None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.
That system you define there just exists in your head. It is not possible. It is like pretending the existence of unicorns. The real one every time ends up in an authoritarian regime.
The former has access to foreign currency with a real value. The later can hope to maybe get an exit visa (the government will loan it's "doctors" to foreign regimes in exchange for real currencies).
How does someone dream of things that are better? How can you have faith in anything at all? Is not the love you feel towards your friends and family kind of like the unicorn you are describing? Do you even really feel love, if its just in your "head"?
It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.
And people keep saying that communism hasn't been tried. But it has. It starts with the state trying to be socialist and then "withering away" to full on communism (according to the ideology's author). Only we never get past that part. We usually go straight to concentration camps, murdering those who disagree with the revolution, relative poverty, and a extremely uncompetitive economy.
What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out.
The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially, you have right to rent a room and you have right to ride a taxi but there are strict limits on how much you can do it. So what more entrepreneurial people do? Simply distribute the business ownership to their friends and relatives on paper and keep growing and running their enterprises.
Also, there are two different types of shops and businesses: Locals only shops, locals only restaurants, locals only buses that are at very poor quality and I believe they are free or heavily subsidised and there are better quality versions that have prices similar to the European countries(prices way beyond a person with a salary can afford). So who do you think eats at these expensive restaurants? Yes, tourists - but also people who have access to tourists and people who work for the government.
One day a wandered around my casa particular in Havana and ended up in a place with very nice houses quite close to governmental buildings. I took some photos, enjoyed the place and ate at a restaurant. Then I noticed that the restaurant got very busy with military personel and well dressed people. Those were definitely not tourists, those were people from the nearby governmental buildings having a dinner after work.
Very interesting experience overall. Almost completely positive, full of life lessons about so many things including classes in the society where they are not supposed to exists. I'm also convinced that consumerism is not the only way to a happy life and abundance and excess are not necessarily the answer. The first week was hard, the second week I was completely happy to have only 2 options for beer and 1 option for chocolate.
(Dig further with Hayek, I am sure you will find much worse things in his naive Darwinism than anything in your scary communist countries.)
First, you did not build a valid criticism about Hayek, just labeled him as Darwinist. Second, your reasonings are as if you see 1000 people jumping from a 5th floor and smashing themselves against the ground every time and still saying: there must be another possibility. No, man, it is in front of you, do some analysis, please!
It was always my understanding that while Cuba lacks a lot of things that many other countries take for granted, that the quality of its doctors was outstanding. I even remember seeing this mentioned in the newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic.
Is this not true, or no longer true? Have I been under a false impression for all this time?
> [...] Argentina [...]
No.
Source: I live in Argentina and it's neither socialist nor communist. It's currently center-left capitalist. Our immediately preceding government was center-right capitalist. In the 70s we had far-right capitalist military dictatorship (Chicago boys influenced economy wise, School of the Americas trained).
Annecdotal evidence, but an acquintance of mine (who is an MD) encountered Cuban "doctors" in South America and wasn't impressed at all.
> I even remember seeing this mentioned in the newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic.
The thing is that Cuba made a lot of claims about their handling of the pandemic, but as with every communist country out there it's hard to really know what's really going on.
1: Why isn't france or china on the former or currently socialist list? There are many others.
2: Consider the volatility and violent turmoil, war, genocide, atrocities from those former and present countries from the timeperiod of german unification under bismarck (somewhat arbitrarily chosen date) to the present day.
3: There have been many non-communist and non-socialst nations which where bad and there are still such regimes in existence today.
Eliminating "communism" or "socialism" was not a cure for anything. Many of these countries share different traits which would have a much greater effect on their stability.
Do you think that all those books people have written about it, both for and critically against, are just filled nonsense, and the writers and thinkers just had to count on the fact that nobody would actually read them? And that I, who have read a small portion, am somehow hypnotized into delusion by them, thinking I have gained knowledge, when in fact there was no knowledge to be gained at all?
I can't of course argue against this, as I am implicitly deluded in general, but I would still question your overall rhetorical strategy here.
I also went to local restaurants, they were extremely cheap but way too basic IMHO(However I think there was a special kind of a restaurant that is intended to be fancy but also for the locals. I was having a proper fish meal and a beer for about equivalent of 5$ in CUP at one of those). However I was told that I can't take any other bus than Viazul(the fancy tourist buses) for travelling between cities. Not that I would want to travel in one of those anyway, definitely not comfortable or safe to travel.
Here is one of the buses that the regular Cubans were traveling: https://imgur.com/a/jIynZMZ
For some reason, communists suck at automobile making.
OH! By the way, apparently CUC was discontinued a year ago in 1st of January 2021.[0]
We have evidence in America that the right/democratic quadrant kind of works -- it can produce great prosperity, but there can be a lot of sadness still (Jim Crow). At least there are mechanisms to fix it internally. It can get better (Civil Rights Act) but it can also get worse; we are finding now that if the Overton window moves too far to the right, there seems to be a tendency for America to become more authoritarian. We don't really know what going too far left looks like in America (probably the same IMO) because it's never even come close to happening; despite all the hysteric labeling of Democrats as Communists, they are really more liberal than left. There is no mainstream leftist representation in the US Federal Government, not even Bernie or AOC (the Green New Deal is written squarely within the framework of capitalism).
There are a lot of people out there saying that the left/democratic quadrant looks attractive, but they are shouted down by people who say that we can't ever try that, because look at what the left/authoritarian quadrant did in the past. People who are here in this thread right now. They are very vigorous about this claim, possibly because they lived under such left/authoritarian regimes. But I think that's a big mistake to conflate left/authoritarian with left/democratic, and it leaves us at a suboptimal local maxima as a society.
People often argue that it's a short trip from left/democratic to left/authoritarian, and that may be true. But it's also a short trip from right/democratic to right/authoritarian, and that's where we are right now as a nation. On this day, January 6, we as Americans should be more aware of that than ever. But that doesn't mean we can't try new things, and we shouldn't be held back from improving the future by the failures of the past.
Inside we got the lobsters as promised, maybe the only good food we had apart from the resorts. It came with some extremely stringy mangoes that I don't want to try again.
They also had friends come over to offer cigars and those peculiar Cuban shirts, I think taken from a factory. At least that was their story.
