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Comment by kziemio | Hacker News Reader

This "better example" would not exist on earth, so there's nothing useful to learn from it.

The US and USSR were equally powerful, playing the same game, with the same population. Ideology vs ideology. Capitalism won by a mile.

Because fundamentally the US isn't driven by an all-encompassing ideology. Capitalism doesn't dictate how every citizen live their life. It only describes how the economic system will work. Anyone inside the system is free to create their own enclave. If you want to move to Oregon to live on a commune, no capitalist commissar is there to stop you. Starting a capitalist enclave in a communist country would have had to sent to the gulag.

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I'm not disagreeing that capitalism is the better economic model. Merely that calling the contrast between east and west germany the best possible experiment when it was likely the worst.

Maybe a comparison should be drawn between post war Yugoslavia and Austria as they had comparatively less interference from the major power blocs.

Also the U.S had much greater economic power than the U.S.S.R throughout the cold war. After WW2, Stalin even considered accepting American economic aid from the Marshall Plan.

> If you want to move to Oregon to live on a commune, no capitalist commissar is there to stop you.

I don't know, didn't work out so well for the Rajneeshees. Or Clive Bundy.

Neither of those are counter examples. Both had issues that have nothing to do with trying to live in a commune within the US, something that many groups have done successfully.

Also Waco.

I was being a little bit tongue in cheek, and you're right that you can fly under the radar, but it's also possible to draw the interest of the feds, and then they will fuck you up.

I spent a fair amount of my summers as a kid in a buddhist community hidden away in the woods. I think they're all above-board now, but at the time they were always fighting w/ the govt, trying to hide illegal busses & cabins out of site in the trees and stuff like that.

> Capitalism doesn't dictate how every citizen live their life.

That's not really true. Reports of living "off-grid" make it out to be extremely diffiicult to not be part of the consumer economy. Similarly, the un-banked have a lot of trouble. Heck, even adamant Linux users report a huge amount of trouble when trying not to be part of the "Windows Ecosystem".

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