There are still lots of people in the world who think that the one hundred plus million pile of corpses directly attributable to communism is a bug, that the system can work without that.
They are wrong. Those bodies are a feature.
Communism has no other recourse to deal with the vast number of people who can't be compelled to give up being selfish. This is the central weakness of communism as a system, it has no answer for people who don't voluntarily play along. It must have a strong, totalitarian government to force everyone to play, and even then there will be those who won't, so communists simply kill them.
I always tell people that communism is an interesting idea: what if we all worked our very best, took only what we needed, and placed the good of society over our own selfish desires?
But it doesn't work (even a little bit) in practice. Selfishness and abuse of power are baked into the human psyche. The 1960s was rife with failed communes, proving even small scale implementation fails.
And this is where the left pisses me off to no end, because their entire political platform is based on half baked ideas and they just hand wave it away and double down on them when they inevitably fail.
Their belief that they are good people are interwoven with their political beliefs, which is why they don't understand trade offs, ignore downstream effects, and never think about 3rd order effects. Good intentions are what drives them, and because they are largely of the professional class, with university credentials, they think they are smart enough to think of everything.
I usually just shut them up with: "In school, you were one of those not doing any work in group assignments, just waiting for the others to finish it for you, weren't you?"
It's female thinking. Do what's best to pacify everyone in the moment. It's a great instinct to have for caregiving but does not lend to long term planning
But it doesn't work (even a little bit) in practice. Selfishness and abuse of power are baked into the human psyche. The 1960s was rife with failed communes, proving even small scale implementation fails.
Anyone who was forced to share with siblings knows it doesn't even work in the smallest social unit.
It works on the smallest scale (the family) because one provider gives resources to one distributor to oversee the fair portioning out to each of their needs. Your 6 year old doesn't earn their food, rent, utilities but their needs are supplied and they give what they are able. Beyond the immediate family, it falls apart.
There are still communes, lots of old hippies looking for fresh blood to come in and do all the work taking care of themselves and the old hands who have 'done their time' and get to be lazy now because they are in charge of everyone else's work now.
The more respectable economists very clearly made the point that selfishness or selflessness is not an option that effects optimal resource allocation; assuming current limits based off animal biology. Centrally directed humans could decide to be selfless, and fail to output enough harvest for society because farmers' supply chain collapsed. Such collapse is inevitable when participating agents aren't permitted to act on localized knowledge to decide actions. Communism is not just morally incompatible with primate psychology, it is mathematically impossible (without a Mother Brain provided with sufficient information and communication capacity).
That is a failure of command economies, which is very true, but I intentionally don't talk about that, because economics is just part of the communist system.
That is still the surface level characteristic. Where you pretend leadership actually wants to pursue the propaganda of a communist utopia. Communism, like all leftist ideologies, is a tool that sociopaths use to gain power. It requires strong centralized power, and like all systems is vulnerable to corruption. And since it lends itself to totalitarianism, and has a religious element to convince the horde of useful idiots, it is nearly ideal for a sociopath.
No leftist system of government can survive inevitable corruption. That is why all leftism fails. Decentralized and limited government is less vulnerable to sociopaths and less capable of causing damage to society.
There are still lots of people in the world who think that the one hundred plus million pile of corpses directly attributable to communism is a bug, that the system can work without that.
They are wrong. Those bodies are a feature.
Communism has no other recourse to deal with the vast number of people who can't be compelled to give up being selfish. This is the central weakness of communism as a system, it has no answer for people who don't voluntarily play along. It must have a strong, totalitarian government to force everyone to play, and even then there will be those who won't, so communists simply kill them.
I always tell people that communism is an interesting idea: what if we all worked our very best, took only what we needed, and placed the good of society over our own selfish desires?
But it doesn't work (even a little bit) in practice. Selfishness and abuse of power are baked into the human psyche. The 1960s was rife with failed communes, proving even small scale implementation fails.
And this is where the left pisses me off to no end, because their entire political platform is based on half baked ideas and they just hand wave it away and double down on them when they inevitably fail.
Their belief that they are good people are interwoven with their political beliefs, which is why they don't understand trade offs, ignore downstream effects, and never think about 3rd order effects. Good intentions are what drives them, and because they are largely of the professional class, with university credentials, they think they are smart enough to think of everything.
I usually just shut them up with: "In school, you were one of those not doing any work in group assignments, just waiting for the others to finish it for you, weren't you?"
It's female thinking. Do what's best to pacify everyone in the moment. It's a great instinct to have for caregiving but does not lend to long term planning
Anyone who was forced to share with siblings knows it doesn't even work in the smallest social unit.
It works on the smallest scale (the family) because one provider gives resources to one distributor to oversee the fair portioning out to each of their needs. Your 6 year old doesn't earn their food, rent, utilities but their needs are supplied and they give what they are able. Beyond the immediate family, it falls apart.
There are still communes, lots of old hippies looking for fresh blood to come in and do all the work taking care of themselves and the old hands who have 'done their time' and get to be lazy now because they are in charge of everyone else's work now.
The more respectable economists very clearly made the point that selfishness or selflessness is not an option that effects optimal resource allocation; assuming current limits based off animal biology. Centrally directed humans could decide to be selfless, and fail to output enough harvest for society because farmers' supply chain collapsed. Such collapse is inevitable when participating agents aren't permitted to act on localized knowledge to decide actions. Communism is not just morally incompatible with primate psychology, it is mathematically impossible (without a Mother Brain provided with sufficient information and communication capacity).
That is a failure of command economies, which is very true, but I intentionally don't talk about that, because economics is just part of the communist system.
That is still the surface level characteristic. Where you pretend leadership actually wants to pursue the propaganda of a communist utopia. Communism, like all leftist ideologies, is a tool that sociopaths use to gain power. It requires strong centralized power, and like all systems is vulnerable to corruption. And since it lends itself to totalitarianism, and has a religious element to convince the horde of useful idiots, it is nearly ideal for a sociopath.
No leftist system of government can survive inevitable corruption. That is why all leftism fails. Decentralized and limited government is less vulnerable to sociopaths and less capable of causing damage to society.