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Comment by vincent-toups | Hacker News Reader

You're probably right and this is a total 100% dichotomy between naked, machine like capitalism and Soviet style central planning with Gulags etc.

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Modern welfare states make unconditional and impersonal transfer payments. Neither your neighbors nor your social worker get to adjust your assistance based on how much they like you, they just cut a check.

There are good alternatives, but they aren’t based on relationships either.

When you think about it, it's perhaps less certain. Consider a supercapitalist company like Amazon, where engineers are fired when they have outlived their usefulness, and Soviet Russia under Stalin, where the constant purges ensured loyalty and provided new blood in the administrative ranks.

Both Bezos and Stalin had no patience for timewasters, Bezos is known to run tight meetings.

Central planning works on the level of the Firm.

When you get fired from Amazon you find another job. When you get purged by Stalin you get shot. These things are not comparable.

Blacklists have certainly existed in the US.

> These things are not comparable

That's just true on your single characterization, which is not relevant to making a equivalency. The ultimate outcomes of those resources are irrelevant and it's a disingenuous comment to re-frame a situation and claim someone is wrong within your frame of reference.

*did not mod your comment either way

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