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Comment by bamfly | Hacker News Reader

Free markets do a fine job of justifying their value with straight facts, no need to reach like that. Apply whatever you're considering free markets to other places & times, and it wouldn't have had the same outcome. It took a lot of things coming together, but most of them were scientific advances or just luck (new world plants exist and are awesome, was a really big one)

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> it wouldn't have had the same outcome

It's had the same outcome every time. Take a look at Lenin's collectivization of agriculture. Production collapsed, and famine resulted. He then instituted the New Economic Program, and production was restored. Collectivization was applied again, and it collapsed again. Finally, the Soviet Union allowed farmers to farm certain parcels and keep the profits, which staved off famine, supplemented with wheat shipped from Kansas (known as "the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union").

Pretty sad, as before 1917 Ukraine was known as the Breadbasket of Europe.

Did you know that the Pilgrims tried communism for their first year? They starved. Then they switched to private ownership, and fed themselves.

Failure to embrace/invent capitalism sooner isn't the main reason basically all graphs measuring anything related to humans start to shoot up in 19th century. Lots of factors contributed. There must be (given it happened) reasons that, while doing very well in some ways, more-free-market approaches didn't wildly outcompete everything else much sooner, though some efforts were made that way well before the 19th century (and, again, did sometimes experience notable, but not categorically-different, levels of success)

> Failure to embrace/invent capitalism sooner isn't the main reason basically all graphs measuring anything related to humans start to shoot up in 19th century.

All? Nope. Only the ones that were more free market, and the more free market the more things "shot up".

Evidence? The millions of poor leaving everything behind and coming from Europe to the US.

There were some notable historical events in early 20th Century Eastern Europe that quite famously had an impact on how many farmers were around to farm.

The Israeli Kibbutzen cannot feed themselves, either. They rely on state subsidy.

If you can cite a collective farm system that didn't result in famine, feel free.

The Ukrainian famine of the 30s was not caused by either world war. It was caused by forced collectivization. It was caused by Stalin. It was peacetime at that time.

Wear these downvotes as a badge of honor for truth-telling.

I don't think it's an honor, but I couldn't care less about my karma points. I just enjoy telling the truth, whether it's popular or not.

I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism, despite no historical evidence of its success anywhere. And, on the flip side, the consistent success of free markets.

My favorite excuse for the prosperity of the US free market was the fact(!) that the millions of Europeans who migrated here were the wealthy(!) of Europe.

> I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism

The topic wasn't collectivism. You keep trying to make it about that, I suppose because that's what you wanted to argue about.

Collectivism is the opposite of free markets, so it's on topic.

> I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism, despite no historical evidence of its success anywhere. And, on the flip side, the consistent success of free markets.

Indoctrination.

> My favorite excuse for the prosperity of the US free market was the fact(!) that the millions of Europeans who migrated here were the wealthy(!) of Europe.

I hadn't heard that one.

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