On the other side, they seemed to have a desire to buy clothes, in particular sports clothes like basketball tops. We didn't have that with us but we were told they'd swap the cigars for a top easily. Even just a shirt like you might wear for working in the City would fetch a lot of cigars, apparently.
On the bright side, I never went to Saudi Arabia. I really don't like murderous regimes, especially those who suppress and kill journalists and get away with it because all US presidents want to sell them weapons and stuff.
And besides, I’m not sure if there’s a single case of such actions truly helping the people. Authoritarians thrive when they can point to another country as their source of economic troubles. America’s greatest success came from endlessly pushing its consumer goods and media at other countries.
This is too simplified to mean anything. The USSR had many socialist branches, where the bolsheviks ultimately won out in a power struggle. The bolsheviks wanted state control, the citizen working for the state, while others were into having actual soviets where the citizens would've taken control of their means of production. Having a parliament and democracy was important to many of these groups (and the liberals who were also politically active). I wouldn't recommend a dictatorship, regardless if it has "of the proletariat" as a suffix.
The downvoting around here is just weird. I thought downvotes were supposed to indicate comments that were against forum rules or just unhelpful; _maybe_ offtopic? But people seem to downvote stuff they just don't like, regardless of how intelligent it might be.
It's sad, and it's deteriorating HN.
Sure isn't.
Food and medicine shortages due to COVID-19 caused the biggest anti Castro regime protests since the 90's [0] [1]. Thanks to the communist regime people are back to starvation. Even the government was forced to acknowledge it because it got so big.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Cuban_protests
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/11/americas/cuba-protests/index....
Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country in the world, people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin. [2]
Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than the US! [3]
It's not all black and white. Every country does good things and bad things. You just choose to ignore the bad things one country does and solely focus on them for another one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELAM_(Latin_American_School_of... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/rise-patients... [3] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/cuba/usa?sc=XE2...
Certainly the economy took a hit, and this is true everywhere in the world, but starvation? I'd like to see a source for that, as you haven't provided any. Typically, what happens in situations where island countries cannot acquire foreign currency, is that they cannot import specialty foods, and have to rely on local, low-quality and repetitive sources of nutrition. But it is very unlikely for actual starvation to happen.
So, on my first week it was hard. I was working in very central London and I had access to peak consumers options. I like it, I was used to have anything that crossed my mind being readily accessible for me. Except for shorts that week, apparently. My order from Amazon did not arrive and I was trusting Amazon enough to skip going to a high street shop to buy one up until the last day.
So I flew to Cuba with no short pants. Turns out its very hard to buy clothes in Cuba, I didn't know how locals manage to do it and I was out of luck. If you stay at a resort, there are shops in the hotel but I wasn't going to stay in a resort. I found out that there's a shopping mall in Havana and you can even use your credit card to do purchases(I went there with very little cash as my research indicated that ATMs work fine. In reality, not that fine). The mall was nothing like the ones I was used to and the shops sell knock offs at original prices.
Anyway, I was for a rough start so I was forced to improvise and not follow my initial plan. Later the things stabilised, I was able to find an ATM that will let me withdraw cash from my HSBC account but by the time I already befriended a few local people who would give me a glimpse into the actual daily life in Cuba. I went to the places I was planing to go, great beaches and everything but my mind got occupied with the way everything works in Cuba, so I kept paying attention.
First week, I was missing my routine in London. The snacks, the entertainment, even the food. I was feeling like missing out and I had no idea how to enjoy life without those things.
Then I realised that I was feeling bad because I was expecting to spend my time the way I spend it in London but I was not in London. The consumerist lifestyle in London has defined my expectation and I was annoyed because those expectations are not met by Cuba. A nice restaurant would take the edge of it but the core problem persisted.
Then I started looking inside. Do I really need to spend money for enjoyment? Do I really need to taste a different beer every time and judge it? Does my pizza needs to be proper Italian? Do I need advertisements to give me ideas to do or buy something? I found out that no, I don't need ads and I don't need to occupy my mind with the decision making of the kind if lager I should drink tonight. Instead of riding the amusement park of consumerism, I can simply be curios and explore!
My second week was much more chill. I knew which beer I like, I like Cristal and I have no interest in Bucanero or Presidente. Big deal, it's a nice beer and available pretty much everywhere. Maybe Heineken is better but I don't care anymore, that's not something that I would spend time on.
I need something sugary? Well, it's not available on every corner so I will just not have it now and If I still want it I will buy one of the few snacks that are available. It is alright not to have it now.
I found myself to consume much less and be quite content with it and I found out that I was enjoying the stuff I consumed much more. My actions were no longer guided by the consumer infrastructure and the simplest things were giving me more joy than the speciality stuff that I had to buy to out do the regular things I buy. A fish at a local restourant tastes much better when I'm hungry than the fish I would eat at the restaurant that is highly rated and endorsed by influencers.
Don't get me wrong, I do value and enjoy the variety of food, items and entertainment in the western societies however I no longer believe that these things are the main ingredients for a happy life or society. It's nice to have those things, it brings so much culture too but if you think that your life will be less fulfilling without those you will be wrong. These are nice to have but there is a danger to give up on actually fulfilling stuff in order to live a consumerist life. Let's not try to optimize for having ever more food and gadgets and things.
You don't need an all-powerful totalitarian government to enforce that kind of ownership; the people can do it on their own. Owners of steel mills need workers to work the steel mills. Without workers, their steel mill is worthless. Without private ownership of a steel mill, the still mill is still valuable as long as it has workers. Under communist philosophy, the government doesn't need to use authoritarian powers to enforce communal ownership of steel mills, because no one wants to own a steel mill that has no steel workers. Therefore, workers have the ultimate power under this philosophy.
However, that 'bus' seems to be a locally modified truck, probably a Soviet-built ZiL-164. There is definitely an argument to be made that the cars and trucks produced under Communism, both in the USSR itself and in client states like East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, weren't as good as their contemporary Western equivalents for all sorts of reasons.
Because I didn't know and maybe I should. I spent half my life unaware of the origin of "capitalism".
In the early 20th century, "consumerism" was supposedly used to mean something like "consumer protection".
