161–170 of 328 posts
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I know this was a snarky comment, but I have to point out - you know pensioners don't work, right?
You know that people invest in their pensions long before they get to stop working, right? At least how it worked in mid-to-late XX century.
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Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the commu…
if I recall correctly, the Soviet councils were robbed of all authority by the bolsheviks. Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level. I'm just talking about ideas I've…
The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.
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Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".
> Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. > I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate Me neither but trust isn't scalable. O…
Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices.
> Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital.
> Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds.
> It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey!
Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...
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The life expectancy figures are manipulated: https://www.econlib.org/about-that-cuban-life-expectancy/
I don't know that having a high abortion rate is "manipulation", they are of course going to have a high rate relative to the rest of Latin America. I cannot find a sourcing for the specific rate of abortion they cite. The first "manipulation" identified would not impact Cuba's position as 1st in life expectancy in Latin America, as they concede in their article.
It is because if you cannot take care of a kid with some kind of problem and dies young, it lowers the life expectancy. So they encourage abortion and remove it from the count.
This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part. None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.
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People tend to value different things. If you value hunger and corruption, go to Cuba or North Korea where you have to ask permission even to have the hair cut you want and some are illegal (NK in this case). Or you have to be treated like an animal in the customs to even make medicines or food in. I have seen this elsewhere, believe me. Those people that live from that deserve... I will not say what they deserve, bu…
Regarding the haircut thing: that's actually a myth: https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E Unfortunately it's myths like this that are shown as evidence of the /entire/ narrative around NK being false, by those who treat NK as a socialist paradise. There is a lot of poor journalism on the topic (see: myth that NK claimed to fire a rocket into the sun, myth that NK claimed to have found a unicorn, claims that KJU doesn't poop,…
This is also a myth? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap...
I wonder what they would not do to a local if they do that to foreigners.
How about this? https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/19/north-korea-horrific-pre...
The hair cut stuff is irrelevant, and sorry if it was not accurate. But the level of freedom there amounts to zero. I do not trust westerner media either all the time like a kid. I am not this silly. But hey, there is way more than that...
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> A list of socialist or communist governments now: > [...] Argentina [...] No. Source: I live in Argentina and it's neither socialist nor communist. It's currently center-left capitalist. Our immediately preceding government was center-right capitalist. In the 70s we had far-right capitalist military dictatorship (Chicago boys influenced economy wise, School of the Americas trained).
Argentina is almost socialist in taxing terms. And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
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if I recall correctly, the Soviet councils were robbed of all authority by the bolsheviks. Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level. I'm just talking about ideas I've…
"Doing nothing is not an option" is a very dangerous principle. Doing nothing is always an option worth considering and something that needs to be realistically compared about the proposed alternatives. The cure can easily be worse than the disease, and we have many historical examples of well-intended changes turning out more horrible than the problems they tried to fix. Quite often it happens that you are in (at le…
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> For some reason, communists suck at automobile making. Do you not think that embargoes have some degree of impact on this?
There are two things being confused here. Cuba wouldn't have an auto industry if it wasn't communist, unless it adopted weird protectionist policies- no comparable countries do. Therefore, it relies on imported vehicles. Partly because of the embargo, supply of these is limited- particularly in the case of personal cars, the government had better things to spend limited hard currency reserves on while people could ke…
A lot of Americans haven't owned American cars since the 70s.
Other Caribbean islands import vehicles that are neither American nor even available in the US.
I know nothing about the auto industry, but South America is not that far away, and apart from tariffs, isn't it demonstrably economically viable to ship things long distances over the ocean? Because people do it, that's where all the consumerism comes from.