Systems of Economy
 

Just like the title sez, which do you like better Capitalism, Socialism, or Communism?
This thread is only for posting your oponion, and so nothing like "Capitalism rules! Communism sux!" because we all know communism is the bestest :rmage: :I concur!

common, we all know hes a commie. I mean look at him, hes red for gods sake!

Communism and socialism are roughly equal and fall under the same basic fault: People are bastards. The people would never agree to give up what they make so that someone else can live in equal comfort, thus in order to have either you need totalitarianism, which leads to bad bad things. Thus, neither can work.

This leaves capitalism, which has many faults of it's own, mostly moral, which go back to the whole people are bastards thing, however, it thrives on those supposed 'faults', producing product and money by feeding on people's own greedy selfish desires.

In short, people, psychologically speaking, are not 'pure' enough for communism or socialism, but they are 'impure' enough to cause capitalism to thrive.

I think Krylo said it all. Better than I could, in fact.

Krylo that is a good analysis. But I don't think that people wanting to be productive and work hard is "impure." The very, very, very minute percentage of CEOs that backstab workers and break unions are examples of evil capitalists. Pretty much everyone else is working (and working hard) for The Man. Nothing impure about these folk.

The reason capitalism works is the following flaws of humanity:
1. Greed.
2. Sloth.

Sloth, of course, is the primary detriment to Communism and probably Socialism; why work if you get the same thing doing nothing? Greed works in correspondence to Capitalism. You work more, you earn more.

I, personally, prefer the system of "randomism". You see, in this system, every week (or even day for richer nations) one person is selected to get a very minor, but individually large, portion of the nation's profit that year. It would be something that gives maybe ten, twenty thousand dollars to each person. This already exists on a small scale; it's called the National Lottery.

Of course, what we have in America is niether Socialism nor Capitalism but a mix of the two, which means that, instead of a happy compromise, everyone is disgruntled and dissatisfied. Yay USA.

I don't think it's possible to reasonably disqualify any of these three "systems", especially because they all represent pretty broad categories (altough capitalism has an unfair advantage: because I think most people will fit more things in that category, while leaving really strict principles to the other two, of course until it comes down to using real-life example... then anything bad is communism), but it's obvious people will continue doing that by using shifting definitions of what constitutes a "working system". I feel a good (not perfect) example of that is Krylo's post (sorry).

Edit 1: Actually, I'm not pooh-poohing the actual contents of Krylo's post, but the apparent "disqualifying" of communism and socialism. If there wasn't such a pretension, I'll gladly apologize and go shut up in the corner.

So, assuming all three can produce "working economical systems", I'd pick communism. Communism based on a small, local scale, and with some consideration to immediate potential autarchy.

Oh hell yeah, Communism can work on a small scale. It's because small communisms are self-governing, like the ideal communism. But Communism and Socialism degrade in quality as they get bigger. Capitalism doesn't do it anywhere near as fast.

I completely agree with that. It's apparently in the order of things that things get bigger (and when they get bigger they turn bad, or worse, rather). Maybe having a system that can't consider any elements as permanent other than the individual would be protected from inner tendencies to grow in size.

That's the problem. People as a whole DON'T want to work hard for the man. They want to work hard for themselves, if at all... and even then they'd rather not work hard for themselves.

That's what I was getting at.


Oh no. I disqualified it, on the basis that it doesn't work for large groups of people because people are greedy. Small groups work better. I'm more apt to give my neighbor fifty bucks than an ethiopian, after all. Works the same way.

Communism, if you remove psychology from it, is actually damn near perfect. Actually it IS perfect. It's humans that screw it up.