https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anyone would like further explanation, you can find 7 years' worth here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
2. Even in a world where essential resources are plentiful, many people compete for status, which is a zero-sum game.
3. Perhaps as a result, communism when attempted historically results in famine and/or shortages and/or genocides.
1. Capitalism cannot work since it inevitably leads to concentration of capital and monopolies, which hinders competition and causes extreme income and wealth inequality.
2. The same zero sum game applies to capitalism, since people still compete for wealth and status.
3. Historically looking, capitalism and its ever expanding nature lead to colonialism, endless imperial wars and conflicts, resource grab wars and conflicts, debt slavery, people dying of famine although there was no global food shortage, climate destruction, ...
So yeah, both capitalism and communism can fail and prosper, depending on the implementation, but none of the systems is inherently better.
The problem is that we actually have evidence against this tested theory. Whenever communism has been implemented on a large scale it has failed. Countries like the USSR and Mao’s China implemented communism and it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Whereas today we have a variety of capitalist economies ranging from today’s prosperous China which has a mix of capitalism and a dictatorship, to places like Sweden or the United Kingdom.
Capitalism is a better system based on the experimental evidence that we have, at a minimum. And that does not even include arguments appealing to human nature and the inability of a government to manage prices or human desires.
> 3. Historically looking, capitalism and its ever expanding nature lead to colonialism, endless imperial wars and conflicts, resource grab wars and conflicts, debt slavery, people dying of famine although there was no global food shortage, climate destruction, ...
Communism never stopped these things either. The reason is that these issues are government failures.
First, the countries you mention included Germany and Japan, which, during World War 2 were both fascist states.
Second, the USSR in conjunction with Nazi Germany invaded Poland and together kicked off World War 2 - the USSR was a reluctant ally only to defeat a greater evil. Both regimes were outright evil.
Third, colonial expansion was primarily done under monarchist governments.
Fourth, if you want to (incorrectly) say that the US, UK, Germany, etc. and capitalist economic systems have the same feature of 'deaths of tens of millions of people" then you also would have to take into account that capitalist economies have also prevented the deaths of millions, provided the world with vaccines and breakthrough medical treatments, helped get us to the moon, and improved living standards for many billions of people. Communism did none of that over the long-term. Even Communist China has come around to support capitalism.
Finally, the debate among anyone serious, and I do mean exactly that, isn't capitalism + free markets versus something else, but instead it's to what degree should a government be involved in the market. Capitalism is so obviously superior that it's difficult for anyone to bring about an improved economic system based on the human condition up to this point. Frankly, communism is a failed ideology at the nation-state level and it has been outcompeted by capitalist economies, which is why it doesn't exist except by violent force, and in those limited cases it is dwarfed in wealth, effectiveness, and benefit by all but the worst capitalist economies.
On the other hand, if removing central planing makes communism not communism anymore, then adding those "minor tweaks" make capitalism not capitalism anymore.
Btw, central planing is not a requirement for a communism, it's just that one of the largest communist experiments was implemented that way. There was also a king of distributed self-planning, that worked much better as an implementation of communism.
>if removing central planing makes communism not communism anymore, then adding those "minor tweaks" make capitalism not capitalism anymore.
The minor tweaks to make capitalism work still allow private ownership, free exchange of goods, and a system based on the movement of capital.
The changes to make communism work, make it not communism by definition. If you don't have central planning then how are goods and services created and allocated? By a free market? That's capitalism!
Which historical communist country would you like to live in?
None of the historically available communist countries would be my choice of living. In the same way, I would not be eager to live in any of the historical early pure capitalist countries, unless I am sure I would belong to the top 1-5% percent.
Good capitalism implementation borrowed quite a bit from communism/socialism, to make those systems bearable for an average citizen.
Given that capitalism exists at least a hundred-year longer, I suppose there's still possibility for a nice implementation of communism to come. It took capitalism at least 150 years to get to the somewhat liveable level.
I'd still rather live in a Star Trek like communist utopia/dystopia than in an Elysium like capitalist utopia/dystopia.
Capitalist societies experience famine, but that's not the same as causing famine, something which has happened numerous times in communist societies:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Compare that with the following famines that were both experienced and caused by capitalism:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India
If you look at the full list of famines, you'll find the difference between capitalism and communism astonishing:
I had to search for “tankie”. Thanks for introducing a new word for me. For people who don't know what “tankie” is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
However, please keep in mind that not everyone who is not a priori against communism can be classified as hard core Stalinist. One should be able to criticize both systems, and wish a better one, without being labelled from one side as “tankie” and from the other side as “imperialistic capitalistic pig”, or another insult of the day.
