But... that's the idea behind communism!

I know you're being glib, I just wish everyone would calm down about communism and capitalism. They're both useful but flawed ideologies and if there's one thing that the last century should have taught us, humans are not good at instituting either extreme. What we do have evidence to suggest is that taking the useful parts of both seems to work well.

From an historical point of view, we know what we need to do, we just get wrapped up in ideological wars. Regulate markets up to, but not past, the point where they're not winner take all, companies aren't hurting workers and we're not destroying the environment. Provide social safety nets, healthcare, and tax preparation so small businesses can focus on building useful things instead of spending all their time with overhead tasks and individuals can take risks without fear of destitution. Finally, and most importantly, heavily tax the 0.1% and get rid of corporate influence in public policy so we don't end up going back to....this.

Was life ever like this? and if so, is it a failure of that life that it devolved into... this? and if not, how would you get there? These are facetious, here is my point:

You're drowning in ideology while decrying ideological wars because you have decided the way things should be, outlined that this would be a shared vision of all (if only they were as clear-headed as you), that this way would never ever devolve, and provide no path for getting there and hope no one asks. it's magical realism!

Yes and no (I know, way to narrow it down).

On one hand, yeah, that aligns with a vaguely socialist ideology and maybe some other stuff. It has some of my biases in it, particularly in terms of what our current problems actually are (a secular lack of fiscal equality), and that's very much up for debate. There are a lot of social and racial issues that also contribute to our problems, but...

On the other hand, this is the blueprint for the nations that currently have the lowest inequality and highest social mobility. Yeah, this reflects ideology, but at some point we have to actually pick something and picking something that's currently working isn't particularly ideological. Just because it happens to align with ideologies doesn't mean it's ideologically driven. Literally any solution will align with some random ideology.

I appreciate your followup but this ideology isn't random alignment. it's just a kinder, softer version of the dominant ideology. how do you think the 0.1% of a given "good" country gets all that money to tax? from resource and wealth extraction from the "poor" countries! Even presuming we should have a 0.1% to tax (instead of treating them like the french aristocracy, for example) is an ideological position. It's capitalism.

Fwiw, these were my biases too and then I think I just got jaded that you can't stay here. Ignoring the first world / western chauvinism at play, we could get there but i think even these "nice" countries are all going to backslide if, idk, we run out of computer chips, the global extraction economy fully shifts to China, or the IMF decides to punish them like they did Greece.

Capitalism only ever was good for the commoner at gunpoint

I think I know what you mean but I'm still very confused.

Communism is not a "useful but flawed" ideology.

Communism is deliberate fraud.

Read Marx on the Labour Theory of Value, and watch as he twists the definitions of words until he hits upon the desired outcome.

And all of socialism is built about that lie.

> If you don't work, you don't eat.

Oh no....

You probably would also call Adam Smith, Ricardo and all classic economists a fraud? Labour Theory of Value is at the core of classical economy, all these authors assumed the theory, Marx did not create it. Marx theory built on top of it, and solved several paradoxes known in the theory at the time.

> Read Marx on the Labour Theory of Value, and watch as he twists the definitions of words until he hits upon the desired outcome.

Yeah, any attempt to ground a normative proposition in objective fact is inherently flawed. But the is/ought distinction and its impact in that regard, while written about at the time Marx wrote, was far from as widely accepted as it would later become at the time (and people of all ideologies still have problems with it today.)

But that doesn't prove Communism is a "deliberate fraud", or even a flawed ideology; at most it proves that Marx's writings on Communism make a fundamental error that mistakes it for an objective scientific fact when it is, in fact, an ideology (the two being in separate domains, but the attempts at constructing objective supports for ideological positions, both backward from an ideology that was assumed to be correct and forward from perceived facts were a systemic misguided pursuit of the philosophy that hadn't really dropped off all that much by the early 19th century.)

> And all of socialism is built about that lie.

No, its not. Socialism is much older than the Marx and the LTV, the LTV was part of an attempt to scientifically ground socialist ideology, as part of a wider systematicization of the ideology.

[delayed]

Productivity is typically measured in GDP, a metric which can be gamed.

If I spend a day doing my garden and my neighbour spends a day painting his kitchen, nothing is added to GDP

If I pay my neighbour to do my garden and he pays me to do my kitchen then GDP increases.

If I work longer and spend that money on child care that increases GDP but not quality of life.

The metrics as they are make sense. What perhaps should be fought over is whether or not employees should more commonly have an equity stake in the operation of the company, such that those overall gains do get realized by those doing the labor.

There are tiers of attachment when it comes to labor. I think most would agree that a freelancer has no claim to share in the profits of a company they do some work for, and most would also agree that someone who has put forward capital that allows the company to exist in the first place also deserves a return on it. The point of disagreement seems to be at what point an employee is an integral enough part of the operation such that their compensation should be linked with the overall performance of the company.

Some companies handle this well enough, others abysmally.

It is a bit more subtle than that though, in a literal and practical sense almost all the work is done by fossil fuels. There are a lot of interesting real-world correlations on the classic wtfhappened site [0] that are more than likely linked to a sudden slam-the-breaks because oil availability became the bottleneck as production shifted from exponential to linear growth [1].

Then the response to that was the famous decoupling of money and the physical world by Nixon combined with a growing belief that control of the government and attacking political opponents is the path to prosperity.

It'd be fairer to go back to economic fundamentals and reward people based on labour rather than the current policies in the west of printing money and handing it to asset owners. I own enough assets to make do whether we do this the fair way or not, but what we're doing to hard workers is a travesty.

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...