> Yeah, and all that will come at the cost of more environmental damage and more suffering. Not at all. The current systemic environmental destruction happens

> Yeah, and all that will come at the cost of more environmental damage and more suffering. Not at all. The current systemic environmental destruction happens because it is more profitable to do so. There is no money in protecting the environment. Worse - it costs money to do so. So the system wont do it because avoiding doing it is needed due to the profit maximization mechanic of the system. > We tried communism as well in my Eastern European country, where all the resources were owned by the state, and there was even more poverty, scarcity and rationing No Eastern European country suffered from any of those until the US and its Gulf Allies started the economic war against your bloc in late 1970s to starve it of GDP. In fact, Kennedy administration feared in 1960s that everyone in the world would imitate your development model because you were developing way too fast and raised your people from mud houses and barefeet level to apartment blocks and physics education level within the same generation. They thought 'something needed to be done about it'. And they did - it was the Vietnam war. That is called 'the Domino Theory' read about it. Note that if anyone did even a fraction of what the US did to your bloc to the US itself, the US would immediately trigger a nuclear war as the examples with previous, much lesser offenses show. In a way, your bloc sacrificed itself to avoid a delirious, unstable nuclear-armed actor from destroying the human civilization if it couldn't get its way. And Im not using the 'delirious' and 'unstable' words as metaphors - the US strategic documents actually, literally advocate projecting an 'unstable persona'. > it lacked the competition and efficiencies driven by the free market You have no idea about how efficient the free market is yet. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret-42-million-are-suffering-from-hunger.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret... Entire Eastern Europe is still protected from much of the free market because it still keeps a lot of social democrat measures that were leftover from your communist era and Europe's 1960s era socialism. Wait until those measures are disappeared to make way for 'the market' through the trojan-horse policies of centrist and right wing neoliberal parties backed by the US.