But in the mid 20th century, it was apparently adopted as a preferred term to "capitalism" in order to contrast Western economies with communism.
Then, by the 60s or so, it morphed into something like the modern sense of "a policy of encouraging consumption".
That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc.
This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.
You want to do something by yourself? Brive me, because it is illegal or you will have trouble. And anyway, if I want, you can have trouble any day, because you did something illegal. Also, the brived people are also in trouble, because receiving a brive is illegal also. Now you have a system where anyone, at any time can be arbitrarily accused of criminal actions. Criminal actions that the government allows to happen depending on their interests.
They do not allow the right to have dignity for the people there. It is really sad. The only truth is that the system imposed there works because of corruption, literally. It is the way it works: I do not let you eat bread, but you need bread. So I give you whatever I want, if there is scarcity you can do nothing, except illegal things to survive, such as trading.
In order to raise our lives level there were previous savings that were reinvested in process improvement, which eventually kept raising our life standards. Capitalism is exactly about that: same product at better price or higher quality products.
We humans always try (yes, left wing people also!) to buy at the lowest price and sell at the highest price (in general terms). That is why competition is good, because it does not let business abuse a monopolistic position and the prices drop.
People try to associate excessive consumption to capitalism. I do not think it is a trait of capitalism per se.
I think you do not have basic notions of economy. How can something be free? If it is free, it is because someone is doing the work (the doctors). If the doctors do not get paid a market price they are being exploited (forced to work for less). So that is where it is paid. You get it for free, yes, at the expense of those people that could have a better life and in the name of the good for everyone else they are converted into a simple tool for the propaganda of their leaders.
I wonder if that is ethical. I mean: forcing others to do a work that you consider good for the rest without giving them a chance for alternatives. Are those people worse than the people that deserve that health care? Should they be a means to a goal? There are two kinds of humans? The ones that are a means (doctors, rich people, etc.) and the ones that get benefits from them (the users or receivers of those things). No, I say no. Noone should be the means of anyone else. If we want something we ask for permission or cooperate. The rest is just propaganda.
A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not.
If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure.
And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out.
There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't.
Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
> I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate
Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level.
I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.
3. True. I do not think a non-socialist system makes countries automatically successful. But I think that a great degree of economic freedom favors much development. There can be other problems, though.
It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later. It is not about it is your fault or not (extend this to any enemy in any society). If you choose crying and not fixing, you will face a bad fate. If you choose fixing, you can complain or not, but if it is fixed, your fate has way more chances to be a good one.
Of course, if there is no private property directly, uh, that is going to be a bad one. The welfare is expensive and it is what is basically destroying my own country in my opinion: we cannot indefinitely hold a 120% debt. Besides that, I really think that it is the welfare of the politicians and many sectors of the public workers, not from the normal people that do not fall in one of those areas.
There's no two kinds of humans - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The doctors will get free healthcare too, if they need it. Trying to put market value on medical care is inhumane and prioritizes an economic system over human life.
I'm not sure why you're talking about rich people here, but because you brought it up - the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative.
Value doesn't come from speculative markets, but from the sum of labor put into it. Rich people realized that if they use some of their capital to provide the means of production, they can skim off surplus value from the workers putting in the labor.
In other words, even though they don't do anything productive to create the value, they still take value that others created. That is exploitation.
Cuba is not really in abject poverty so much as they have a command-control economy (so some things are subsidized to be much cheaper than in our economic system, and others aren’t) that is pretty corrupt. They are definitely not a rich country on average or at p50, just not in abject poverty. According to some sources I found on Google their nominal/PPP GDP is actually pretty middling, which is likely due to what I mentioned about a lot of high-standard-of-living services being available despite low availability of goods.
The shortages of things are definitely bad. But the lack of variety in consumer goods really isn’t, and is probably what the parent comment was pointing out. There are not a million different things to buy as seen on TV/Instagram, but that in itself doesn’t appear to have a huge impact on life.
Let's investigate this claim a little bit. First of all, when I think about heavy handed government intervention, I think about the use of lethal force. Labor history in the United States is replete with instances of the US government using lethal force to quash labor movements. For example:
[0] The Battle of Blair Mountain was the first aerial attack on US soil, when the US Airforce attacked striking workers with leftover bombs from WWI.
[1] The Homestead Strike, where the PA State Militia was brought in to put down a steel worker uprising.
[2] The Great Railroad Strike, where national guard troops and police killed over 100 workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Michigan, and Illinois.
[3] The Lattimer massacre, where almost 20 unarmed striking workers were slaughtered by county police.
[4] The Memorial Day massacre when police opened fire into an unsuspecting crowd of assembled striking mill workers and their families, killing 10, maiming 9, wounding dozens more.
I could go on but I think I've made my point. I could literally list at least 10 more incidents of state-sanctioned violence being used to quell worker uprising, and if you haven't heard of the above events, I encourage you to do a deep dive into the history of labor movements in the US. (It's worth noting that it's not surprising that you may not have heard about these events, because they are not taught in schools. I wonder why?)
My charge to you: can you find a single instance of the state using this kind of violence against the owners of corporations? Of the police shooting plant owners and their families in the back? Of the US air force raining explosives down upon mine owners? Of the national guard being deployed to stop worker exploitation and wage theft? It seems to me that the exact opposite of what you claimed is true: heavy handed government intervention is done at the behest of owners against workers movements.
"[O]nce emotions had died down, [PA Governor] Pattison felt the need to act. He had been elected with the backing of a Carnegie-supported political machine, and he could no longer refuse to protect Carnegie interests. [1]"
This is why you see today that Amazon is even using the same firm [5] that Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick used against their workers last century! That's not an accident!
Just as a final point, private property does not ever "spring up and thrive" on its own. Private property as a concept only exists as long as that property is defended by the state using its monopoly on violence. When someone trespasses upon your property, you call the state to forcibly remove, arrest, and imprison that person. If the state doesn't show up, you can only own as much property as you can personally defend.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Arrival_of_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Memorial_Day_massacre
I think one of the worst contributions of marxism (as in incorrect) is the theory of objective value (translating from spanish, I hope I am doing it right), which basically says how much you are being stolen. In fact, there is no such thing as objective value and this is very easy to demonstrate in the experience of any of us. It is just absurd.
