Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

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Things don't change abruptly so society can protect itself from lunatics.

Whatever examples you can come up with for "why don't we solve this faster we have the solution", can be counter argumented with the fact that your solution can turn out to be strictly worse and have unintended side effects. Many times in history we thought we had solutions for things and then we didn't. If society, or "the system" is too easy to change, then anyone can take power and mess it up for everyone else equally as fast.

A slow changing system is preferable if you want to self protect against it, even if some avoidable misery is sometimes around due to this lag it's way better than someone blasting through everything because they know better.

This seems like classic immature "but why don't we change everything and do a revolution" which does not take into account the negatives of that or that the revolution will go like someone else wants to, not you - and these things only work if "you can control everything" which is basically why communism has not worked. A battle of competing incentives seems way better than some guy deciding he knows better about everything and if he can only "coordinate everyone" he can "solve everything". That's called a dictatorship, which comunist states tend to.

The problem with communism isn't the revolution, that part has worked incredibly well. It's the fact that the communists don't know what they actually want. I've seen them argue against almost every concrete concept or idea that is falsifiable, but has a decent track record of improving people's lives, because it compromises their all or nothing ideology. Xi Jingping said something like "How about we let the ideology slide and try something that works for now" and no, China did not adopt capitalism, they adopted a heavily state controlled market economy with politicians having direct influence over almost every major business with the ability to fire CEOs. If anything, this proves that the western style "anti-statism" ideology that blames all economic problems on government intervention is, like communism, complete bullcrap. Yet you naively hear from people how China has adopted Capitalism, when in reality they broke literally every single rule in both the capitalist and communist books.

It's like the author of this blogpost says. It's hopeless, because we already have the solutions, not because the problems are hard.

I wonder if that's because of communism or because in any country with one party in power for too many years there is a drift to authoritarianism first and eventually to dictatorship. There are examples even in Europe and around it right now.

Of course communism as ideology cannot allow competing not communist parties. That would be heresy and the first years after the revolution in Russia 100 years ago show how it goes. Not communist parties are unthinkable by definition so yes, an ideological communist country sets the stage for dictatorship. A communist party in charge for only a few years in a democratic country, not much more than anything else.

"Of course communism as ideology cannot allow competing not communist parties."

Only when we are talking about marxist communism. Anarcho communism is (in theory) fine with alternatives by design.

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