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Comment by philipov | Hacker News Reader

Please point out a country that actually implemented Communism. The Soviet Union never got past Socialism, where capital was owned by the state, not by workers. Communism doesn't imply a state-controlled economy, and that's the inefficient part. Socialism combines the worst aspects of a late-stage capital ruling class with a command economy.

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I've never understood why the fact that striving for communism reliably lead to disaster can be used a defence of communism. Can you explain that line of reasoning? It seems to me that's saying nothing more than "The utopia that I imagine is fantastic!". The main contention is not the qualities of the imagination, but the clash between the imagination and reality.

Simply put, it can never be implemented because perfect Communism would mean absolute genocide for the nation that manages to pull it off. All variations of Socialism function by extreme, persistent violence, to enforce the state's control over most aspects of a person's life including particularly economically (and everything else as a consequence).

The closer you get to implementing this fantasy Communism, the closer you get to death. That's why nobody can do it, it's why nobody ever has, it's why nobody ever will. It requires a staggering amount of aggression and violence to even attempt Communism, much less these idealized versions (which require 24/7 perfect violence to be applied to disallow even the slightest step outside the framework by the population).

Oh yeah, by "communism" I mean whatever was implemented in Soviet block, China, India, Vietnam etc., not what Marx and others envisioned in their theories.

I think it's a big difference, and one of the enduring legacies of cold-war propaganda is the confusion of the issue by conflating the two. A market economy is better at allocating resources efficiently than a command economy, but the argument over whether to have a command economy or market economy is separable from tendency of wealth to concentrate. The existance of winners is important to a market economy, but it also serves as an entaxic force (inverse of entropy, analogous to gravity) in the system that moves it towards greater order and centralization, until the corporate winners become de-facto states unto themselves with their own command-setting potential. Keeping the winners from leveraging their winnings to also win every subsequent round is the game we're playing to keep the field fair. That points to ideas from communism, but it has nothing to do with whether there's a command economy. Socialism is what happens when the demagogues get control of the ideology, just as they have in the US.

What we need are anti-trust protections that prevent the formation of `too-big-to-fail` entities of all stripes.

Just to be clear, when people say "Communism" and specify "the Soviet Union", that's adequate for rhetorical purposes. You can clarify that the Soviets were merely extremely socialist if you want, but everyone else understood what he was saying.

"A market economy is better at allocating resources efficiently than a command economy"

It was that way, agreed but might not always be that way.

Because free market economies have their own share of inefficiencies and moral hazards and certainly cannot be the efficiency pinnacle of human civilization.

I don't know what computers and networks will be capable of in the future, but it's worth noting that command economies failed in the time before these things really took off. The weak link has always been people who's brains developed in a time when they were monkeys scrabbling under trees and screeching at their fellows. No wonder they can't efficiently run big systems. But it's becoming evident maybe these tiny self centered brains are just big enough to design something that _can_ run a complex system efficiently.

Market economies are good at allocating resources, but they're also good at concentrating resources, which kills the market. And in some sectors, markets don't benefit the social fabric as a whole, hence why intervention into markets is often necessary

This is classic no true Scotsman.

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