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Hot take: Yes. Because classical liberalism, the free market, and bottom-up government has done more for the advancement of humankind than sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done.
Let's stop pretending like all values have the same ethical valence.
edit: sadly dang has once again taken it upon himself to stop communists from posting on HN. I'm sure most of y'all agree with this in the first place. at any rate take this as an open invitation to drag me in the comments with whatever ridiculous nonsense you can dream up. I won't be responding to any of it because I literally can't. thanks
Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology.
> rapidly developing industry
What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured their inefficient brutalist factories? The same factories that ended up being shuttered in the 1970s. Even ignoring the grave human rights abuses, the communist satellite states were bureaucratic behemoths that collapsed under their own weight. It's like you've never even heard the word "Perestroika."
But in any case, the communists not only persecuted my great-grand-parents for their religion (they had to flee from Ukraine), but also stole my grandparents' land, and destroyed my parents' youth. I was also born in communism (I barely remember the Romanian revolution as I was an infant) and posts like this remind me how quickly people forget and that the Jewish people are really onto something in never letting us forget the horrors of the Holocaust. In similar ways, I've taken it upon myself to never let people forget the horrors of communism.
> despite being a feudal backwater in 1917
Imagine calling regions that gave birth to cultural gems like Prague, Budapest, Kyiv, or Warsaw "feudal backwaters." Did you know that in 1884, Timișoara (the Romanian city I grew up in), became the first European city to implement DC electric street lighting? Backwaters my ass.
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/327/7424/1129.full.pdf
People under capitalist rule tend not to think of it as such, but those are the victims of capitalism, just like the holodomor is victims of communism. And that's not "tu quoque" but rather simply applying the same standards and method of analysis to both systems.
That's why people keep diving into that, it's not that communism was so great, it's that capitalism is the particular set of horrors that they're currently living through, so people tend not to be thrilled about that. They are as entitled to their past experiences and history as you are to yours.
Anyway, it's weird, because we all love these organizations called "corporations" that use exactly the kinds of central planning that is supposedly impossible to execute properly. Companies that treat divisions like a "free market" and force them to compete for resources and attention generally find this works extremely poorly, you actually need collective coordination and human benevolence/good-faith for anything to work. The part about capitalism that's nice (on paper) is that it breaks the collectivism down to a scale that humans can plan and function with, and forces active competition between entities such that inefficiency is pushed out of the market (although of course there is an inherent tendency towards oligoply and consolidation without government intervention).
But the thing is countries cannot work like this, and there is no guarantee that a capitalist country doesn't suffer the same "complacency capture" as an oligopolistic market competitor. Nor is there any failure mechanism to replace them when this happens, short of outright political collapse (which may be impossible due to situational factors anyway). Again, we live in a state with millions of political prisoners being exploited for slave labor for oligarchal profit... that's the failure case for communism too, capitalism is just as capable of falling into the same pitfalls. And success is, as always, completely orthogonal to ethical merit - you can be good-hearted and still fail, or act unethically and succeed (and in fact it helps!).
Again, it's not that communism is so great, but pointing at specific bad outcomes while refusing to apply the same standards to specific bad outcomes from capitalistic systems (while chanting "tu quoque") has always been an aggravating feature of american political commentators. The lack of ability for self-reflection is why we live in a prison state and a police state and increasingly a total-surveillance state, we have horrible outcomes here from our system but "it's better than ukraine 1936!". And that's a pretty low bar, why is that always the focus of the discussion?
And why does it have to be "if you like it so much go there", like the only possible choices in the world are US prison state or china/NK prison states. Why can we not choose to be the EU instead, with a generally socialist outlook and many outright collectivist (worker/state owned) enterprises but also a strong democratic system riding herd over limited and regulated market-economics?
Great posts, though!
It’s like attributing the success of Saudi Arabia to its theocratical monarchy.
Oil is basically a cheat code for countries. If you have oil, you will do OK regardless of political/economical system.
Even then, the quality of life in the USSR was pretty poor compared to the capitalist West.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
You can even see shades of this now with Russia… what is going to happen when the gas runs out, or if western countries block international trade of their gas (as they attempted to do recently)? Nothing good.
