The best one I heard, I am pretty sure was from a Stephen Baxter novel, was our tendency to create valuable "caches" of resources.

> This presupposes there is some way to know what human nature is.

Empirical observation.

Look what happened in all the 20th century communist countries.

Empirical observation is only a way to determine what is, and not what could be.

Since we know that human behavior ("nature") is substantively malleable, we need to know what could be, not merely what is.

That's the problem.

It's not ethical to perform experiments on human subjects without their explicit consent.

That's why the Institutional Review Board was created:

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

You can't just perform experiments on large groups of people to see what will happen.

So in short, neither you nor I know what human nature is, and thus setting up criteria for social organization on whether it aligns with "human nature" is impossible, and a foolish goal.

There is a sort of sleight of hand being performed here. Communism is being blamed for the consequences it has on its own country.

Capitalism on the other hand, you can look at and say "look how well it works for this country", because meanwhile it is doing terrible things to other countries.

What horrible things, to what countries?

Vietnam? Invading Iraq for oil? The multiple coups in Latin America to establish an authoritarian government? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...