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The short answer is that communism is desirable to a certain kind of people because they lack any real ambition and simply want to coast through life. At the same time, they want the state to provide all of their material needs and wants.
You can easily find such a sentiment expressed by many posters right here on city data.
As long as they're aligned with the Soviets, they're going to be subjected to trade sanctions. It wouldn't matter what economic system they chose.
As far as the Balkans, you'll have to read up on how they were forced into IMF administration with the trade embargo during the 80's. They were subjected to the economic Shock Therapy which brought on currency devaluation, hyperinflation, high unemployment in the 40% or higher range, and loss of government pensions.
I spent a semester in Vienna in the early 1990s, studying former Warsaw Pact countries. And I’ve been to most of them and I’ve read extensively about them.
May I beg to ask if that might happen to show perhaps just a tiny bit of knowledge?
But what's the point of getting a PhD if you're destined to live in poverty like everyone else? Where does the motivation come from?
Prestige! If you're a "doctor of sciences" at a university or the Academy of Sciences, you get to look down your nose at everyone else, socialize with your peers (an exclusive group), and perhaps get an apartment in a good location. In the absence of better financial compensation, you get compensated in prestige, and the privilege of behaving in a superior manner towards others. You may even be allowed to travel to international conferences occasionally, at the State's expense.
People who favor communism erroneously think they will benefit from it. I think there is also a large element of self-righteousness and idealism in their thinking. Capitalism is based on the values of greed and self interest as motivators. You don't want those incentives to be extreme, and so they are tempered through cultural norms and regulation, but at the end of the day, you work hard and create inventions and start businesses to prosper. This is why capitalism works so effectively 99% of the time.
Pro-communists imagine a utopian world where everything is fair and everyone is equal. Pro-communists are incapable of understanding the reality of life, that unfairness and inequality are natural. When you see a litter of puppies and one is born a runt, that is unfair and that puppy is unequal. That is just a product of nature. Nature produces a lot of unfairness and inequality. Products of nature include human IQ, human talent, and human physiology. Nature gives you a wide disparity of morals, work ethic, perseverence, drive, ambition. All of this unfairness produces inequality of prosperity. It cannot be overcome with a government or economic system.
Pro-communists are self-deluded into believing that inequality and unfairness are man-made constructs that can be overcome by communism.
First, unfairness and inequality can never be overcome on earth. Pro-communists can't understand this fact.
Second, look at any communist nation and see how unequal they are between the corrupt elite leaders and the masses. Communism does produce reasonably equal masses of equally miserable and deprived people. Once the incentive to work hard and produce disappears, because the fruits of your labor are taken from you and distributed to people who don't work hard or produce, then people simply quit working hard and do the minimum required. Productivity plummets, dragging down quality of life with it.
A college Economics professor once did a remarkable experiment with her class room to illustrate the end product of institutional communism. You can read the story below.
Basically, she instituted communism in the grade structure of her class. Nobody would be issued individual grades. The entire class grades would be averaged, and everyone would receive the same grade.
At first, the entire class got a "B" grade, with the smart, studious students contributing A grades while the worst students failed. The worst students were thrilled to get B's for doing little but the top students felt robbed to receive lower grades than deserved. This killed the incentive of the top students to work hard and excel. As time went on, the top students studied less and less since there was no incentive to do so, as they could not impact their personal grade.
In the end, the good students quit studying and working hard and everyone received an F. Equality achieved. That is communism.
The sad thing is that so many people fail to understand this sad fact, despite 100 years of examples of failed communism everywhere it has been tried. There are still masses of delusional people who still believe that communism can achieve utopian equality, despite all evidence to the contrary.
They are not completely to blame.
There is a massive industry convincing them this is true. The forces propagating this lie know that communism cannot produce utopian equality, but know they can seize maxium power and control under communism if they can just get it installed as the nation's government and economic system. To achieve that end, they constantly propagate the utopian equality lie in these mush-minded, impressionable, and well-indended people.
Communism produces equality of failure, poverty, and misery.
People who believe communism is desireable erroneously and delusionally believe that all people can be equally highly prosperous. They don't understand that unfairness and inequality are natural and impossible to eradicate. As long as there is a bell curve in talent and a bell curve in work ethic and a bell curve in perseverence, there will always be a natural bell curve in prosperity.
Unless or until government screws up the entire system by picking winners and losers, which is what we currently have in America.
Leave capitalism essentially alone (some regulation is needed to mitigate the ruthlessness of pure capitalism -- we don't want to go back to child labor and slavery) and the free market does a fabulous job of matching goods and services to consumers. That system also does a remarkable job of rewarding people for providing valuable goods and services, so they prosper. It also does a wonderful job of punishing people who provide nothing. It is a very good system.
