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Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

History rhymes. Read Thomas Piketty's Capital and Will Durant's Story of Civilization to understand the cause and recurring nature of economic inequality.

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Why not Marx's Capital? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital:_Critique_of_Political... - "Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production"

And why not Benjamin Tucker's critique of Marx in "State Socialism and Anarchism", wherein he correctly predicts from first principles that state socialism eventually leads to gulags, about 20-30 years before it actually happened.

http://praxeology.net/BT-SSA.htm

OK I'll bite. That logic is ridiculous. "Because X led to Y for one instance of Z, X leads to Y (ultimately and permanently) for all Z?" Spot the fallacy. (And what exactly do you mean by 'first principles' in a field of social science and political economy?)

Counter-thoughts from reality: China's doing great, and the US has a higher percentage of its own population incarcerated than any other state in human history.

China appears to have forced labor in their prisons. Is that not what a gulag was?

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/jun/22/inside-chin...

For that matter, the US has it as well (albeit to a 'cleaner' extent):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

I think that Tucker would argue that the US prison state is a result of socialistic tendencies in this nation. He made statements about 2/3 of the way down that are reminiscent of counter drug wars arguments (of course that is not strictly a prediction since counter drugs laws argument have tuckerian ideas in their DNA.)

Tucker made the accurate prediction. If you challenge that it won't happen again, the onus is on you to explain what is different and why Tucker's model will fail this time around. Did you even read the essay?

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