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You cannot ignore the military spending, though. It is wealth production as with anything else. I am not suggesting the wealth was fairly or reasonably distri
by retrac 6y ago
You cannot ignore the military spending, though. It is wealth production as with anything else. I am not suggesting the wealth was fairly or reasonably distributed. (Then again, is it truly under any system?) I am pointing out that wealth was produced and existed. And that there was a fairly steady rate of growth sustained for about half a century in all. Of course the 70s onward stagnation was real, and coupled with unsustainable military spending, it eventually collapsed in on itself.
Still. The USSR produced about a billion tonnes of steel or so while it existed, with production exponentially increasing over time. That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. And many popular wonks do effectively make such claims.
- slibhb 6y ago> That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. And many popular wonks do effectively make such claims. These theories claim that free markets are better at generating wealth not that closed markets can't ever, under any circumstances work at all.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoEven the claim "the USSR produced a billion tons of steel while causing only several million people to starve to death in perfectly avoidable ways" doesn't really pose any problems for the theory that its economic system is fundamentally incapable of working.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adolph 6y ago> You cannot ignore the military spending, though. It is wealth production as with anything else I disagree with this assessment. For a transaction to produce wealth each counterparty gets more out of it than they put in. In many transactions this is true. The fruit of the agriculturist allows me to focus on computer typing. The things I type allow some people to make better decisions. At each step we each add value that produces wealth. Some transactions are entirely comprised of loss. Military spending is a form of insurance against catastrophic loss. While some industries capture the wealth from that sort of spending, they do not reciprocate with value. The value is turned into craters for training or worse and too often into decreasing the wealth cycles in other parts of the Earth.
- matkoniecz 6y ago> That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. You are arguing with weakest possible form of argument, no surprise that you can show that it is low quality