Capitalism more efficiently allocates the labor of people than a command/communist economy. Thus, for the same population, a capitalist economy has more wealth -- it can spend this on better consumer goods AND better military hardware. The tokens themselves don't matter.

As well, the "western world" was much bigger and better resourced than the soviet bloc, and started from a much higher level of development.

It's amazing that the soviets were able to maintain some level of parity as long as they did (maybe to 1960-1965 in most military forces); for some things, playing catch-up was easier than initial development (nuclear tech, lots of other weapons, many consumer products), so it was easier to remain in a close second place than to potentially be the leader.

Like it or not Russia defeated the bulwark of the German war machine, there is no question they suffered the brunt of the German military force that would have easily overwhelmed other allied nations, even possibly the US. Russia did so using that inefficient system to allocate resources.

They did not do this by simply chucking their soldiers at the Germans with the threat of being shot by a Peoples Party Officer if they tried to run back, and often repeated myth of why Russia was able to halt and then pursue the Germans back to Berlin.

Also, any discussion of Russia during WW2 needs to include Simo Hayha ("White Death"), just because he's the most amazing sniper in the history of the world.

They actually never had arms parity - USA had over a 20:1 ratio of nukes in the 1960's. The problem is, the :1 is still enough to wreck all sorts of havoc. Also, massively more infantry.

Edit: Sorry, my numbers were wrong, misremebered. 1964: USA 2,416 USSR 375 [1]. So more like 8:1... later on the USSR closed the gap, but the USA had better strategic positions with bases in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and West Germany, and they cut off Cuba from the USSR after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race

At some point, nuclear forces are pretty much a binary thing -- either you have enough to guarantee a second-strike countervalue capability, or you don't. China seems to believe it can do this mission with ~200 warheads, today.

Building ICBMs requires not just money, but wealth. Infrastructure, the ability to divert your smartest people to building ICBMs because they aren't needed to solve "the food problem", ability to create a system where smart people can become educated, etc.

Communism is a system in which the government basically has all the money, but it isn't very good at producing wealth. Wealth is produced by the aggregation of countless little local decisions and communism is absolutely terrible at making those local decisions. So even though the government basically has all the money, it was in a system that didn't have a lot of wealth.

The USSR had plenty of scientists and natural resources, but they were embedded in a system that couldn't produce enough wealth to compete. The US ultimately, for all the sound and fury surrounding the military expenditures of the 1980s, was building its military out of the leftovers of its budget. A much less wealthy system couldn't even keep up with a fraction of the wealth the US had, regardless of how much money it may have controlled.

You're so far off I despair of even imagining where to begin trying to correct you. You have to have a base level of wealth to even come close to building them.

Why not? He captures or pays off someone from US who has the know-how, and if he has an industrial base, natural resources they sure can do it. That is what the soviets did.

A lot of their technology was pirated from the West. The atomic bomb, or most of the computer chips and operating systems (by the late 70s).

Prices in a capitalist system are information signals that inform the system how to allocate resources. If you do away with the pricing information (by setting mandatory prices, for example), you break this and usually end up with large surpluses or shortages. Getting other people to inspect the system for inefficiency and remove it is less efficient than using prices for the same purpose.

If a command economy were capable of producing on the same level of efficiency as a private one, then Stalin's various five year plans would not have starved millions and the collective farms might have actually worked. As it is, they didn't and Soviet Communism just wasn't very efficient.

There was also the fear and terror the country was ruled by, resulting in a state of constant paranoia among the citizenry. Not to mention the cronyism inherent in that system, by which only the most "loyal" (not to the state, but to their bosses) had any kind of future. And then there was the massive and vicious oppression and persecution of various minorities across the nation, and of the nationals of the various countries which the Soviet Union invaded and absorbed.

And even at the start of the Soviet Union, there were the millions who were killed during the Russian revolutions, which radically restructured the societies which made up the Soviet Union.

All these factors and many more contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union. It's just not nearly as simple as saying that "capitalism is more efficient than communism".

It's not like the USSR was unique historically. China, Vietnam, and North Korea also attempted similar systems. Of the three, two have effectively admitted defeat and are now pursuing progressively free-market systems while the third hasn't, and is a Hell-hole as a result.

Um.. No. I explained some of the reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed. No other "centralized system" had the particular history that the Soviet Union had. It was absolutely unique. And I can see no reason why any other "centralized system" must have all, or even any, of those negative factors which caused the Soviet Union to collapse.

"even if you remove all those problems a centralized system still can not beat a capitalistic system with its superior capital allocation via pricing mechanisms"

This statement of yours sounds like an avowal of ideology (an ideology that's sadly all too prevalent on HN), rather than any sort of argument in favor of capitalism or against communism.

"Somebody not in the favored central government is going to want to be in the favored central government clique, and in the absence of other mechanisms to keep them in check (like letting the market decide who wins or even having both win), it's going to turn to violence."

Are you saying that "favored central government cliques" and violence aren't possible in capitalist systems? Even a superficial look at a model capitalist country like the US will reveal their presence.

No, it's a reflection of Economics 101, really. You simply can not replicate the amount of information in a price in a centralized system, it's actually impossible.

Walk through the first few chapters of http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC... . No, seriously, do it. The first few chapters are very basic and if you can just wave them away as "ideological" then we're done here anyhow. Prices contain a lot of information and no central authority can match it. They especially can't match it if they believe prices are a moral issue and they ignore the basis of them in the first place.

"Are you saying that "favored central government cliques" and violence aren't possible in capitalist systems? Even a superficial look at a model capitalist country like the US will reveal their presence."

First, the US is not a model capitalist country and has not been in a long time. The idea that the US is some sort of unrestricted capitalist paradise is propaganda, not fact. Second, your logic here is terrible. When I say that the only outlet for advancement is one or another form of violence in a centralized system, therefore I am claiming that in a capitalistic system it is never a form of advancement? If you're not even reading my actual points and you're willing to bend what I'm saying that hard, or you can't even see the grievous crime against logic you just committed, that's not even worth replying to.