Pro-communists just don't understand this. They believe in a fantasy. Nature is unfair. Some re-balancing comes through moral societies that promote charity and thus mitigate the suffering of the poorest, but it comes from VOLUNTARY charity, not forced redistribution of wealth. The more money government takes away from hard working people, the less those people will work hard. That is why communism produces poverty and misery. There is no incentive to work.
Last edited by Igor Blevin; 07-18-2021 at 12:14 PM..
But what's the point of getting a PhD if you're destined to live in poverty like everyone else? Where does the motivation come from?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
Prestige! If you're a "doctor of sciences" at a university or the Academy of Sciences, you get to look down your nose at everyone else, ...
A PhD is a kind of priesthood, and the 20th century "communist" countries essentially cultivated a secular ecclesiastical society. Oxymoron, but on deeper reflection it makes sense.
In the USSR, a young person lacking "street smarts" but replete with mathematical ability could do well in the school and university system, reaching a prestigious technical position in the defense sector, nuclear sector and the like. Persons in demanding STEM positions (long before the acronym became popular!) were a kind of aristocracy, according special privileges, benefits, and yes, prestige. Indeed, in the West we don't even have a concept of "intelligentsia". The closest is the profaned and maligned notion of "The Elite". In the USSR it meant people who wrote poems, played chess, solved differential equations for a living, but lived in a communal apartment, took the metro to work every day, and occasionally received a "putyovka" to vacation in Sochi.
I see strong parallels between the Soviet cosseting of its scientists, and the halcyon days of blue-collar works in mid-20th-century America. Whereas Joe Sixpack could walk out of high-school with a 2.3 GPA, and walk right in to a cushy union job at General Motors, with a pension and so on, and buy a house before he turned 30... Iosef Schesti-butil'nik could excel in his Young Pioneer center, then in Komsomol, graduate from high-school with a Red Diploma, then get into Moscow Physical and Technical Institute, and eventual get his Candidate of Sciences degree, getting at job at TsAGI. That worked great for decades! But then TsAGI all but collapsed in the early 1990s, and its luminaries had to make ends-meet by selling hand-crafted furniture or whatnot. So, both Joe and Iosef eventually felt the sting of their cushy environments collapsing around them. And today, both have similar grievances.
North Korea and Cuba still seem to have Stalin-style Communism.
That's not Communism.
That was Socialist Property Theory paired with the Command Economic System and a dictatorial government.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GSPNative
I went to East Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1990 and was shocked at how run-down and devoid of modernity those countries were, by comparison to West Germany. Then I went to the Balkans in 1994 and was shocked at how impoverished Romania was (and less so Bulgaria). I've seen the results of Communism first-hand: poverty.
Yes, I lived and worked occasionally in West Berlin and worked in Potsdam, so I was in the East quite a bit.
I was in Czechoslovakia and Hungaria for Druzba '86, and at the US Embassy Mission in Romania.
For breakfast, my Romanian counter-part used to drink a glass of warm water with a teaspoon of sugar, because that's all they had.
1984 was a banner year in East Germany. For the fist time, you could choose the color of your car.
For those who don't get it, there were no such things as car lots.
In East Germany and the like, you went to an office in an office building; filled out the forms; and started making payments on the car.
When you made your last payment, you'd get a postcard in the mail telling you where to go to get your car.
You prayed it was color you could tolerate, because there were only 4 colors: a brownish red (not too bad), a Robin's egg blue, a tan/beige (not too bad either) and a yucky green.
Black wasn't allowed, except for Party members and even then for high-ranking members.
White wasn't allowed because you need Titanium for the white paint pigment and Titanium is very expensive.
While it was the 1980s, those cars did not have power-steering, power-brakes, radios or air-conditioning. Most of them were 3-on-the-floor although you could get an automatic transmission.
The short answer is that communism is desirable to a certain kind of people because they lack any real ambition and simply want to coast through life. At the same time, they want the state to provide all of their material needs and wants.
You can easily find such a sentiment expressed by many posters right here on city data.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mahayana
John Stossel has a new video on the evils of Socialism in practice, not theory:
Note:
This thread is about communism. Not socialism; communism.
It's not about cluelessly conflating the two. It's not about slapping either or both labels on any random government policy based on whether or not that policy triggers you.
It's about communism. So how about we limit it to that, and not veer off on endless absurd tangents into your contemporary sociopolitical grievances?
Last edited by 2x3x29x41; 07-18-2021 at 04:10 PM..
It's about communism. So how about we limit it to that, and not veer off on endless absurd tangents into your contemporary sociopolitical grievances?
How about watching the video before presuming - wrongly - that the video is about definitional matters.
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