your worldview cannot survive the fact that a lot of people are assholes, it will always fail when you try to put it in practice. If you look at the Acts of the Apostles, how they are describing the early Christian community sounds an awful lot like what communists are trying to achieve. And it worked, for a time, but this was a small group of zealous believers banding together because of both their beliefs and persecution from without. While this may be the ideal of Christian life, you have not seen any large-scale Christian societies working this way, outside of places like monasteries, where life is very strongly regulated, or other similar small groups (and those often go poorly as well), because it simply doesn't scale. So we have to create a society that accounts for the fact that a lot of people are greedy and won't work for the common good. We counter that by first teaching that they should, but also allowing for something like capitalism where people's energies can be focused on something that at least has the potential to make others' lives better along with their own (the mythical "enlightened self-interest", which is possible). The only other alternative is absolute totalitarianism, which is the worst condition humans can inflict on each other.
- ozzyman700 8y ago
  "because it simply doesn't scale." How do you decide to believe that it is because of lack of scaling and not another factor? I believe wage inequality exists because private property is allowed to be held by citizens and rent taken for the lands productive use. I think people should be able to own buildings, but the land should all be the governments. A Land Value Tax would be something I would be ecstatic to see. There should be no incentive to hold land and wait for it's value to rise. To do so is unproductive to society and incredibly productive for a single person's return on investment. But their investment is stolen from society at large. (of course theft is a matter of opinion, I don't mean to misconstrue what I believe is fact vs belief)
dang 8y ago
Please keep generic ideological tangents off HN. They're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by cubano 8y ago

Nasrudith 8y ago

He didn't come up with it on his own - it was based on previous fallacies which also caused millennia of suffering. Bad economics taken seriously does that in general - many wars were fought under the gold standard to boost the effective economic cap imposed by deflation. Falling for a model of thinking is certainly a sign of a poor leader.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago

I'm totally convinced that any leader seduced by Marx would be someone I would not care to live under. Marx's ideas, aside from being wholly unrealistic, inevitably result in tyranny and misery because man cannot be perfected. If your worldview cannot survive the fact that a lot of people are assholes, it will always fail when you try to put it in practice. If you look at the Acts of the Apostles, how they are describing the early Christian community sounds an awful lot like what communists are trying to achieve. And it worked, for a time, but this was a small group of zealous believers banding together because of both their beliefs and persecution from without. While this may be the ideal of Christian life, you have not seen any large-scale Christian societies working this way, outside of places like monasteries, where life is very strongly regulated, or other similar small groups (and those often go poorly as well), because it simply doesn't scale. So we have to create a society that accounts for the fact that a lot of people are greedy and won't work for the common good. We counter that by first teaching that they should, but also allowing for something like capitalism where people's energies can be focused on something that at least has the potential to make others' lives better along with their own (the mythical "enlightened self-interest", which is possible). The only other alternative is absolute totalitarianism, which is the worst condition humans can inflict on each other.

ozzyman700 8y ago
"because it simply doesn't scale." How do you decide to believe that it is because of lack of scaling and not another factor? I believe wage inequality exists because private property is allowed to be held by citizens and rent taken for the lands productive use. I think people should be able to own buildings, but the land should all be the governments. A Land Value Tax would be something I would be ecstatic to see. There should be no incentive to hold land and wait for it's value to rise. To do so is unproductive to society and incredibly productive for a single person's return on investment. But their investment is stolen from society at large. (of course theft is a matter of opinion, I don't mean to misconstrue what I believe is fact vs belief)

dang 8y ago

Please keep generic ideological tangents off HN. They're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html