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Romania is also a highly biased example based on Ceaușescus personal decisions on how a country should be run. Which shows my original point: Even within the co

by sgift 3y ago

Romania is also a highly biased example based on Ceaușescus personal decisions on how a country should be run. Which shows my original point: Even within the communist countries you can find difference and things which worked better or worse. Just putting them in some big "it's communism, all was shit" bin is an oversimplification which doesn't help at all.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Even within the communist countries you can find difference and things which worked better or worse. That's true, but life in the GDR was still shit compared to the west, even if it was the least shit out of all the eastern block. You can powder a turd in sugar but it's still not gonna be edible, it will still be a turd. That's why people from the est were risking to get shot/arrested to cross the border west. Better childcare wasn't enough to unshittify the life in the east.
- sgift 3y ago
  Yes, but you are arguing against something I never stated. My point stands: The communist countries had aspects which worked better. And I haven't seen anyone (besides tankies) seriously stating "let's go back to the UDSSR and it's satellite states", but many people noting the same thing: Some things worked better. Let's learn from that. And those then get shouted down with "all communist countries were shit! you never lived in one, or you wouldn't say things like this!"
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >My point stands: The communist countries had aspects which worked better. A lot of things can be made better when the state can put their finger on the scale or use force to achieve that goal, while you actively choose to ignore the means and process through wich that is achieved, and only look at the end result. For example, abundant housing for all workers was not a problem in communism, but ask yourself why? Because the state could commandeer any piece of land it wanted, bulldoze and relocate whoever lived there without their permission or compensation, then build cheaply using the crappiest materials that don't last, and using virtually unlimited free slave labor from prisons, military and schools/education institutions. So now you can say "look, communism did affordable housing better, maybe we can learn something form that". Learn what exactly? That to get unlimited housing for everyone, you need to evict people off their land at whim and use slave labor instead of paying market rates for land and labor which leads to the supply shortages we have now? Same with your "better childcare" example. Of course it's more difficult to get abundant childcare in a free market economy when you have to pay people what they want in order to convince them to come work in childcare, because those people now have much better paying and less stressful economic opportunities in the private sector, than working in childcare for the pay fixed by the state which was competitive in a centralized state economy but is not competitive anymore in the free market one, and you can't force people anymore into certain careers like before. So yeah, communism did some things better only because there were some major compromises in the back-end that people with rose tinted glasses either forget about or ignore, i.e. you were not part of that underclass of people used as virtual slave labor to achieve those goals.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      Yeah, GP's point is naive at best, and dishonest at worst, because from an engineering perspective, of course you can optimize for one variable at the expense of all the others - but everyone knows that that's always a bad decision, and that if you follow the same curve on the Pareto frontier, you'll never be able to achieve that extreme value with a reasonable engineering trade-space point. Communist states, being authoritarian states, sometimes happen to choose an optimization trade-off that does one or two things better than a free-market state - but then uniformly do everything else worse (such as human rights). It's not that free market systems are perfect - it's just that they at least have the ability to occupy the best spots of the Pareto frontier. Communism doesn't, and saying that we can "take things from it" is incorrect.

by sgift 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>Even within the communist countries you can find difference and things which worked better or worse. That's true, but life in the GDR was still shit compared to the west, even if it was the least shit out of all the eastern block. You can powder a turd in sugar but it's still not gonna be edible, it will still be a turd. That's why people from the est were risking to get shot/arrested to cross the border west. Better childcare wasn't enough to unshittify the life in the east.

sgift 3y ago
Yes, but you are arguing against something I never stated. My point stands: The communist countries had aspects which worked better. And I haven't seen anyone (besides tankies) seriously stating "let's go back to the UDSSR and it's satellite states", but many people noting the same thing: Some things worked better. Let's learn from that. And those then get shouted down with "all communist countries were shit! you never lived in one, or you wouldn't say things like this!"
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >My point stands: The communist countries had aspects which worked better. A lot of things can be made better when the state can put their finger on the scale or use force to achieve that goal, while you actively choose to ignore the means and process through wich that is achieved, and only look at the end result. For example, abundant housing for all workers was not a problem in communism, but ask yourself why? Because the state could commandeer any piece of land it wanted, bulldoze and relocate whoever lived there without their permission or compensation, then build cheaply using the crappiest materials that don't last, and using virtually unlimited free slave labor from prisons, military and schools/education institutions. So now you can say "look, communism did affordable housing better, maybe we can learn something form that". Learn what exactly? That to get unlimited housing for everyone, you need to evict people off their land at whim and use slave labor instead of paying market rates for land and labor which leads to the supply shortages we have now? Same with your "better childcare" example. Of course it's more difficult to get abundant childcare in a free market economy when you have to pay people what they want in order to convince them to come work in childcare, because those people now have much better paying and less stressful economic opportunities in the private sector, than working in childcare for the pay fixed by the state which was competitive in a centralized state economy but is not competitive anymore in the free market one, and you can't force people anymore into certain careers like before. So yeah, communism did some things better only because there were some major compromises in the back-end that people with rose tinted glasses either forget about or ignore, i.e. you were not part of that underclass of people used as virtual slave labor to achieve those goals.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    Yeah, GP's point is naive at best, and dishonest at worst, because from an engineering perspective, of course you can optimize for one variable at the expense of all the others - but everyone knows that that's always a bad decision, and that if you follow the same curve on the Pareto frontier, you'll never be able to achieve that extreme value with a reasonable engineering trade-space point. Communist states, being authoritarian states, sometimes happen to choose an optimization trade-off that does one or two things better than a free-market state - but then uniformly do everything else worse (such as human rights). It's not that free market systems are perfect - it's just that they at least have the ability to occupy the best spots of the Pareto frontier. Communism doesn't, and saying that we can "take things from it" is incorrect.