Saudi Arabia and Russia has been trucking along all these decades despite their less than ideal economies all thanks to oil.
That's not 'the west' and has never been. The US was born protectionist and pretty much stayed protectionist til today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
Of course today we wrap our protectionism with 'national security'. If a free market exists, then let me know because I've never come across one. All markets are protected and certainly not free. And if there is a bottom-up government, I've never heard of one in history. Can you show me an example of a bottom-up government? I'd love a good laugh.
> Let's stop pretending like all values have the same ethical valence.
And lets stop making up values to suit ones agenda.
Edit: Also, you might want to brush up on your history. 'sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done' have given us civilization and nearly all human progress since the dawn of time. Everything from agriculture, to writing, to the laws of physics were produced outside of 'classical liberalism'.
The countries with the highest per capita immigration are in the middle east, not in 'the west'.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-immigration-by-co...
Do you think they are moving to the middle east because of their love of sharia law? Or do you think they are moving they for economic opportunities?
People move to 'the west' for the same reason tens of millions of europeans moved to america in the 19th and 20th century. For money. We were the land of milk and honey or that's what they were told. Do you think millions of italians, germans, irish, etc came to america for the nonexistent classic liberalism?
People come here for the economic opportunity that doesn't exist in their countries - much of the time because 'the west' invaded, destroyed or destabilized it. China being one of the many countries 'the west' invaded, destroyed and destabilized.
The host countries are largely empty husks which have very unproductive labour. They offset the productivity gap with oil revenues to bring in cheap labour keeping their quality of life higher.
And yes, big IMHO to everything I said. I don't carry source in my back pocket.
Working class immigration is still immigration in general.
> much of the time because 'the west' invaded, destroyed or destabilized it
You know who destabilized my country? The USSR. I've heard nightmare stories from my grandparents and parents (who lived 35+ years under communism). Boy am I glad to be an American and I wouldn't give up my citizenship for anything. I'll gladly pay taxes even if end up living elsewhere.
Ad hominems isn't an argument.
> Comparing the UAE (one country, an outlier at that, due to their subsidized incentives) to the collective immigration to Australia + USA + Western Europe + Japan + South Korea is beyond disingenuous.
I wrote the middle east, not the UAE. Very curious. So you are being disingenuous here by misrepresenting my claim. The wealthy countries of the middle east - uae, saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, etc have more immigration per capita than the US and any country in europe. Why are you including Japan and South Korea when both are highly averse to immigration and are not part of 'the west'?
> You know who destabilized my country? The USSR.
What country is that? It's a good thing the USSR is gone then. Maybe the same should happen to 'the west'? Are you saying it's okay for 'the west' to destabilize countries but not the USSR? I don't even know what your point is here.
> Boy am I glad to be an American and I wouldn't give up my citizenship for anything.
Why would you? Did I say you should?
> I'll gladly pay taxes even if end up living elsewhere.
What? Go ahead.
It's like you build up a strawman on top of a strawman and got confused along the way. All I'm saying is people immigrate to 'the west' for the same reason they immigrate to the middle east. For money and economic opportunities. Like you and everyone else did. Take australia. The biggest immigrant group in australia is the british. Do you think the british moved to australia for 'classical liberalism' and 'western values'?
Both things can exist at the same time. America plays a very equal role in world destabilization in the Cold War era to that of USSR, while also the USSR could be a nightmare under communism for the common person.
That's really the only question that matters, when comparing economic/political systems.
"Given" is a bit of a weird way to put that. We had those things not because they were the best, or were even desired, but because people accumulated power and forced those forms of government on their local populations. Maybe civilization and human progress could have gone much faster, and better, without as much death and strife, if people hadn't lived under repressive regimes for most of human history. These forms of government concentrate power among a relative, unaccountable few. I hopefully don't need to enumerate all the bad things those kinds of people often end up doing.
Western democracy has a ton of problems, certainly. And the US's practice of secretly and overtly interfering in the development of other nations nearly always ends poorly for both sides.
But I'd much rather live in a world where Western democracy exists, if the alternatives are sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships.