> Capitalism generates a lot of wealth depending on the situation
Isn't communism in the same "depending on the situation" boat?
Isn't communism in the same "depending on the situation" boat?
The difference to most employees is honestly pretty small, working for McDonald's versus being a janitor for the post office are functionally the same, no one really cares who the guy at the top of the chain is.
The main benefit of capitalism is the dream of being the wealthy person, if you're a janitor it's almost impossible, but the dream is there
Would you prefer to be a poverty-line worker with a realistic but unlikely dream of being wealthy, or a worker who can support a 4-person family comfortably and retire at age 60 but has no chance of ever making any more money?
(This is not a rhetorical question, I think there are genuinely lots of possible answers there.)
(This is proxy for limited opportunity, tough facts like "you have a family that relies on you so you cannot spend 5 years trying and failing at startups," discrimination, economic downturns, the fact that the world cannot sustain more than a few Bill Gateses, and all sorts of other things that are beyond your control even in a capitalist society. On the other hand, I think 1% is significantly above the number of actual janitors who actually strike it rich in real capitalist societies.)
We've never seen that as a country-level organization, but that's the theory.
[Edit: I will agree that your post was not inflammatory.
I also note that I (on a different thread) replied to you on a programming topic, and for a change, I agreed with you and thought that you had a very interesting perspective.]
There's also the question of what the shape of the distribution looks like - for instance, would you prefer a country where 90% of the country has no savings and 10% has more money than they need, or one where 95% of the country has two months worth of savings and 5% of the country has more money than they need?
Actually in most cases I think wealth concentration has a lot to do with how much democracy you have. In America the wealthy classes control our democracy and so we have a lot of inequality. In Soviet Russia the state officials had control and so there was a lot of inequality.
A lot of anarchist theory is schemes for more democracy. The whole idea of anarchism is to eliminate unnecessary hierarchy.
But if we want to compare communism in ideal theory, we have to compare it to capitalism in ideal theory, right? At that point, nobody has any actual data.
I’m genuinely curious if that’s true or not. But it doesn’t sound like you have a source. Is that just a feeling you have?
And that's if communism was functioning "normally". Didn't Romania turn into a kleptocracy? What was the level of wealth inequality there?
Now if you’re really concerned with who was authoritarian, I wouldn’t defend them.
But it sure doesn’t seem obvious to me that there was more inequality in soviet Russia than there is today in the USA.
I grew up in communism and indeed there were people who were "more equal" than others, mostly those well connected with high positioned party members (if themselves weren't such party members). That allowed them much better living conditions than the regular "worker", they ate meat every day (yes, it may sound strange to the average reader of HN but meat wasn't something that we in the 80s in Eastern Europe had access to very often), had bread (for the rest of us it was rationed), soft toilet paper, jeans (I would have killed for a pair of jeans!), pepsi (no coca-cola tho) and a million little other things that people living in Western Europe in the 80s took for granted.
But hey, most of us were "equal" in our poverty, so communism can't be that bad.
[1] State supported heavy industry, export sector, and large public works projects.
[2] Russia after shock treatment is economically worse off than under communism. Roll that over.