[schmidtleonard]

> voluntary business transactions

The evil parts are hid in property rights which are not voluntary.

> made to never grow too big, in order to avoid impacting very many people

Consolidated property rights have more power against their counterparties, that's why businesses love merging so much.

Look at your tax return. Do you make more money from what you do or what you own? If you make money from what you do, you're a counterparty and you should probably want to tap the brakes on the party.

[nradov]

What are the evil parts, exactly? When property can't be privately owned with strong rights the effectively the government owns everything. That inevitably leads to poverty, often followed by famine and/or genocide.

[Retric]

Plenty of examples on both sides of that, even in the US there’s vast swaths of land that can’t be privately owned for example try and buy a navigable river or land below the ordinary high water mark etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigable_servitude Similarly eminent domain severely limits the meaning of private land ownership in the US.

The most extreme capitalist societies free from government control of resources like say Kowloon Walled City are generally horrible places to live.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Why is it that property is taxed less than productive work? Someone sitting on their ass doing nothing but sucking resources through dividend payments has that income taxed less than the workers' income who did the work that generated those dividends. Why isn't the reverse the case? Heavily tax passive income, and lightly tax active income. Incentivize productive activity and penalize rent-seeking parasites?

[xp84]

The reason to not tax investment super harshly is that it’s an incentive to not just stuff your money under a mattress. Many people have jobs and careers they wouldn’t otherwise have specifically because 100 rich guys stuck their money in various VC funds (especially in this here audience on HN). If we taxed the idea of investment ruinously, we decrease that incentive. You may think that somehow all those jobs (or more) would somehow materialize without investors investing, but that’s a hypothesis or an argument, not a proven conclusion.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I've heard this argument, but as long as there is some return then people will invest because some is better than none. VC investments have the potential to return insane amounts, so people will still buy those lottery tickets even if the profits are taxed. I know this because actual lottery winnings are taxed and people still buy those tickets in huge numbers. And if you are saying that taxing investments the same as worked income is 'super harshly' and 'ruinously' high, then what does that say about the state of wage taxes?

[jonah]

Places with predominantly private ownership can be and are prone to famine, and/oril genocide, etc. as well.

[hunterpayne]

Sure, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Centralized (Marxism and its descendants) societies tend to have those things happens the majority of the time. In decentralized capitalist societies, they happened once a long time ago and we took steps for them to not happen again. Seems like a flaw in those societies is that when these problems happen so infrequently people forget and then you get takes like this.

[array_key_first]

I think that Marxism is not centralized - Capitalism is centralized and some communist implementations are centralized. Marxism, if anything, is distributed or communal.

It's not "nobody owns anything", it's "everybody owns everything". Maybe those mean the same thing to some people, but that's the idea.

[throwaway-11-1]

Exactly this. Lenin's whole thing was to reach a point where the sate dissolves!

It drives me crazy how like 95% of HN is too scared or lazy to read a 10min wikipedia article on Marxism.

[xp84]

It’s your position that we just don’t get how genius Marxism is and that it just hasn’t been tried? Why did it not work out so well for the USSR? When was that state going to “dissolve” into a utopia where everyone owns everything? Why was China a poor agrarian society when they followed Marxism better, and has become relatively wealthy since abandoning a great deal of those ideas and participating in a form of capitalism?

[piva00]

Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though, Marxism is about class struggle and the abolishment of a capital-owning class, distributing the fruits of labour to the labourers.

In that definition it's even more decentralised than capitalism which has inherent incentives for the accumulation of capital into monopolies, since those are the best profit-generating structures, only external forces from capitalism can reign into that like governments enforcing anti-trust/anti-competitive laws to control the natural tendency of monopolisation.

If the means of production were owned by labourers (not through the central government) it could be possible to see much more decentralisation than the current trend from the past 40 years of corporate consolidation.

The centralisation is already happening under capitalism.

[Retric]

Yep, a common US example of Marxism is when Farmer owned co-ops for collecting and distributing crops. That model is well aligned with protecting family farms by avoiding local rent seeking monopolies.

Other parts of the agro sector are far more predatory, but it’s hard do co-op style manufacturing of modern farm equipment etc. Marxism was created in a world where Americans owned other Americans it’s conceptually tied into abolitionist thinking where objecting to the ownership of the more literal means of production IE people was being reconsidered. In that context the idea of owning farmland and underpaying farm labor starts to look questionable.

[AndrewKemendo]

Unfortunately you’re taking to the void here

People can’t differentiate between what Marx wrote and what classic dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao) did under some retcon “Marxist” banner

[hunterpayne]

So you never read what Marx wrote then I take it. His ideas were even more unworkable than what the Communists tried. For example, he didn't understand specialization and thought people could just change jobs each day based upon whim. This is a big reason why the Marxists have never been able to convince the working class and why their support always came from the bureaucracy and not from people who actually did the work.

[hunterpayne]

> Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though

What an incredibly dishonest thing to say. Go to a former Communist country and tell them this. They will either laugh you out of the room, or you will be running out of the room to escape their anger.

[piva00]

They can laugh all they want, I understand their resentment from being oppressed into a failed experiment which misused the "marxist" label to propagandise itself. Still doesn't mean that Marxism is about centralised planning though.