Yet there are people that still seem to believe it but I do not think they really think it is correct. This theory is the foundation of how much the employer steals to the worker. And that sets up a very conflictive mindset instead of a cooperative one. I believe more in cooperation. I do not deny an employer and an employee, both parts always want more. But both win together.
That's where the name comes from, in fact.
Why it takes a significant deviation from that base to permit alternative forms to operate on a level playing field should be obvious.
From what I read, consumerism did not have the negative connotation mid-century, whereas capitalism did.
I don't know how it happened, but seemingly "consumerism" acquired a similarly negative connotation, which is a Sisyphean cycle with euphemisms.
As I understand it, "capitalism" was an invention of the writers of the Communist Manifesto, while ironically "communism" was not. When a concept is developed purely for oppositional purposes, it can and often does attract people to defend it.
But in some sense, I feel like it doesn't really exist due to its origin. It amounts to the status quo, plus a word that lets people feel like they are opposing (or supporting) some one or thing rather than fog.
We dont care that they are communists. We deal with all kinds of fucked up regimes around the world but the key difference is none of them have ever dared challenge us militarily with Nukes right off our border.
Cuba is basically perpetually fucked as punishment for that decision and its done as a warning to anyone else that might get in bed nearby with one of our existential enemies (Russia, China).
The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.
Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices.
> Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital.
> Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds.
> It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey!
Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...
A lot of Americans haven't owned American cars since the 70s.
Other Caribbean islands import vehicles that are neither American nor even available in the US.
I know nothing about the auto industry, but South America is not that far away, and apart from tariffs, isn't it demonstrably economically viable to ship things long distances over the ocean? Because people do it, that's where all the consumerism comes from.
It’s just that the western lifestyle is not without its own faults. There’s lessons to be learned about being happy without being full blown consumerists.
No way for their wealth, to begin with, and why you should choose how people choose? They are animals?
Everything that is cheaper than its possible price is literally being paid by someone, with their labour or by others. Free things, literally, do not exist. And things below real price, do not exist. For that to exist someone along the way has to pay it with time or money or forced by slavery. Please keep in mind this every time someone talks about free. Free means "someone else pays". And someone else pays is as selfish and inconsiderate as if I went to you and I demanded from you an arbitrary effort on the basis that you owe me something for nothing.
This reminds me of the first MacDonald’s in Moscow near Pushkinskaya Square. I remember there being a separate section downstairs for tourists/people from away. However this is a childhood memory, and perhaps I’m not remembering correctly?
The Cubans that left Cuba and live in the US, do you think their grudge is over the Cuban missile crisis?
I don't wish to debate the question of what actually drives US policy. I am just wondering whether you recognize other points of view and if you think many people agree with you or you see yourself in a minority.
I am just describing the structure of the Cuban economy where market forces are less involved in how many of something gets produced for consumption. I don’t think it’s great either because it leads to food shortages. Just pointing out (having been to Cuba myself) they aren’t in abject poverty and in some ways punch above their weight for their economic reality (and what someone might think knowing how often they have goods shortages) due to some activites being prioritized over others.
Try to send dollars: the regime will keep them and will give CUPs to relatives of cubans.
I have heard (not confirmed data) that in the customs they can take as much as half of what you send. But yes, the embargo is the problem. Thieves.
I tell you from the point of view of a person that knows what happens there.
You are welcome.
And Cuba does have some new cars. People focus on the old cars because it's so visually striking (and those cars are so beautiful!) but it's more a marker of poverty than America somehow threatening to torpedo any ship that brings new cars to Cuba, or convincing all the global auto manufacturers to never sell any cars to Cuba. There are modern BMWs, Toyotas, etc in Cuba right now. Just not many of them. Expectedly, BMW is doing brisk business selling much cheaper motorcycles and scooters in Cuba, which is also true of other Latin American nations.
I'd rather use my money in ways that make a more positive impact. Though I am not rich enough for that I guess.
Well not perpetually. They could get back into the US's good graces if they were to embrace Freedom (tm) and adopt a government that looks something like what our 51st state would look like.
1. if a doctor spends time to provide free healthcare because a regime says they must, they are exploited. This is one option. 2. if a doctor does it and is paid, someone has to pay that bill for the doctor. If the doctor is free for you, someone else is paying. 3. you can pay yourself.
Those are essentially the three options. None of those are free. In 1. the doctor pays, in 2. a third person pays and in 3. you pay directly. No matter how hard you try, in every option you come up with someone will pay the bill. With time or with money or with any other exchange or will be pointed with a gun to do it.
I agree. Comparing two countries in an unbiased way is very difficult.
>people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin
If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba? Who can I trust for relevant statistics and information?
It's true that democracies are hard to set up and maintain. We are learning that here in America right now. It seems like authoritarianism is the natural order of governments, so maybe left/authoritarianism is like a local minima: it's easy to fall into that well, hard to get out of it, but there are much better things out there if you can avoid it.
Capitalism is basically free market, no price controls, prviate property respect and low regulation. Argentina is number 148 in the index of economic freedom. Would you call that capitalist? Not me: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
When that happens, click the timestamp of the comment you wish to reply to to go to that comment’s page, which has a reply box in my experience.
Blockade seems appropriate.
Really, consider how you're shifting the goalposts: you only consider far right libertarians as capitalists. The rest of the world disagrees with you.
Anyway, I live in Argentina and you don't. You are wrong.
> That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
No. You must use definitions of capitalism compatible with the current consensus. Otherwise you're playing the same game you keep accusing leftists of, "that's not true capitalism, I mean something else!".
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
“In 1999, President Bill Clinton expanded the trade embargo by also disallowing foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba.“
“The United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba.”
I was there in the brief time when U.S. citizens were permitted by the U.S. government to visit on cruises. During my stay, I was constantly reminded that I was disallowed to spend money there on unsanctioned activities.
When I think of "accumulation of capital" in modern society, semiconductor fabs are the ultimate example.
I can't imagine disagreeing that the building of such factories encompasses most of the world via supply chains and most of the exploitation in it.
But I feel like there's an ambiguity and I don't understand what is to be our goal.
Should we not have "accumulations of capital"? That is, should we tear down (and hopefully recycle) all of the incredibly expensive factories?
