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points by jongjong 3 days ago | 0 comments
This is why I think communism would make sense in our current reality. If everyone got paid the same, then it would be fairer than what we have now where everyone gets paid a random amount with no correlation with skill or effort.

Capitalism made sense with small companies where each individual had more or less direct exposure to the markets. One bad employee would drag down the company. You couldn't hide or manipulate your way to the top if you weren't good at creating value and skilled people could actually start their own companies and compete. Now with huge corporations which own the economy, the markets don't work to begin with, and also, people within the big corporations are rewarded randomly at best or worse; in a counter-productive manner.

This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.

[–] badpun 2 days ago
There are always ambitious people who are not happy to be paid as much as everyone else. In capitalism, they start companies or climb career ladders in existing ones. In communism, they join the communist party, where (since the party has totalitarian power over the country) it's trivial for them to just assign unproportionately large share of the pie to themselves - the difficult part is winning at politics game to attain sufficient power within the party. Basically total dysfunction that has nothing to do with productive society - that's why every single one implementation of communism had poor results and lead to people overthrowing it one way or another.
[–] poilcn 2 days ago
Eh? What's this western fantasy in regard of communism?

I wont say for all comm countries, but the ussr is literally the ineffectiveness at scale. You have gigantic central accounting organization that plan faked past with lag for several years for the whole country. Every industry severally lacking budget except for several efficient military serving organizations. Because most of the industries fields fail on themselves, the ones that thrive are also given patronage over the ones that fail. You have rocket industry handling milk production or KGB managing pig farms. Insane amount of people would work in fake organizations where they would just come into cold office and sit there in coats in front of empty table. Cause gov is obliged to give everyone some work and pay.

[–] loglog 2 days ago
No actual communist state ever paid everyone the same.
[–] iugtmkbdfil834 2 days ago
I mean.. there were technically some attempts, but you are right. I think he part that is missing from parent's statement is that basic human nature will effectively ensure that things other than money will of be valuable ( position, knowledge, connections ). I am just not sure how that is not obvious to parent.
[–] gunslinger_meta 2 days ago
That's the stupidest thing I've ever read. If you think racing to the top produces inefficiency, racing to the bottom (Communism) produces even more, as evidenced by all the samples we have at this point.
[–] wallst07 2 days ago
Lol I was thinking the same thing.

I wouldn't scold someone for thinking it, its ok to have floating thoughts. Just don't double down on them and start arguments over the internet with strangers.