In both cases, government actions were what drove crop failures to become widespread famines.
I am surprised to learn this!
So, for actual factual nuanced details, it depends on where you are and what you're specifically talking about. E.g. in canada it was 1964 when women became legally entitled to open a bank account without their husband’s signature.
I can't find a specific date that women were able to access basic non-credit banking services without a cosigner everywhere in the US. It happened in California in the 1800s, but there seem to have been significant obstacles for women accessing banking tools up until some time in the 1960s - without a legal requirement, it's up to the individual banks, some would have been easier than others.
The 1970s bit was a reference to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, passed in 1974 - “Prior to the law, for car loans or financial transactions, a woman was expected to have someone — a father or husband, typically a male — co-sign for that transaction,”
So yes, what I said was only true about access to credit-baring accounts, not all accounts. But before you dismiss how that would have impacted the presence of women on corporate boards - it was 1988 when the Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988 passed and put an end to state laws that required women to have male relatives sign business loans.
So yeah, the reality is both better than what I said, and worse than what I said.
You have to qualify it with married.
A single woman could open a bank account without anyone's permission! A married women was considered a part of a partnership with her husband.
I assume that you're conflating equal opportunity( via rights and treatment under the law) with equal starting points, but they are far from the same things. Equal starting points are going to be impossible, literally a pipe dream without creating some form of dystopian nightmare that prevents people from having children, and instead farms genetically equal embryos who are then raised by the state. Which will also necessitate monoculture and risk humanity due to the lack in individual variation.
Because you might just as well frame public school as the government stepping in to mandate that there are seats in elementary and high school for everyone.
Would anyone leave inheritances or give gifts after that? People would just spend everything they have, targeting a $0 or negative net worth at death.
Why does your kid need a financial advantage? If society provided an equal footing for every child, the advantages you could provide to them would be love, advice inspiration, and bettering society so that there was more for them.
You say “that’ll never fly”, but I say if we’re going to imagine a better world why not imagine it radically better not just incrementally better.
Not sure what kind of dystopia you're setting up where politicians will always use the greater good of everyone else to justify any actions against individuals.
So I'm not setting up a dystopia where politicians swoop in and rob the elderly. I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.
disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.
>I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.
The details matter. Big sweeping statements like the above don't mean anything until you get to details - they sound like moral soundbites but they ignore the details of the actions required to get to that point. That way you never have to deal with negatives arising from your ideas, because you never discuss the details enough to get to the negatives, just the platitudes.
Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective. There are too many workaround. You can give your child your stuff while you're still alive. You can put it all into a trust. You can create a scholarship where the criteria is being this one person. You can put it all in gold bars and bury it in the backyard. Etc. etc. etc. but if there is a cultural consensus that doing that is WRONG, people will by-and-large not do it.
> The details matter.
Indeed they do. But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details. It seems that there are a lot of people on here who don't think we should be seeking to create a society that actually provides equal opportunities - in that context, debating how to achieve that goal is pretty useless. If we all agree that it would be good, then we can discuss specific plans and proposals to get closer to that goal.
The bureaucracy would expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, and enforcement mechanisms would be created like every other tax rule, enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.
>But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details.
On the opposite - without the details the goal is just a meaningless sound bite, used as a weapon to justify things many won't agree to by saying 'but didn't you agree goal x is important?'.
The answer is 'depends on the cost'. If the cost is empowering equality of outcome proponents, or creating communist style political commissar enforcement mechanisms, then no, not worth it.
That's why I say details of plan first, not last. it's easy to say "what if we had equal opportunity" and get head nods but ultimately meaningless. The details are what matter, and if you can't present what you think is a good plan, you don't have one - you just have a platitude to justify wide future actions that I probably wouldn't support.
Ahh, like every other tax rule - so not really at all for rich people and quite heavily for poor and middle class people? Sounds about right.
> That's why I say details of plan first, not last
I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life. "Do you want to go out to eat?" ... "What restaurant? I'll only say if I want to go when the venue has been selected." That's not measured caution, or the ideal - a collaborative approach to solving problems - that response is a trap where every suggestion is met with disdain. Saying "Yes I would like to go out to eat, what restaurant did you have in mind?" doesn't mean you have to go if the selected venue turns out to be chuck-e-cheese.