Or should we have accumulations of capital that are not owned by specific people? What is ownership?
I don't know about the real Mafia, but in fiction, there is the trope of the wealthy mob boss who owns nothing on paper, in order to avoid the law, but relies on relationships to define what he has.
On the other hand, many large companies are presently not majority owned by any human being, but mainly by collective entities like index funds. Is that good enough? Or is that irrelevant to an economic system because some people own more index funds than others?
The only difference is that Cuba doesn't have the opportunity to exploit foreign nations to enrich itself (and get even fatter on taxes).
The best thing to pick at, if you are arguing with Marxists, is the general "labor theory of value" and whether that ultimately is correct. The labor theory of value has to do with how we assign economic value to things on the market, and that it ultimately is from the labor of those who produce the product.
Also, assuming we have perfect faith in Chinese government statistics and Cuban government statistics...
Nevertheless, the wild variations in Covid experiences between countries and controversy over why it happened, make me think it is a useless yardstick.
Are you saying that since we know that Chinese statistics are accurate, Cuban statistics must also be?
I tell you if you are not aware of the original reason. The original reason makes sense.
I understand that normal people is who suffer. That is true and sad.
You're being coy, in not describing the things you find so tiresome.
Before Brexit, I worked for a company that opened a branch near London, in order to access the European market. I didn't make it my overriding goal to go there, but I probably could've, and a co-worker went there and subsequently got married and stayed.
[5] https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940196997/amazon-reportedly-h...
How better? No economic data here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_American_and_Car.... I can say there were riots last July due to a lack of medicines and food.
For many people, cinnamon is a good temporary treatment for type-2 diabetes. But some people have a bad reaction to enough cinnamon, so start light.
Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin, because your pancreas is damaged, probably forever.
Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.
I think that depends on your socioeconomic class and your insurance in the US. I'd say for the median citizen, life expectancy in Cuba with diabetes is probably higher as insulin cost isn't an issue and they do very frequent health check-ins that would be prohibitively expensive for a lot of Americans.
But seeing how you post on HN, chances are you have better healthcare available to you than the median American...
Then again, it seems like Cuba has some pretty cool homegrown diabetes treatments available: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Let-s-open-the-d...
> Who can I trust for relevant statistics and information?
That's a good question and I don't have a good answer. Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.
By that measure, how capitalist is Argentina? As much as this in the economic freedom index, which could be considered an index of "how capitalist" a country is (position 148): https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
If this is capitalism...
I do not know what consensus you talk about. Capitalism is low or no regulation and free market. Also, should favor low taxing. Otherwise you have social democracy.
> Anyway, I live in Argentina and you don't. You are wrong.
This is a fallacy of authority, as you can see by the economic freedom index I shared with you. Position 148 next to countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ecuador... even the communist Laos has a better score in economic freedom!!! I live in Vietnam, Laos is next to where I used to live in Hanoi. If that has more economic freedom than Argentina, Argentina cannot in any way be considered capitalist as such.
Beyond that, given the fact that both of them used very similar tactics, we would expect similar results.
(The same, of course, applies to the post-revolution government - I'm not trying to claim that it's somehow better.)
The problem with mainstream economic right is that it ignores that, or assumes that markets will eventually equalize naturally somehow. The problem with mainstream economic left is that it wants to strangle the market instead of freeing it from oligarchy.
Corporations are also "collective entities" (of shareholders). The real question in this case is who effectively controls the entity. If the entity represents thousands of people, but is controlled by a few, you still get oligopolies and concentration of power. Something like a co-op is another story, although even there it all depends on how its governance is structured.
Even according to the communists, that's not true. Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production. Communism is the hypothetical post-scarcity classless society into which socialism is supposed to evolve eventually.
No "communist" country that ever existed actually claimed to be communist; they claimed to be building communism. Which, as the popular Soviet joke went, is always on the horizon - which is an imaginary line that recedes as you try to advance to it.
So the only conclusion that can be derived from this is that "Marxism-Leninism" inevitably leads to totalitarianism and poverty. Which is fair enough, but it doesn't really say anything about other varieties of socialism, especially the non-Marxist ones. Are you familiar with the Zapatistas, for example?
When Marx came up with his "modes of production", one of those was what he called the "Asiatic mode of production" (because it was ostensibly widespread in Asia). The idea is that it's basically a society where all property is collectively owned by the ruling class, which uses violence or threat thereof to directly extract surplus from the rest of the population. Whether this accurately describes any historical society in Asia or elsewhere is debatable, but it does seem to very accurately describe the USSR. Which is probably why Stalin personally cracked down on that definition, and had it purged from the Soviet interpretation of Marxism.
Regulation is an assertion of authority over the property of others - I'd never tell you what colour to paint your roof, but if I could do it, it would be a dilution of your ownership.
Not saying we need 0% taxes and 0 regulations, but less is more here.
For example, a person with ten titles to ten houses can only live in one of them at a time; their control of the other nine comes from the ability to call the police who'd evict any squatters - which then makes it possible to rent them out. But suppose the police wouldn't show up?
In this case, this could either be through a coop (e.g. those factories are directly owned by the workers working in them, decisions are made democratically) or through a worker's state (the factories are owned by the state as a representation of the workers - this is what the USSR tried to do, but failed miserably at).
I think any other scenario has people leeching off the work of the folks actually producing those semiconductors - e.g. exploitation.
Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.
And nobody's saying we should tear down the factory, we just shouldn't let it be owned by people who have nothing to do with the work being done so they can make money from nothing but the fact they had money already.
A family member with the condition relied on Medicare. That seems like the most likely scenario.
>Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.
Neither have I. But this is interesting. A little over ten years ago, there were reports of "mass deaths" of patients of a mental hospital in Cuba due to the cold.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-trial/cuba-tries-doc...
I guess it's due to my imagination, and the things I read when I was younger, but the more something is understated, the more it's downplayed, and the more details that are left out, the more horrifying it can be. Sometimes I have the impression that other people don't ask questions, either out loud, or in their mind. That they know where to stop, as if there were a nice neat line that separated us from what's beyond the pale.
How can you die of cold in Cuba is one question I think of. Well, it was down to about 38F, and reportedly the glass from the windows and doors was missing. Also the blankets.
