Re:Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth: Ingrid Ro...
by amalcon on Friday February 02, 2024 @06:13PM
(#39235764)
Communism fails because giving everyone a voice in central planning can't scale up to an economy of millions of people. It requires a degree of central planning that permits too much corruption. The only known vaccine against corruption is high civic engagement. Every society has a given level of civic engagement; and thus a given maximum level of central planning before corruption becomes intolerable. No known large society has a high enough level of civic engagement to support the amount of central planning required by communism.
Communism works just fine for small groups (<10), and passably up to a few hundred (e.g. kibbutzim). Your argument would apply equally well at those scales, but mine doesn't. Full disclosure -- there are other arguments that contradict mine while still differentiating these cases.
Of course it doesn't super matter, because this proposal (though not a great idea) isn't communism and communism reliably fails anyway at the scales most people mean.
Communism works just fine for small groups (<10), and passably up to a few hundred (e.g. kibbutzim). Your argument would apply equally well at those scales, but mine doesn't. Full disclosure -- there are other arguments that contradict mine while still differentiating these cases.
Of course it doesn't super matter, because this proposal (though not a great idea) isn't communism and communism reliably fails anyway at the scales most people mean.