Monday, November 19, 2012

NEVER. BEEN. TRIED. ANYWHERE. ANYTIME.

Communism. As a commenter on another forum emphatically tells us:
There have NEVER been ANY real communists, in any country. Those are banker stooges who THINK they have a communist government. NEVER. BEEN. TRIED. ANYWHERE. ANYTIME.
Ah, yes, the "it's never worked because it's never been properly implemented" meme.

Why has it never been properly implemented?  Because it can't be "properly" implemented.  The whole thing  is contrary to human nature.

The fact is that it has been implemented to varying degrees all over, and the failures can be directly traced to the fatal flaw in Communism -- that it is directly incompatible with the human urge to better one's position in life.

Remove that incentive, the incentive to produce and innovate evaporates -- and everyone becomes equally poor, griping about how the system isn't giving them what they are "owed", and frustrated that there's nothing that any individual is allowed to do about it. The only way it could ever possibly work would be if it were completely opt-in, opt-out ... but even then it would be doomed as people looking for a free lunch would opt in, and the people making the free lunches possible would eventually wake up and opt-out. And the only way to stop this is to have the kind of totalitarian top-down control these countries have devolved into -- directly proportional to the degree of "implementation" (thus rendering it not an opt-in, opt-out system -- negating the whole premise).

 Communism is the pipe dream of control freaks.

 That's it in a nutshell, folks.

4 comments:

Robert Mitchell Jr. said...

I would point out that it has been tried, and has worked, mind, only by the religious people the would be Communists hate so much. Alas, not even the people pushing for Communism are joining monasteries, their dream made flesh. In a better world, that would be a CLUE.

philmon said...

Yup. That's opt-in, opt-out. This can work in small communities - notably families and church communties, maybe a tight-knit co-op.

But ultimately the human flaw of sloth will have to be dealt with by the community when it will not be dealt with by an individual exhibiting it, sure that he will be taken care of anyway.

Shunning or casting out must be an option, and leaving voluntarily must also be an option.

This won't happen at the state level unless it involves imprisonment.

It is best to let people work out their relationships among themselves up to the point where fraud and physical coersion come into play. That is where Government needs to step in. Then and only then.

Severian said...

There have NEVER been ANY real communists, in any country. Those are banker stooges who THINK they have a communist government.

Wait... I thought the "banker stooges" were the ones Lenin lined up against a wall and shot, and that Mao imprisoned for 40 years without trial?

Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Kim, Castro etc. killed people explicitly in the name of communism. If that doesn't count, then the Inquisitors weren't "real Christians." Think the atheist left will take that deal?

mkfreeberg said...

Communism is also supposed to entail obliteration of the classes. A classless society, everyone on equal footing.

It isn't compatible with the redistribution objective, because, obviously someone has to do the redistributing...hence, inequality.