Next question would be why was that stuff missing? Perhaps it was taken and sold?
Why would it be sold? Perhaps because it was worth vastly more on the open market than the staff were paid in salaries?
All rhetorical questions in my head, not questions for you particularly.
This story plants in my mind the idea of doctors to whom blankets and pieces of glass are such wealth.
Whenever I read a comment about the Cuban health care system, I will think of it.
Developing type-2 diabetes will be a process that happens over several decades. So which few weeks is it that I need to stop eating sugar? I need to know because I was going to make cookies.
>there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes
I've taken medication that progressively leads to type 2 diabetes for about 17 years. You don't think I have a good reason? Or you just never imagined one?
>Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.
Being able to get medication that causes type 2 diabetes as a side effect might be a first world thing too. I would be concerned about that.
>Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin
People inject insulin for type 2 diabetes; I'm not sure what you are referring to.
Robert Lustig has been curing fatty-liver-disease-induced type 2 diabetes in children by eliminating sugar from their diet. Of course kids get better faster than adults.
I would expect someone who knows he has induced type-2 diabetes to already be pretty damn careful about sugar intake...
But: I am not a physician. None of the above is competent medical advice.
That said, Robert Lustig says most physicians are woefully uninformed about liver pathology.
Socialism is a word that can be defined in absolute terms. But left/right is defined relative to society as a whole. Whoever is left of center in political mainstream is the economic left, by definition.
My point is that, happiness and life satisfaction are not tied to the abundance of consumer goods. When you are sad you don't have to buy something, it's alright to have a few options and your happiness level doesn't need to change by your next purchase. You can experience that in Cuba.
It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
Well, he did work with a criminal from our past military dictatorship...
> . Apart from this comment: capitalism is free market and low regulations. By that measure, how capitalist is Argentina?
By that token there are no capitalist countries at all!
A capitalist country with more regulations than you'd like is exactly that: a capitalist country.
Argentina is not communist. You're embarrassing yourself.
> I live in Vietnam
I've seen you claim you live in all sorts of countries, but whatever.
You are wrong. The only people who agree with your strict definition of "capitalism" are libertarians, a tiny minority. I guess all countries in the world -- the US included -- are communist to you.
Good luck with that.
So the problem you see there is mostly a regulation problem, not a wealth inequality problem.
I have not claimed to have lived in a ton of countries. I have lived in Vietnam, in Singapore, in Spain and in places you do not need or I want to tell you. But I just claimed to have lived in those and to know, through people, other countries.
Go travel a bit and talk to foreigners and read a bit if you want to know more. But do not claim your country is not de facto socialist in many terms. It is. You do not like it? Ok, cool. But it is.
I showed you evidence. I never claimed Argentina is communist by the way. I claimed what they do is socialist-style stuff. Every day stronger and stronger, limiting freedom.
Calm down a bit and start trying to not insult everyone you do not like. You do not like me I am cool with it. But attack the argumentation, not the people.
Milei is the only person in your country honest enough to put his payroll and privileges on a lottery to not keep it for him because he is against taxes.
See you!
Pray tell me, does this line of debate tactics usually work for you?
> Milei is the only person in your country honest enough to put his privileges on a lottery to not keep it for him becaise he is against taxes.
"Honest" is one way of putting it. "Far right libertarian" is another. In any case, like I said, he also has an authoritarian streak.
Someone works on them, someone gets the material (if it is a product). Someone spends time.
If a machine does it, someone created the machine (it is usually many people for a single industrial machine) and someone bought it.
There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. Even if someone gives away something for free from her effort, it is the person who did the effort who"paid" in that case.
There is no such thing as free and coming from nowhwere. Someone pays the price. Voluntarily or not is another matter.
That is why I criticize a lot when someone says that we can get xyz for free. No. There will still be work involved. The manufacturing, the delivery, the service... whatever. So if we want something for free we should think who is paying that. I guess most of us do not want to work for free. In general terms, I do not want, I could do an exception... but not in general. So when we ask for others to do things for free what we are saying is that someone should not get its part of reward or that someone else has to pay it for us, making those people a means to our ends. I would not call that social cooperation.
There were some protests in Cuba, of course as usual presented in the western media as anti-government. Unsurprisingly, they were dwarfed by pro-government counter-protests.
In Portugal a socialist-communist government is governing right now. It is not like they do what their supposed ideology says, but it is a fact that the government is that. Mexico is now managed by Lopez Obrador, a socialist. Argentina by Alberto Fernández. Another socialist. I agree those countries are nothing near Russia before, but it is the governments they have now.
History is also replete with unions beating 'scabs' to death, like Caesar Chavez's union members beating immigrants in the desert as they tried to cross the border.
No matter if all leftists are removed from society, leftism must still be said to be half of what remains.
Nothing in mainstream USA politics should be described as "economic left."
Exploiting is what Cuba does with its doctors when they send them abroad and take 70% and kidnap their passports as if they were animals, or when you are assigned an arbitrary government salary for the sake of it without any possibility of alternatives.
Please explain to me what exploiting is: paying less than what you think they deserve? Note that those exploited foreign countries get investment from outside to improve lives of people there, not to worsen them, otherwise those people would not take a foreigner company job in the first play.They usually pay more than local companies except a few exceptions FYI. At least in Vietnam. In Vietnam working for an american, korean, japanese company means you are mostly blessed.
I know the factories topic well from Vietnam. If you want we can talk about why that is not exploiting but what Cuba does to its citizens is indeed. There is a big difference.
In many ways, giving a public service without taking the wealth of others and giving up you assigned salary for the task could be seen as more socialist than what mamy socialists claim. That is why, as of today, I have respect for Milei: he tries to promote what he believes starting on not making the rest pay the bill.
Things can change, sure. And politics can change people. I can change my mind. I talk about now and today. Respect for Mr. Milei. If there was a person like Milei in Spain, and not necessarily a libertarian, I would probably vote again. Now I simply cannot.
It doesn't directly. It just makes it harder for Cuba to obtain hard currency to buy new cars.
You do realize that's a publicity stunt on Milei's part, and that it's completely unrelated to socialism, right?
> If there was a person like Milei in Spain
Aren't you living in Vietnam?