It is from blatant political rejiggering that use these platitudes to gain artificial buy in from the uninformed.
I mean, if you just ask hitler his goal was to restore germany to greatness. Why can't you just agree with his goal before you know his plan? I hoped that's not the approach you take to political platitudes.
If you have reason to suspect someone is using these platitudes to gain buy in their plans would never gain, its important to ask for the details. If they don't have details, they're just a useful idiot. If they do have details, they're the thing that separate good and bad.
So lets not pretend "lets agree to my incredibly vague goal without any mention of how we get there" is a reasonable thing to try and thrust on strangers EXCEPT for the express purpose of manipulation and echo chamber buy ins.
1. Enforcing outcome equality directly by force of government, which is what we're discussing here, is pretty much the raison d'etre of communism
and
2. It starts from the premise that if an outcome isn't equal then there's automatically a problem created by people, which isn't true.
"Tax brackets, medicaid, and public schools, to name a few. None of those are communism"
Tax brackets and medicaid are indeed not communism, though in a communist system Medicaid would be the only option. Those are safety nets, not forced equalization of outcomes (state schools aren't really a safety net, and in my view shouldn't exist; governments have a poor track record with education and ensuring everyone has access to it could be done in other ways like voucher schemes).
"A mandate for diversity on corporate boards wouldn't be communism either - it'd be an attempt to undo historical biases that give people unequal opportunities based on their race or gender."
These laws aren't safety nets designed to ensure a minimum quality of life for all. They are communism because they are direct attempts to enforce equality of outcome for only special demographic groups who are favoured by the ideology.
But we can’t have the discussion of what the best way to undo historical inequality, if we don’t agree that historical inequality happened, that it’s effects are still being felt today, and that the rate at which it’s being equalized is not enough - if the world is biased against you for your entire lifetime then it’s not useful to say “well it improved!”
If life is a board game, you’re arguing for the rules of the game: that these rules are enough to ensure that it’s fair. What I’m saying is that if life is a board game, it’s one where the game doesn’t start from scratch when you’re born - the people who were playing before you arrived have a far bigger influence on how the game unfolds for you than the theoretical fairness of the rules. Which means if you’re born into the right identity, the rules protect you. If you’re born into the wrong identity, the rules keep the game stacked against you.
And if you call that communism, well then I guess I’m a commie, but i really do think communism has a lot more to do with collective ownership of the means of production than mandating equal representation in positions of power
You can try to blow off actual, concrete performance in metrics everyone agrees on like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality, but you will still be wrong by the mass collective judgement of many billions of people over a period of a century or more. Claiming otherwise is like claiming 2 + 2 = 0. There are no such things as walls around capitalist democracies to stop citizens from fleeing.
I would for example argue that, while still imperfect, European-style "social democracies" that combine a market economy with a strong social state are a lot better a system than either Soviet-style communism or US-style capitalism. They certainly tend to do much better than both on the metrics you mention like like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality.
And when considering "oughts" we need not limit ourselves to extant systems either. We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based. I'd argue that such a system would be different enough that it would no longer count as capitalism.
W.R.T. Europe doing better on those statistics, can you cite that? It's not really true I think. The USA and western European countries are comparable in terms of percentage of migrants:
https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/wmr-2020-interactive/
USA is ~15%, similar to the UK, Spain, France, Germany. Of course they would all be much higher if controls were relaxed. Many people would like to migrate to the USA but cannot, even from western Europe. Notably pale on the map: eastern Europe, China, Russia, Latin America etc. Migration stats are as I said - communist countries have very low numbers of immigrants and capitalist countries, which certainly includes western Europe, have much higher rates.
For life expectancy it's the same story. USA and Europe are very similar. The USA is a bit lower, probably due to higher rates of obesity, but there's not much in it. China, Russia and especially North Korea are both quite a bit lower.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
"We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based"
Theoretical non-capitalist, non-communist systems are usually communist on close inspection. UBI is communism in its purist form, renaming it doesn't change that. If you want to know how well paying people regardless of work goes, take a look at the current rates of inflation, backlogs in government services and economic chaos that lockdowns and furloughs led to. That's peanuts compared to what a meaningfully sized UBI would entail.