Do we have some corresponding examples of how communist societies treated those people who were not useful workers?
I am willing to bet that those examples aren't exactly brimming with fellowship and charity towards those unfortunate comrades.
I am willing to bet that those examples aren't exactly brimming with fellowship and charity towards those unfortunate comrades.
> Despite its limited resources, Cuba has developed an integrated mental health system that emphasizes prevention and community care.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3610072/
> ... We present background information and an interview with the President of the Cuban Society of Psychology to learn about current mental healthcare in today's Cuba. Mental and medical healthcare are free and fully integrated. Early diagnosis and intervention is standard as each patient is known by their community doctor/nurse team from infancy through old age and by yearly home visits.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ppc.12548
There are more, it seems they do a pretty good job of supporting community-based approaches given low funding. It'd be interesting to see some harder numbers on outcomes. Not surprising that supporting small, integrated communities has positive effects on mental health though.
I would argue most societies throughout history have treated people with mental illness less than kindly. But if wish to treat them better we must stop thinking of people as factors of productivity, and therefore their worth is only as useful as the amount they add to the bottomline. (Though I'd presume, albeit with little evidence currently, that society would be benefited in probably cost and happiness if we were to take on the task of providing adequate mental care to all.)
So being spent way better than, say, some random central African republic's mineral wealth, but not a model which is easy to duplicate much of anywhere else.
Maybe capitalism isn't great, but dang, some of the replacements turned out to be a lot worse. It'd be nice if that context were provided instead of just another jibe at capitalism, which is one field of attempted solutions to the vast and intricate problem of resource management.
Communism deviated from its ideal model, precessed, and collapsed. Capitalism can, and is, failing similarly. If you're truly interested in preserving capitalism, then it behooves you to take criticism of it to heart, and examine how it is falling apart. Your failure to accept criticism as "anything but collectivists kvetching" will only further its demise.
I don't particularly care about capitalism, myself, but the endless shallow attempts to tie whatever woe is being discussed to it is terribly reminiscent of how I used to hear about problems being the inevitable result of our nation turning away from Christ or whatever.
Then you need to read my comment more deeply. Yes, it's adjacent to that no-true-Scotsman. The difference is I'm pointing out the inevitably of such, cf Goodhart's law. Just like implementing communism inevitably results in a concrete model that differs from the ideal, which will then be optimized for, the same thing is happening to capitalism. The objective difference is that it has taken capitalism longer to precess, but that's not particularly exceptional given the lasting power of say monarchy.
> I don't particularly care about capitalism
By your comments, you effectively do. You can't make an argument and then feign nihilism.
> the endless shallow attempts to tie whatever woe is being discussed to it is terribly reminiscent of how I used to hear about problems being the inevitable result of our nation turning away from Christ or whatever
Sure, there is always much groupthink and false attribution. Still, specific arguments need to be judged on their own merits. Reflexively opposing the prevailing groupthink is just another type of following.
Imagine someone keeps making this odd squawking noise in some language you do not understand, every time there is a discussion where something remotely negative is discussed. You don't have to really care about what that noise means, or its opposite, to not want to hear it anymore. That's all. "Capitalism has failed" is that squawk, because who knows what will be put in its place but just the sheer amount of hearing it all the time is irritating. That's what I mean by mentioning how shallow it is as a critique, it's just this sound people keep making.
Try as I might, I cannot come up with a consistent good faith reading of your comments.
You're tired of hearing about something, yet not so tired that you won't create arguments about it by pulling in more distant topics? And when I try to connect with what seems to be your larger concern, you'll say you're just bored of the whole topic? All while ostensibly wanting to hear discussion of a related issue by reading this thread?
The best I can come up with is some kind of coping mechanism. If you're bored of the discussion, just stop responding. But perhaps next time, don't throw out the false dichotomy red herring.
Try to imagine someone on Hacker News who followed your every comment. Should you complain about something, they mention that this is the result of a world which has turned away from Christ, or has not embraced TimeCube, whatever. Just over and over again. You'd get sick of it, right? That's how I feel about the squawk of "capitalism has failed us." It's not much more complicated than "Your probable alternate wasn't that great, either."
Furthermore you keep referencing this "probable alternative" bogeyman while completely ignoring that my criticism is coming from a place of reform rather than wholesale replacement. It's likely everything sounds like "squawking" to you because you're not listening to the specifics of what anyone says. It's very odd that you want to engage with the topic just enough to reject it. It takes all types, I guess.
Well in terms of history we have not had a very long time for this experiment to play out. It is very possible that the construction of a system which allows both the generation of several billions of dollars also causes far greater harm than some of the other systems which were too heavy on the gas so to speak.
If history is a guide, all forms of a system fall due to avarice, vanity, or an external system which is operating 'better' at the current time.