But how did the trade get started?
Does it go back into an infinite past? An infinite series of trades, with neither an end, nor even beginning?
Otherwise it would seem something must be free.
Cuba's exploitation of its doctor is a piece (one I do not have a full-understanding of, nor the care) of a greater whole.
Slavery and exerting power on a select group of people is obvious, and clear to see -- but the boundaries are clear and isolated.
Colonialism and exerting power on a whole peoples is less obvious, and harder to see -- because its boundaries are muddy and the things it affects are innumerable.
We can go even more high-level, but I do not know yet how to describe it.
I am uninterested in isolated "pieces" of the greater puzzle. In my view, they are ever-changing and indicative of greater causes; ones that are systemic, all-encroaching, and much more valuable to identify and root out---if I want the isolated incidents to stop fractaling, and reappearing.
Isolated injustices, like Cuba's, are of little concern to me. This is not my battle; it is the battle of the Cuban peoples. My battle is against the Rube Goldberg machine of my humanity, and the rest.
Some, but definitely not most. Step out of the touristic areas sometime and you will see. Poverty, poor healthcare, slow, overpriced internet, blackouts, food shortages, very low wages and very high prices, some places only get tap water for a few hours a day (sometimes every few days)... Such good lives they have.
The RLA was passed in response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which I mentioned in my previous post. This was an uprising that spanned multiple states, and resulted in over 100 deaths.
These laws which you regard as heavy handed were paid for with literal blood at the hands of the federal government and corporations. I think it's important to point out the scope and scale of these things. On one hand you have the federal government mobilizing the machines of war at the behest of, and in coordination with corporations, to slaughter workers and their families for having the audacity to ask for better working conditions. That's heavy handed.
On the other side you have laws passed in response to this bloodshed that were intended to help tilt the scales in the other direction just a bit. That's not heavy handed. Maybe you feel that these kinds of restrictions are heavy and onerous, but really I don't think it's fair to draw an equivalency.
As for Caesar Chavez, I don't think that's an example of heavy handed government intervention. It seems more like interclass violence, and it's sad. I will be the first to say that no one really comes out of the labor rights movement squeaky clean. But I think it's the government and corporations who have the highest body count and deserve most of the blame, because they had most of the money and power at the time. They could have chosen and afforded to not resort to violence, others in more precarious situations felt that violence was the only choice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act_o...
Posting history suggest that poster references this study pretty frequently.
Give me examples of colonialism nowadays. Or what you consider colonialism.
For me exploiting is only one thing: forcing the other part to do something under threat or coaction.
Namely: "we should pay more to x, y, z" is not exploiting. Going to them and forcing them to work for us, it is. When someone does not have alternative and you have something to offer, that is not exploiting, even if it looks like little to us. The solution for these people to get more is to have more people trying to employ them, then salaries get higher. This is a relatively slow process, but it happens (it happened in history).
We go to less developed nations because it is cheaper. True. And they benefit from it. Are they worse than us? No, it is just their countries did not reach the same conditions yet. But you would say: hey, we should pay them more, give them a better place to live, blabla, which I get, it is ok, I am with you in part, but there is a problem: people buy the products that are cheaper for the same kind of product. And it makes sense: you will not pay more than you need for something (I mean a meaningful extra amount that limits what you can do, not one cent more or less, of course), since you have a limited amount of money, which is resources.
So at the end you have a chain of supply where if you raise the prices much, people will stop buying. If people stop buying, people in developing countries go unemployed. It is all a chain. So now you would ask: how do you raise the salaries for these people? Letting many employers, I mean as many as possible, enter the country, because that means that employers start competing for the employees and the salaries get higher. They cut on their profits if they cannot find workers.
This is how it works. Many people do not understand it. I have been there, working there, living there in places where this happens. And the difference between some of these people having an employment that is probably three times and health care insurance (I talk about Vietnam, but this happens in many developing countries in similar ways) is that the sister of one of those guys does not end up doing what you are thinking and instead goes to university with the help of the family.
This is the reason why I cannot call that exploiting. They improve their lives, eventually they will learn and compete with us (they already do in some areas or are starting to).
I find very hypocrite people complaining about better conditions for others (we all want that I guess) when it is not them who pay the bill.
There is no replacement for this way of developing IMHO, and it has been the model of success, with all its problems.
Forced redistribution is awful to make people wealthy, even if it looks counter-intuitive, because we all have a tendency to think that if someone has a lot and someone has too little, then we take away from one and give to another.
But what many people do not take into account is that doing that kills the incentive to create the wealth in the first place.
I do not think it is difficult to see the beginning of these patterns, they seem relatively natural to me: if I can plant a big field of potatoes and you can hunt well, we assess the cost of each activity and x kg of potatoes equal y kg of meat.
I think you are mixing the fact of something being free as in "no money involved" with the fact that time is "money" or that spending time doing something is also money: it is consuming time, which is also a kind of capital.
So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.
This is Adam Smith's just-so story, but he was wrong - no society has ever been shown to survive on a barter economy. Anthropologists have shown that what existed before trade was the same as what exists today when trade collapses: informally held debt. Alice knows how to work leather, Bob knows how to work wood; Bob needs a pair of shoes; Alice gives Bob a pair of shoes to satisfy his need and both Alice and Bob remember that; later, when Alice's house needs repairs she knows whose shoulder to tap on.
This is "barter" in the sense that Alice's and Bob's services have been transacted through time, but you'd be moving the goalposts since you just defined barter as Alice and Bob sitting down and determining precisely how much wood-labour equates to a fixed quantity of leather-labour at the point of purchase.
If you'd like to learn more, then David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is something of a standard reference on the subject. It's on the Internet Archive.
But how do coins, sheep, yarn, or whatever, originally come to be? If nothing is free, there must be an infinite chain of trade, leading back to an infinite past. But cosmology and evolution suggest otherwise.
Incredibly disingenuous to assume everyone that disagrees with you (and with factual data noless) is a bot/shill
Nothing about Cuba, so nothing factual here.
Wuhan had a lot of international observer since it was the birthplace of the pandemic (and China had to save face and show it was in control).
I would be curious to see similar credible data for Cuba.
People. Don't. Click. On. Links.
And if they do, they sure don't read them.
