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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

A commune in isolation can not protect itself.

The US ones did not fail because some more aggressive group overtook them. They failed because they did not work and eventually the members tired of it and left.

The state-sponsored kibbutzen in Israel also fail, because they can't exist without massive government subsidy.

Communism has been tried many times on a nation scale. 100% failure.

Your ideas are not new and they have been tried, again and again. They just don't work. They don't work on a small scale, they don't work on a large scale. They don't work when voluntary, they don't work by force.

There is just something about communism that is fundamentally anti-ethical to human nature.

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Did you even get my point that communism is different from socialism? I very much stated exactly that communism (in my opinion can’t work either). But socialism as a spectrum of ideas has plenty of working aspects included in basically every Western democracy.

Socialism produces mediocre works, and can't compete with free market operations. This is why socialist operations tend to be heavily subsidized or they simply make free market competitors illegal.

It's most obvious when agriculture is socialized, because it's impossible for people to believe the lie that they aren't starving.

Yes, I know that communism is supposed to be without a government.

Free market is not inherently incompatible with socialism. Hell, free market only works properly (according to its very creator, Adam Smith) when it is confined to a well-regulated market.

The only entity capable of creating such a market is the government itself. Also, don’t forget that plenty of areas simply don’t operate on a supply-demand basis — e.g. healthcare.

Socialism isn't defined in terms of a "well-regulated market". Socialism is when the government provides goods and services.

> don’t forget that plenty of areas simply don’t operate on a supply-demand basis — e.g. healthcare

Supply-demand is in play even under socialism.

But here's a simple example. Take your corner drugstore. It has a couple aisles of all sorts of healthcare products, from aspirin to toothbrushes to athlete's foot cream to cold remedies. There are multiple brands with multiple formulations at various price points. How does supply & demand not apply there?

More generally, pick any health care issue. For each, there are a multiple of options available, with varying costs, efficacies, risks, and pain. Including doing nothing (by far most diseases disappear on their own). How is that not supply & demand?

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