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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

With total equality, productivity and innovation plummet, because most of those who are able and willing to work more and/or better resent the freeloaders that enjoy what the actual producers produce without putting in the effort, and become demotivated.

Do they? Most people I know are happy knowing that they're doing useful things. That happiness isn't impacted in any way by other people not doing useful things. In fact, if I'm honest, I'm considerably happier about living in a society with people who opt out of work to live on welfare supported by taxation than people who make huge sums of money but avoid tax themselves. I don't think I'm alone in that (although, that said, I live in Europe rather than the U.S., so that may make a difference.)

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I'm also from (western) Europe and we for sure don't live in "totally equal" societies :)

Eastern European communism created a much more equal society, but it's difficult to argue that people there enjoyed a better quality of life than we did in the West.

> Eastern European communism created a much more equal society

I question that assertion. The problem is that in communism, (not unlike our financiers in capitalism) the people closer to the resources or decision-making process were inherently more well off - in fact, probably closely modeling a power-curve.

Part of this is human nature, the other part is lack of technology for transparency.

From what I know from people who actually lived under communism: yes, there were those who had more and those who had less. But the inequality was still much lower than even in the most social-democratic Northern European countries (this is not to say they were better societies, just that they actually were less unequal).

In the 1950's, the USSR was the second largest world economy, the first into space, and living conditions were arguably far better than what preceded it in Eastern Europe, especially when you consider they lost ~20% of their population in WWII.

You can't compare anywhere on earth to the 'West' because the 'West' started out ahead of everywhere else in the world in the 1900s, partially a result of colonialism and various conquests.

Communism created some of the fastest growth rates in history, albeit at a cost, and of course as time went on, corruption became a problem.

If you want to see how poorly capitalism can function, go visit a 3rd world country. Most are capitalist, and they fail because of massive corruption, and anyone with a brain simply flees for the West.

I disagree, take India and China, both developing nations with populations that are significantly better off after adopting some form of Capitalism.

China still has a great deal of central planning. And India is a lot more socialist than most people realize.

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