Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're looking at this from a consumerism point of view.

The US started a huge build up of arms. eg missiles and destroyers specifically, but also the US had significant advances with tank and aircraft weaponry.

The US consumerist system had a positive feedback into the US industrial military complex where advances in manufacturing and information technology lead to huge efficiency gains for arms production even though Western arms production supply chains almost completely isolated.

So, the US had a massive technology and manufacturing advantage, then the US tanked world oil prices and other commodities that the USSR required from world markets. Significantly the USSR was buying more grain and food from the world market, so while the USSR was able to keep up with technology, it was not able to keep up with efficiency gains that the US was realising.

Corruption was also a huge problem for the USSR, and it still is to this day in Russia.

The Americans bankrupted the USSR on multiple fronts. Capital allocation is a capitalist system notion, but, more generally, the US was able to allocate deploy its available resources in a way that out-competed the USSR. The USA was able to organise its society and economy in a more efficient and productive way than the USSR, and that is a Macro Economic argument.

Until the 80's the USA had second most equitable distribution of wealth next to the USSR. The USA imposed significant taxes on everybody up to a marginal rate of 80%. If you want to "Make America Great Again", you need to restore taxation to the levels seen between 1945 and 1981; maybe even to the end of the 80's. American government funding through the DARPA project lead to numerous technological advances that most people, worldwide, now depend upon.

> I think you're looking at this from a consumerism point of view.

Not really, more like a “capitalist” p.o.v. but not in the pejorative context or the crony corporatist context that it holds today; my view is that prices are the mechanism by which information is shared by all participants in a market and that profit (from uncoerced transactions) is the wage for correctly allocating capital. This process occurs regardless of state intervention but it is distorted by state intervention, which is why authoritarians seek to mandate that profit be taken from people in order to fund their failing projects. Left unchecked this process strangles the productive machinery of society because the unproductive coercively funded portion captures more and more of the value in society and continues to squander it on their own values that are not viable in a free and open society. If this process is restrained then the market can drive growth and the parasitic aspect grows with it because of the continued increase in surplus value generated by the market and the fact that the parasitic coercive aspect can simply claim more of the surplus value.

You mention advantages that the US had but that doesn’t explain why the USSR collapsed. Lots of places besides the US didn’t have all of those same advantages but they didn’t descend into the same type of failures that command economies did. And its not as though the USSR didn’t innovate technologically. They were just had less surplus value available to their parasitic endeavors because they had a command economy and that system is not able to coordinate the actions of millions of people to the degree that a market is.

> Corruption was also a huge problem for the USSR, and it still is to this day in Russia.

There may or may not be a cultural element to this but surely you agree that corruption is more of a problem when the corrupt entity has more power and control?

> The Americans bankrupted the USSR on multiple fronts. Capital allocation is a capitalist system notion, but, more generally, the US was able to allocate deploy its available resources in a way that out-competed the USSR. The USA was able to organise its society and economy in a more efficient and productive way than the USSR, and that is a Macro Economic argument.

Capitalists may have studied the way that markets allocate capital in more detail but the entire concept of communism is that the workers “should” control the capital assets they use at their profession. If it is true that they haven’t even considered how workers would choose what capital assets to build and maintain, which capital assets to leave idle for the time being, and which capital assets to abandon, disassemble, and reallocate, then that is an argument in my favor.

> Until the 80's the USA had second most equitable distribution of wealth next to the USSR. The USA imposed significant taxes on everybody up to a marginal rate of 80%. If you want to "Make America Great Again", you need to restore taxation to the levels seen between 1945 and 1981; maybe even to the end of the 80's. American government funding through the DARPA project lead to numerous technological advances that most people, worldwide, now depend upon.

This is an ideological issue and beyond the scope of our discussion about prices, command economies, and capital assets.

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