Places that the US (reasonably!) dumped money on, in most cases to highlight and contrast a US-supported domestic system with the Soviet one.

In other words: the GP is saying that the Soviets didn't have the money or human resources to do the things the US did, and you're responding with "look at all the things the US did with its money and human resources." It's true, but not really a response.

> The Soviets didn't have the money or human resources to do the things the US did

SK is one of the biggest economies in the world, NK is literally starving to death right now. I don't think some US intervention decades ago really explains why NK isn't able to build much of anything, or why their allies still can't help them even manage to feed themselves.

NK doesn't have that many excuses in 2023, but that wasn't really the point (or even claimed) anywhere in the comment.

The claim is much simpler: if you're looking to compare the US and USSR during the postwar period, you need to consider the raw resources they had available. The US triumphed, and achieved a wide range of humanitarian successes in the process, but the why of that boils down to an intact workforce and a roaring industrial base, not some definitive dustup between Communism (tm) and Capitalism (tm).

Indeed this was my original point way above, though I would postfix it by saying, as I did also, above, that the Soviet planning system was a failure and Stalin a tyrant. The original claim of TFA was just pure nonsense. You can't explain a Russian's lack of a car in the rubble of 1948 Stalingrad based on "Soviet communism bad, American capitalism good"

You can probably make that claim in 1975, though. Unfortunately people are not reading that far down into my comment to get the distinction.

The US dumped a lot less Marshall Plan money on West Germany than Britain, less than half.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

And yet the German Miracle happened in West Germany, not Britain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder

And West Germany was practically leveled in WW2, unlike Britain.

Your own links explain this: the German Economic Miracle is defined with respect to the fact that West Germany was leveled. Britain was not leveled, and exited the war in debt to its allies and colonies (debts that primed the ~15 years of austerity and decolonialization that followed).

In other words: a decent chunk of the Marshall Plan money that the US dropped on Britain was in effect cover for existing debts, meaning that it not directly applied to industrial production or reconstruction in the ways that boosted West Germany (and France, Greece, etc.).

Perhaps you don't realize the scope of the catastrophe in Germany. The cities were all bombed and burned flat. Industry was destroyed, anything left of the industry was looted. The dams were broken. A generation of German men was wiped out.

And yet W Germany rose to the most dominant economy in Europe by 1970. Britain was not and did not. The key difference was Germany embraced free markets, and Britain turned away from free markets.

How about Japan? Bombed, burned, and nuked to the ground. An island nation with no natural resources. By the 1970s it rebounded to be the leading industrial powerhouse behind the US.

Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?

This is ahistorical to a fault: the UK introduced postwar social reforms that were already present in continental European nations. Britain's industrial decline can be traced to long before the Marshall Plan, and even the war: it's tied inextricably to the UK's "colonial prestige" politics, including the desire to run a massive and expensive empire long after its extractive value had been maximized.

> Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?

I don't know why you're fixated on this. Again: nobody in this thread has made this claim. The only thing under discussion is whether it's reasonable to naively treat postwar Europe's recovery as a triumph of capitalism, which it isn't.

I've heard the litany of endless excuses why implementations of communism all failed, and endless rationales for why free markets succeed.

Why is it that nobody can point to a successful communist society, now or historically? At some point, one just runs out of excuses. Meanwhile, free markets undergo prosperity again and again and again.

You're reading this as an apologetic for Soviet communism, when it isn't.

Here is the totality of the argument: comparing the immediate postwar economic outcomes of the US and USSR is intellectually embarrassing, because everybody here understands that they aren't comparable. If your goal is to demonstrate that capitalism produces prosperity, you can point to literally any other period after the postwar one.

Isn't it interesting that the free market countries flourished after WW2, and the unfree ones didn't? How many explanations and excuses are needed for that?

My god, you have this hammer, and you're really searching to find a nail for it...

What kind of lunatic distorted world view does one have to have to put postwar Britain in the same bucket as North Korea or the DDR?

SMH

I didn't. It's just that Britain had much less of a free market than postwar Germany, and didn't recover as well.

Eastern Europe before and after communism fell.