> Economy is closer to a zero-sum game, after all theres limited resources in a period of time.

The "economy" is so much more than just the extraction of natural resources, and it's not a zero-sum game in general. Maybe you're conflating "money" with "wealth"?

The pro-communist argument really is founded on two points:

a) it's impossible for everyone to be a (successful) businessman: somebody has to be an employee and do the actual work, y'know?

b) to be "actually rich" -- which is not just "being on the level of personally comfortable standard of living", it's more of "having certain level of personal influence" -- you have to own a share in a commercial enterprise and get the dividends from it; rare exceptions like a prominent lawyer or a genius surgeon notwithstanding.

These two are mostly empirical observations, and you can frame it very differently depending on your liking; the "exploitation of the worker class" is only one such frame, there are many other.

These points seem to forget about income mobility. How about the fact that almost nobody under 40 is a millionaire (rich), but just about 20% of Americans over 65 are? We can’t all be rich at the same time, but we can all be rich by taking turns, which tends to be what happens as people accumulate wealth over decades. The rich people today were more often than not the poor and middle class of yesterday.

And those points "ignore" income mobility because it mostly comes from transitioning from being a worker to being a entrepreneur of sorts. You don't generally work your whole life as a welder, for example, or a woodworker, and retire with $1M in the savings account (perhaps if you work as a surgeon, you do...)

Also, should we perhaps count the people who didn't manage to live to be over 65 in this percentage calculation of "20%"? That'll move that number down quite a bit, I am afraid.

> The rich people today were more often than not the poor and middle class of yesterday.

Well, poor people today are more often than not were the poor and middle class of yesterday too.

Also not everyone can be good looking, a great singer or a professional basketball player. But you are right communism solves all equality problems by making everybody (except a few select and their families) miserly poor, prevents people (again except a select few) with talent to stand out and kills everyone else who is too unhappy with how things are.

The most hilarious thing about "a few select and their families" being rich is that it's not even true. Having a roomish (1 room per person + a living ropm) flat, a car with the personal driver, a small villa, and access to "closed for others" food and clothing stores was pretty much the most one could achieve -- and non of those things could be bought by money. Heck, that car and the villa? State-owned and attached to the position, you lose your place -- your successor gets them. Money simply could not buy one a lot: there was either nothing to buy, or the thing you wanted wasn't being sold.

And yeah, the common populace did object to the higher-ranking party members and bureaucrats having those privileges. One of the slogans of perestroika was "away with privileges", I kid you not -- people would rather elites be as poor as them. Well, the irony is palpable: thirty years later, the common populace is not much richer than it used to be (teachers used to be able to easily travel by plane on their wage, not anymore), but the top-level government officials are way, way better off than they used to be.

Of course they were richer, way richer than common folk. You forgot to write access to western goods, skipping the lines for healthcare (some had privilege to use foreign healthcare), best schools, best food,... Compare that to hungry peasant dying by millions.

Yes, because workers don't as a general rule get rich, the masters do. Again, my comment was not trying to argue for the benefits of Communism, but to explain why it does keep coming up.

And it's because you can always come to the line personnel and tell them: "Don't you just hate it that while you do most of the actual work, the upper-ups earn hundreds times as much as you? Well, here's a solution: ..." And this solution was socialism and trade-unionism in the XIX century, communism in the XX, heck, even capitalism was sold as one in the very late Soviet Union, no kidding — it was seriously argued in the media that privately-owned firms would pay workers better than the state-owned enterprises, just look at the West, and many people actually belived that, really.

Of course, none of those solution ever worked, and that's exactly why they will always be proposed, in one shape or another — socialism itself didn't appear out of nothing, "when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" was uttered in 1381. So there you go: the spectre of communism will haunt us all as long as inequality exists, that is, until the humanity stops existing.

>> Heck, that car and the villa? State-owned and attached to the position, you lose your place -- your successor gets them

What country are you describing, pal? In Soviet Union it was "вольнодумство" ("freethinking"), which was a bad thing, to own personal cars / dachas by the highest members of partocracy only. Because that raised questions concerning their loyalty and belief in the system. But even they bought all that under the name of their wives and children. We've got plenty of memoirs of their scions to stop perpetuating the lies.

You can be rich, invest, and still work. You don’t magically putter around all day once you make money. Or at least all the self-made wealthy I know are still actively productive.

That completly misses the point, first, rich people earnings come mostly from their investments, not their work. Second, the money earned through investment necesarily comes from the work produced by other people and thats completly independent if the rich person works or not.

The person who "earns by investing and working in both nearly equal proportion" doesnt really exist beyond outliers, this is empirical, the 1% owns as much wealth as the entire middle class, this is where their yearly income comes from,they get money because they own stuff, not by being superworkers, otherwise the inequality wouldnt be growing.

I get the sense that you’ve read a lot of theory without any observational facts.

The vast majority of the 1% and 0.1% get most of their income from labor nowadays. This is a phenomenon called “The Rise of the Working Rich”. This looks like CEO compensation, top athletes, too musicians, business owners, and so on. On average, the 0.1% gets about 20% of their income from investments and 60%+ from their actual labor.

70% of the Forbes 400 are self-made, the vast majority of millionaires receive $10k or less in total inheritance, 11% of Americans will be in the 1% for at least 1 year in their lifetime, and the majority of Americans will be in the top 20% for at least 1 year in their lifetime. If you chop off the top 1% in developed countries, their Gini coefficients are very similar, implying that the US doesn’t have exceptional levels of suffering from inequality, it just produces a lot of rich people.