[slashdev]

So it looks like you're one of those people who've been fooled.

Look at any communist country and note that the worker ends up with fewer rights and an order of magnitude poorer. The reason is simple and fundamental, if you remove personal incentives for innovating and producing useful things, you get a much less efficient system and smaller economic pie. Everyone is poorer.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is neither here nor there, it's not the point.

[thundergolfer]

> if you remove personal incentives for innovating and producing useful things

Do you never stop and think about how you're so quickly equating "incentive" with money (and only money)?

If we look at people that have been radically innovative a great many of them do not appear to be particularly interested in accumulating wealth. So much do we owe to Claude Shannon, or Albert Einstein, and yet did these men innovate to get rich? No.

[eloff]

Money is not the only incentive, but it's a very important one.