Communist Views

[Kilroy_x]

Oh for god's sake, I'm not opposed to your ideas because you labeled them "communist", and I'm not opposed to them because I consider murder to be an intrinsic aspect of communal societies. I'm objecting to them because they're wrong. Often simply by merit of the fact that your examples don't meet your own definitions. Case in point, you named my counterexample of agrarian communal societies as an example in your favor, completely neglecting the claim that wealth and class equality (things named as fundamentally important aspects of communism) didn't actually exist in them.

In fact what you've been describing (in every case) doesn't even seem to be communism but rather socialism, but it doesn't matter because I'm responding to the ideas and not the label.

and then I see people who -do- have health insurance to cover the costs of operations, and hear stories about how -after- the operation, the insurance company has staff whose sole job is to find ways to retroactively have not agreed to pay for the procedure.

If they do this by illegal means they can and should be prosecuted. If they don't, then technically this is just an instance of an anti-fraud measure. You know, that thing we were talking about a mere post ago? How do any problems that stem from these types of measure get better when the measure is applied not just to the cost of a single health care operation, but indeed to the ability to even participate in the economy at all?

The system can develop to have all basic services rendered as fully subsidized government services. This just isn't optimal.

The problem is not with your observation but with your logic (and the fact that you are trying to simply combine the two rather than to test the implications of the logic against reality). Yes, services can be nationalized. Yes, there are countries with high standards of living and nationalized services, including health care.

The problem is in your arguments, in the way you're conceiving of the economy in general.

The logical end of more and more of your labour going into a central pool via taxation and coming back to everyone through subsidized services is to have ALL of your labour going into a central pool via taxation and coming back to everyone through ALL subsidized services.

Labour, labour, labour, labour, labour. Problem one with Marxism, not everything is actually about labour. This is important. Make a mental note of it to reference whenever you are considering economic arguments.

Problems two and three are simply your association of the standards of living of socialist countries with their socialist attributes, and beyond that your misinterpretation of the way a socialistic political economy actually works (which seems designed to shoe-horn as much Marxist reasoning as possible into the explanation no matter how obtuse or difficult).

Yes, a nationalized healthcare system can provide everybody with healthcare. This is not because nationalized services are more efficient. In fact almost by definition they are less efficient. The reason nationalized services can provide service to a nation is simply because a country can easily consolidate wealth for large projects. The consolidation and allocation of said wealth has its own costs, but as long as it's within certain limits of what the private sector can actually produce, it doesn't cause any real dramatic problems.

If you want to know why socialism works while communism doesn't, it's not because of any of the reasons you've given. There's not a country in the world without dissidents. If communism was really more efficient than capitalism it would be just as capable of dealing with them. What utility does one extra laborer have that in his absence the entire economy cannot function? This is silly. Every argument given along these lines is silly.

How about I skip straight to the end: this is how economics work. The market produces wealth. To the extent that there is interference in the market, wealth is not created but simply redistributed. This redistribution has a cost.

x + y - ( z / a) = b. Ceterus paribus.

x = Each individuals market accumulation of wealth
y = The wealth that gets redistributed to them (keep in mind that unless this number is 0 for everybody, it must be a negative number for some number of people.)
z = the total cost of redistribution (excluding what is already contained in Y)
a = number of people
b = their personal standard of living


Of course this is a ridiculous oversimplification, but if you want to get more detailed we can do that later. Meanwhile you will notice simply by studying this formula that the presence of z at all when non-zero means that while a specific persons standard of living can be higher, the average standard of living will have to be lower. Depending on what y is, the economy may come closer to wealth equality, but it will never improve purely by redistribution. It can't. This is formally impossible.

Now something can happen, like wealth can be redistributed to build a road, and this road could allow for more efficient commerce. However the production of this road, by necessity, cost more than it would have had it been built by the market itself. The utility that is generated is not generated by the road, but by the market. The market would have generated utility either way but now it has to absorb the cost of the road. There is an increase in productivity but it costs more than it needed to (which is to say it has a cost at all. If two parties exchange something voluntarily, it is because both perceived a gain to me made. Hence the construction of the road is a positive utility outcome for both parties, and the use of the road allows future utility generation. When the government constructs the road, the construction of the road is a negative utility outcome. Although the use of the road still allows for future utility generation, the cost of the road must be absorbed by the market as someone was not happier to allocate their money there than they were somewhere else.)

So there you go. Using that you should be able to figure out, legitimately, why Socialistic countries can have high standards of living or be considered desirable to live in. Now please, stop using the wrong reasoning just because it's fashionable.