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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Oh wait. Russia tried that. For more than 65 years. It did not work too well for them.

You might want to learn a little bit of history before spouting off the conventional wisdom you learned in 8th grade.

Russia for hundreds of years was a total backwater. At the turn of the 20th century it was incredibly far behind the rest of Europe. Under communism Russia became an industrialized superpower that rivaled the US. Ultimately the communist system collapsed, but partially because of its own success. The impoverished denizens of pre-Communist Russia had never been able to force democratic reform, but with the economic growth under communism arose a commercial class that was able to force some level of democratic reform.

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It is conventional wisdom because it goes against all human instincts that the fruit of your work should your own property. That is why all communist systems ultimately fail, because they kill all incentive to work hard and to innovate since no single individual can get the benefits of their own work.

Let me laugh at your "superpower" claim regarding Russia. For dozens of year that "superpower" had to rely on importing wheat from the US to keep feeding its own population. Being able to launch rockets while your people are literally starving (and I am not talking about being "hungry" as we see often nowadays) is not an achievement, it is an utter failure.

There was no economic growth under communist Russia: it was simply spoliation of people's property to feed certain sectors of the industry (the ones that were "successful". Like Bastiat said, there are "things that you see and things that you do not see". Focusing only on the achievements of Russia makes it easy to forget the massive failure of its system in all other endeavours.

>> they kill all incentive to work hard and to innovate

At that time, the USSR was pretty advanced technologically. And it's citizens we're and still are pretty advanced academically.

One explanation why the soviet system failed was due to inefficiency in investing in oil production(which led to a mini soviet peak oil), because the wrong incentives at the institutional level.

But wrong incentives at the institutional levels are pretty common in capitalistic countries: the 2008 crisis is one example.

I am not talking about government-sponsored innovation (all countries with enough cash are capable of doing that), I was referring to spontaneous innovation (people setting up businesses by themselves to create new products/services and add value to society). Obviously when you are in a fully state-controlled economy, none of that stuff can be allowed to happen.

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