251–260 of 328 posts
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Your definition is the correct one for what Communism strives to be. A communal ownership of things. It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.
It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.
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If you develop type-2 diabetes, you may be able to cure it by not eating any sugar for a few weeks. And, keep it off after, if you never eat sugar except with enough fiber. I.e., apples ok, donuts & froot loops not. That is good advice for all of us: there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes. For many people, cinnamon is a good temporary treatment for type-2 diabetes. But some people have a bad re…
>If you develop type-2 diabetes, you may be able to cure it by not eating any sugar for a few weeks. Developing type-2 diabetes will be a process that happens over several decades. So which few weeks is it that I need to stop eating sugar? I need to know because I was going to make cookies. >there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes I've taken medication that progressively leads to type 2 diabetes…
Robert Lustig has been curing fatty-liver-disease-induced type 2 diabetes in children by eliminating sugar from their diet. Of course kids get better faster than adults.
I would expect someone who knows he has induced type-2 diabetes to already be pretty damn careful about sugar intake...
But: I am not a physician. None of the above is competent medical advice.
That said, Robert Lustig says most physicians are woefully uninformed about liver pathology.
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The market is one-dollar-one-vote. If you start with an equitable distribution of wealth, then sure, it's the will of the people. But if you start with wealth being disproportionally skewed towards a very small class - as is the case in every real-world developed economy today - the result is oligarchy, not democracy. The problem with mainstream economic right is that it ignores that, or assumes that markets will eve…
There is no mainstream economic left.
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Well one thing about going to a poor communist country is you still notice that a lot of people are doing regular people things like sending their children to school or dance lessons, having weddings, playing music, dancing, and drinking alcohol. The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy. Cuba is not really in…
> The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy. No way for their wealth, to begin with, and why you should choose how people choose? They are animals? Everything that is cheaper than its possible price is literally being paid by someone, with their labour or by others. Free things, literally, do not exist. And thi…
Really interesting article! On a related note, one oddity I often see online (and, once, in person) are the die-hard groups of westerners who insist that North Korea is actually a paradise on earth and any claim to the contrary is some kind of evil capitalist propaganda. Utterly baffling, when there are so many sources like this article indicating otherwise.
Not paradise, but not a prison state like the US describes. Just a really poor country like other poor countries. My cousin (Korean-Canadian) went on one of those hokey tours in the DPRK before they were banned and actually talked to the locals. She said they had normal lives of jobs, friends, relationships, hobbies, like we all do, just with less material wealth.
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This was exactly the kind of context I was missing. Thanks for this. I remember some high-profile expats immigrating to China in the 1950s and 60s, and writing about their experiences publicly to acclaim and disdain. Do you know if any of these are critically well-received?
I'm not sure which high-profile expats you're referring to. That's not an area I'm familiar with. I do know about the fates of some westerners who went to North Korea. But don't know much about those who went to China.
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> NK is really the odd one there with the hereditary thing and all. Almost all other communist "dictatorships" are really not that different from US style corporations. Wait, are you saying equity ownership and therefore control, of “US style corporations” isn't inheritable?
I'm saying public companies -as in trading in the stock market- (and to a lesser extent private ones too) and corporate culture is very similar to communist government. Schumpeter said something in the lines of "it's ironic that in democratic free-market countries most economic activity happens under hierarchical top-down organizations".
It’s only even slightly ironic if you ignore that “free-market” is the capitalist euphemism for a society whose structure is top-to-bottom regulated (largely, through the exact shape of the imposed definition of “property rights”) around principals engineered and fought for tooth-and-nail over centuries by the capitalist (née mercantile) class to allow their heirarchical top-down organizations to replace those of the feudal aristocracy as the main driving force in society.
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"Left" and "right" are relative terms, not absolute. Mainstream economic left is whatever the majority of people who are left of center hold to.
The economic left isn't allowed into the mainstream of politics.
Socialism is a word that can be defined in absolute terms. But left/right is defined relative to society as a whole. Whoever is left of center in political mainstream is the economic left, by definition.