[InclinedPlane]

The idealogically pure idea of stateless citizens working in harmony of their own free accord is a fantasy that doesn't mesh with reality and just as dangerous as any Marxist Communist fantasy. In the right here and right now states are far from perfect, and we are in the middle of a period where lots of forces are pushing for greater consolidation of power in the hands of the state. But the benefit of having governments (some of them at least) still outweighs the extreme dangers of not having them.

[biomene]

In what way is communism dangerous? I fail to see any inherent danger in a form of society that distributes its wealth evenly across its citizens.

[run4yourlives]

Well, for one, it fails to address the inherent need of people to achieve for personal/selfish reasons, thus removing life purpose for many of your best and brightest - it kills ambition.

Ambition is what drives humanity forward, for better or worse. Unless you can channel the needs of the state as a replacement for personal ambition, your society under communism is unsustainable. This is very difficult to do without reverting to a society that is either 1) capitalist or 2) utterly corrupt.

Either way, communism is self defeating, and therefore dangerous.

EDIT: Just to note that I upvoted you and encourage others to do the same. This is a place to share knowledge and you asked a perfectly valid question that many people have. This is not reddit and nobody should be downvoted for asking a question, regardless of how basic it might be.

[morestuff]

I'm not so sure that it's clearcut that personal/selfish ambition is exactly identical to financial ambition. Further, there's probably a few different configurations of societies that distribute wealth evenly that are compatible with financial ambition. As for corruption, you probably need to convince someone that capitalist corruption is better :)

[run4yourlives]

I'm not so sure that it's clearcut that personal/selfish ambition is exactly identical to financial ambition.

It really doesn't matter if they are or not. In order for communism to truly work, you'd need to abolish all rewards. That is, the very act of having hockey players and cosmonauts and musical talent recognized by the state at large - regardless of financial reward - creates the very imbalance that communism is supposed to address. As I said: self defeating.

People may seek different rewards based on their character, but the very nature of man is that we work best when challenged and respond will to the rewards earned when overcoming those challenges, financial or not.

If your economic system essentially requires a man with a gun to ensure and enforce its existence, there is something wrong.

[jakeonthemove]

What run4yourlives said.

To put it simply - when all the wealth is equally spread, there is no incentive for anyone to do anything. If everyone is paid equally and has the same benefits, there's no point in working harder or smarter - you just do the bare minimum and be done with it.

Let's take a capitalist factory: workers are paid $5 per assembled iPad. Those who want more money can assemble 100 iPads and make $500 in a day's work. Most are happy with $100 per day, so they'll assemble only 20 iPads (let's say that's the minimum amount required).

Now a communist, state-operated factory: workers are paid $100 per day because everyone is equal. Those who want to make $500... can't, even if they assemble 1000 iPads. So they just assemble the bare minimum of 20 and are done with it, secretly cursing the government for this injustice/inequality (how ironic is that?).

The overall production level drops significantly unless the state raises the minimum amount of iPads made to 100 per day. Obviously, the people who are happy with $100 per day are now pissed off, either because they don't want or simply can't work that hard.

The only ones benefiting from communism are those who make the laws and control the factories/country.

[_delirium]

To put it simply - when all the wealth is equally spread, there is no incentive for anyone to do anything.

I don't think this is true in general, though it's true for some jobs (mostly jobs that nobody wants to do). For example, I don't think scientists, or even most HN types, are motivated solely by money, and would just sit around drinking beer if they couldn't make more money. Many of us are more motivated by science and technology. Making money is nice, but I would still work on tech if it made absolutely no difference to my salary. The reward is finding interesting things, gaining recognition for my ideas from my peers, etc., not just some monetary bonuses.

If anything I think there's a slight negative correlation between in-it-for-the-money and quality in science. The people who are there to optimize money are usually good game-players, adept at working the system and working their way up bureaucracy. Brilliant scientists often aren't even very good at that, and are more often really driven by the science first, perhaps peer recognition second, and maximizing money a distant third.

[jakeonthemove]

True, but what's the incentive beyond creating your new product/tech? There's no one to buy it but the government (unless it's something that appeals to the ordinary citizen and is not banned because it's competing with a gov-issued product), and then what? How will you develop your new theory/tech in the future?

[_delirium]

I don't have in mind some kind of Soviet-style authoritarian state that would censor things and whatnot. Was just commenting on the more general issue of whether people would create things if it had no effect on their salary; I think many people would. I certainly would; actually I probably do more things as side projects than as "real" projects as it is. The incentive is that technology is interesting, and people using and commenting on my stuff is rewarding. How to actually set that up in practice, I have less confidence in. My own politics tend towards more Scandinavian style social-welfare state, rather than communism, because it seems much clearer how to make it work in practice (market economy, but with high taxes, high level of public services, and a strong social safety net).

