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 o

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.