I can't be bothered to read a study promoted by someone who has shown no evidence at all of reading it yet.
I have read the study hence why I posted it (couldn't find a study of similar rigor for Cuba specifically). This study sufficiently shows the point I'm trying to make.
To say I didn't read the link to a study I posted is a bit rude no?
Now, you can argue they were a joint-venture with Fiat and not an entirely original idea (though the Soviets made improvements in ruggedness and ease of self-service), but whatever: cars made by the Soviets didn't suck.
--
[1] from Wikipedia:
> The rugged Lada was popular in Europe, Canada and South America for customers looking for more affordable alternatives to local brands, and sales of the new cars were extremely successful, reaching as far as New Zealand. In the West, their construction was frequently described as cheap and that inspired jokes at the car's expense; nonetheless, Lada "gained a reputation as a maker of solid, unpretentious and reliable cars for motorists who wanted to drive on a budget."
Wikipedia uses as reference Andy Thompson. Cars of the Soviet Union, Haynes Publishing, 2008.
I had a hard time understanding this, but I think I got it.
You are saying that if I work for, say, Xerox, I should own a portion of Xerox, because their capital belongs to me, because I use it to create value.
This is better, you are saying, than me owning an index fund that has a little of every company. Because if I do that, then I am exploiting all the workers in all the other companies.
As a self-contained system of belief, I guess it has a certain logic to it.
But if Xerox goes down the tubes then I don't want to lose my job and all my retirement savings!
I also think I see an inconsistency. If owning part of another company is exploiting their workers, then I should also be concerned that any form of ownership by workers at my company could involve exploitation.
Simply because we do different jobs using different amounts and types of capital. Averaging things out must be exploitation of workers by workers in the same way as owning mutual funds and such.
I believe in the ballpark of 5 to 6 million patients take this kind of medication in the US. If they all eventually got diabetes, it might be up to 15% of cases. However, not everybody lives long enough.
I've been to NYC a couple of times.
Things I got there (in more than one trip):
a terrible pretzel from a street vendor (cold and *wet*)
a *fantastic* cup of coffee at a cafe where I was meeting someone
a bowl of lentil soup (surprisingly very cheap)
some chicken lo mein, about the same price and exactly the same generic dish as anywhere I've been in the US, except perfectly executed, really fresh and hot
a chicken souvlaki pita, one of the best, although the place (in Queens) smelled kinda like urine
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29827641.
The person waiting and flooded the comments days after to rank their posts higher, increases the likelihood that this is the tirade of someone accused of domestic violence by two sources.
The thread's topic is completely changed by the flood of comments and I insist that it be removed entirely if you are not going to remove enough comments to reduce the thread hijack.
I think nothing. Cuban is an authoritarian government that uses it's healthcare for propaganda. It has all the incentives to lie and AFAIK none of these claims are verified by independent parties parties. Regardless of political system it's a poor embargoed island and it's easier to believe that they are gaming the metrics than really providing better health outcomes.
They are terrible cars. Some of their aspects, like being very basic is considered a plus by some people and that's about the only positive thing that can be said about these cars. The affordability for the Westerners came from the income difference, these cars were not affordable for for the locals as they had to save money for years to buy one.
Very bad, very unreliable, very inefficient, very uncomfortable cars can be popular only when they are extremely cheep or the only option.
> And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
So by your logic, USA is a socialist country? Democratic socialist? Communist? That’s… not what most Americans would say.
> The numbers could not be fully explained by part-time schedules; about 70 percent of the 21 million people receiving Medicaid or SNAP benefits work full time, in general, the GAO said.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stam...
[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
However, I think bartering has always existed for a reason, and when it did not or trading was forbidden, what you end up is with poorer or more violent societies.
This is the same reason why we specialize our labour and we do not do all things: shoes, food, blankets, bridges, roads, trains, planes, computers. Because if we had to self-supply fully, our lives would be much more miserable. From there it follows that trading is a natural choice: I can give something valuable and someone else can give me something valuable in exchange. Of course that gets mixed with debt and other stuff (I did not read your reference yet so I cannot assess how true it is in my very limited opinion) but the alternative to bartering, trading, etc. is violence. Every time.
There is an analysis from a well-known spanish philosopher that died short ago, his name is Antonio Escohotado, well-known for having written a book about the history of drugs that was translated to many languages.
He wrote a 3-volumes book that is called "Los enemigos del comercio" (The enemies of trade).
He researched the topic with unusual passion, since when he was young he used to be a communist. He wanted to explain to himself why he was so communist at some point. He spend around 15 years writing that. One of his main conclusion is that the alternative to trading is trading people (slaves) and the conquer of the other (violence). I really think it is true. He establishes some relationships between the amount of trading and the violence in societies (military vs trade societies). I think it is a nice read, but I am not sure it is translated to other languages as of now. The one for the drugs it is.
Greetings.
I join you in pointing out that there is not a rigidly adhered to performative standard of government classification. By that I mean for example, that while the USA is generally considered as the quintessential modern, successful democracy, it is not that, but a representative republic with deomcratic elections.
So sure, France hasn't been purely "communist" or "socialist", but the reality of the world is that there is much more going on than could be captured by a check box.
>3. It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later.
Well, we have Iran as just one example of those kind of outcomes. That course is only tolerable from one end of the bayonet. If you stab enough people if might fix every problem we have, but there will be nobody to complain later.
I guess it really is as you say: intervention just causes more intervention...
With that in mind, consider what would happen today if you were to claim some random empty house as your own, posted a sign to that effect outside, and started to shoot any "trespassers". That would be murder - and the law would come down on you. Same thing would happen in this hypothetical society if someone tried to do what you describe.
(The issue of how a fully anarchist society would deal with murder in the first place is a separate and complicated one. I can't really speak for them; my own take is that anarchism is a kind of political asymptote - an unachievable utopia that the realistically-possible ideal society would trend towards as its cultural underpinnings evolve to make it more viable. In this day and age, something like Bookchin's libertarian municipalism appears to be empirically viable.)
More explanation here in case it's helpful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I will avoid the political comments, though I tried to keep the discussion reasonable at all times.
It was not my intention to start any flamewar, less ideological. You can see in my comments rebuttals or exchange of opinions.