Even within a strongly capitalist system like the US, being motivated by things other than money actually used to be closer to the norm for a large number of professionals. The current situation where people change companies a lot, get large bonuses, and have widely differential pay, is a pretty recent phenomenon. At Bell Labs, everyone got fairly similar salaries, despite the fact that some people were much more successful in research than others. Of course, you had to be at a certain level of success to get there at all, but once you were there, you just got the normal Bell Labs salary, with raises tied to seniority, old-corporate-style. Yet many people there excelled anyway, despite the fact that they could've sat around pulling the exact same salary without putting in much effort. Why? Because they were motivated by things other than money, I would guess.

[dalke]

Wow. I do not recognize your description of factories, economics, or political systems. iPads are made in China, governed by the Communist Party of China. They have migrated from a planned economy to one of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Is this a communist factory?

I think you are confusing a "planned economy" with "communism." But even then, there is nothing in the definition of a planned economy to say that all people in a certain position have the same daily wage. The Soviet union had an incentive system. For example, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09668134908409742 says "encourages the foremost collective farmers by means of adding extra labour-days."

You idealize the idea of the piece-rate system, without realizing that that's the system used in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era. Read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_reform_in_the_Soviet_Union... how the Khrushchev era reform movement pushed to move from a quota system to "standardising their wages and reducing their dependence on overtime or bonus payments."

From that page, "The piece-rate system led to an enormous level of bureaucracy and contributed to huge inefficiencies in Soviet industry. In addition, factory managers frequently manipulated the personal production quotas given to workers to prevent workers' wages from falling too low."

So it seem that your "capitalist factory" is using the same piece-system incentive system as used during the Soviet era, which is about as communist as you can get.

I also think you are confusing "capitalist" with "meritocracy." The US during the period of slavery was under laissez-faire capitalism, but quite obviously slaves did not enjoy the same benefits which you attribute to capitalism, and a slave working the same job, with the same abilities as a free man was unlikely to make the same rates.

You write "Obviously, the people who are happy with $100 per day are now pissed off, either because they don't want or simply can't work that hard." Or they might put their family life ahead of the company's bottom line and think that 40 hours of week is enough even if some people want to work 80 hour weeks.

Finally, you wrote "The only ones benefiting from communism are those who make the laws and control the factories/country." There's nothing unique to communism there. The same holds with capitalism. If only the richest 1% in a capitalist country make the laws and control the factories/country, then it's very likely that they are benefiting the most. The economic system and the form of government are not as strongly coupled as you suggest.

[dantheman]

It requires the use of force to redistribute weatlh. It also removes the price mechanism, thus robbing the people of information required to produce and evaluate.

[InclinedPlane]

What if we just gave everyone like vouchers or something that they could use to trade for whatever they wanted? Although, how do we encourage people to do work that's more important than other work? Or people who have skills that are in short supply? And how do we make sure that people don't hog the stuff that takes a lot more work to produce? Maybe if we gave people more vouchers if they worked in more difficult or more needed jobs, and maybe we could make it so that the stuff that takes more work to produce requires more vouchers to trade for. But then how do we set the values for such things? Who could possibly collect enough information to get all the ratios right? Oh wait, who knows better than the people who use goods and services? What if we just let them set their own rates for voucher exchanges and let everyone sort out things on their own? That way people who have skills that are rarer or more needed by the public will be able to collect more vouchers and people can choose what goods and services are most important to them personally by deciding how many of their vouchers they're willing to give up for them.

There you go, I think I fixed communism.

[raintrees]

Or (re)invented capitalism?

Vouchers == Church Indulgences == Dollars

[InclinedPlane]

#cough#that'sthejokecaptainobvious#cough#

[raintrees]

(My wife pipes in "Way to go, Master of the obvious..." with much tremolo).

Yes, I admit, I can be slow on the uptake... Sorry. :)

[InclinedPlane]

The pursuit of communism resulted in the tragic deaths of over 100 million innocents during the 20th century. More than were killed by Nazism, Facism, and Japanese Imperialism combined. And that is merely the darkest portion of the shadow that communism has cast on human civilization, the full extent of suffering and loss is on a scale that makes the Black Death look like a walk in the park.

[jebblue]

Of interest to those who are down voting you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_communism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

[morestuff]

History can't convince a nerd until you show that history was caused by an intrinsic quality, not an accidental one. I think it touches too closely to 'decline of pirates linked to increase in global warming' without any explanation of how their ice cold hearts kept us cool.

[jarek]

I don't think it's fair to say killing millions of people is an intrinsic quality of communism or that pursuing it will inherently cause millions of deaths. As an example, pursuit of communism in Cuba has not caused magnitudes more deaths than pursuit of capitalism and generally "right wing" politics during Operation Condor.

[nirvana]

An example of how and why this will always fail is well presented in the story of the Twentieth Century Motor corporation. A reading of an excerpt can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmJUobwKQk

If you'd prefer text here's one: https://thesnarkwhohuntsback.wordpress.com/favorite-passages...