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Comment by derelicta | Hacker News Reader

Rent-seeking is a cancer, it has to be abolished. There is an alternative to all of that, but you won't like its name.

> Rent-seeking is a cancer, it has to be abolished. There is an alternative to all of that, but you won't like its name.

As someone who was born in USSR I can venture a guess that OP won't also like its implementation.

As someone whose (some) relatives were born in the old Yugoslavian Republic, they miss its implementation.

So why they are not voting to get it back? It is not like all kinds of Communist/Socialist parties are outlawed in either exUSSR or ex-Ugoslavian countries, it is just that some old people like to reminisce about it but nobody _actually_ wants it back.

You can't vote yourself out of capitalism the same way you can't vote yourself out of slavery.

Says who? Sure you can! After failed coup attempts Venezuela did exactly that in 1998[0]. But I guess they were no true Scotsman, right?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Venezuelan_presidential_e...

Sometimes miracles happen :)

For a certain generation of Yugoslavs, it isn’t just the party that matters but the specific man who led it, Tito. Once he died, even though his party remained, things quickly went downhill for Yugoslavia.

I thought he was talking about land value tax

Who doesn't like land value tax? "Won't like it's name" pretty much has to be communism/socialism imo

Pretty much every land owner

I fail to see the similarity between a land value tax and communism

Which alternative do you mean? Communism? Anarchism? Socialism? They all want to abolish rent-seeking and not only, but through very different strategies.

Well the former is the end goal in both cases. It's just lefists can't answer the following question in a single unified voice: what goes away first? The State, or Capitalism?

In USSR and other Marxist-Leninist experiments arguably both the state and capitalism prevailed. The relation of workers to their workplaces didn't actually change - still taking orders, this time not from the owner of the workplace but from the state beaurocrat. So workers actually didn't have control over means of production, just this time the political class and the owner class got combined into one class - the class of state beaurocracy.

A lot of people referred to the USSR's economic system as "state capitalism"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

There's also Georgist Liberalism, which honestly isn't a big sterp away from where we are now. Basicaslly it just means tweaking the tax code.

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