Beligerence of the "State" knows no bounds, I hope we can free ourselves from this regressive construct and, once again, live in this world judged by our own merit and character, beholden to none.
Ambition is what drives humanity forward, for better or worse. Unless you can channel the needs of the state as a replacement for personal ambition, your society under communism is unsustainable. This is very difficult to do without reverting to a society that is either 1) capitalist or 2) utterly corrupt.
Either way, communism is self defeating, and therefore dangerous.
EDIT: Just to note that I upvoted you and encourage others to do the same. This is a place to share knowledge and you asked a perfectly valid question that many people have. This is not reddit and nobody should be downvoted for asking a question, regardless of how basic it might be.
It really doesn't matter if they are or not. In order for communism to truly work, you'd need to abolish all rewards. That is, the very act of having hockey players and cosmonauts and musical talent recognized by the state at large - regardless of financial reward - creates the very imbalance that communism is supposed to address. As I said: self defeating.
People may seek different rewards based on their character, but the very nature of man is that we work best when challenged and respond will to the rewards earned when overcoming those challenges, financial or not.
If your economic system essentially requires a man with a gun to ensure and enforce its existence, there is something wrong.
There you go, I think I fixed communism.
Vouchers == Church Indulgences == Dollars
Yes, I admit, I can be slow on the uptake... Sorry. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_communism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
To put it simply - when all the wealth is equally spread, there is no incentive for anyone to do anything. If everyone is paid equally and has the same benefits, there's no point in working harder or smarter - you just do the bare minimum and be done with it.
Let's take a capitalist factory: workers are paid $5 per assembled iPad. Those who want more money can assemble 100 iPads and make $500 in a day's work. Most are happy with $100 per day, so they'll assemble only 20 iPads (let's say that's the minimum amount required).
Now a communist, state-operated factory: workers are paid $100 per day because everyone is equal. Those who want to make $500... can't, even if they assemble 1000 iPads. So they just assemble the bare minimum of 20 and are done with it, secretly cursing the government for this injustice/inequality (how ironic is that?).
The overall production level drops significantly unless the state raises the minimum amount of iPads made to 100 per day. Obviously, the people who are happy with $100 per day are now pissed off, either because they don't want or simply can't work that hard.
The only ones benefiting from communism are those who make the laws and control the factories/country.
I think you are confusing a "planned economy" with "communism." But even then, there is nothing in the definition of a planned economy to say that all people in a certain position have the same daily wage. The Soviet union had an incentive system. For example, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09668134908409742 says "encourages the foremost collective farmers by means of adding extra labour-days."
You idealize the idea of the piece-rate system, without realizing that that's the system used in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era. Read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_reform_in_the_Soviet_Union... how the Khrushchev era reform movement pushed to move from a quota system to "standardising their wages and reducing their dependence on overtime or bonus payments."
From that page, "The piece-rate system led to an enormous level of bureaucracy and contributed to huge inefficiencies in Soviet industry. In addition, factory managers frequently manipulated the personal production quotas given to workers to prevent workers' wages from falling too low."
So it seem that your "capitalist factory" is using the same piece-system incentive system as used during the Soviet era, which is about as communist as you can get.
I also think you are confusing "capitalist" with "meritocracy." The US during the period of slavery was under laissez-faire capitalism, but quite obviously slaves did not enjoy the same benefits which you attribute to capitalism, and a slave working the same job, with the same abilities as a free man was unlikely to make the same rates.
You write "Obviously, the people who are happy with $100 per day are now pissed off, either because they don't want or simply can't work that hard." Or they might put their family life ahead of the company's bottom line and think that 40 hours of week is enough even if some people want to work 80 hour weeks.
Finally, you wrote "The only ones benefiting from communism are those who make the laws and control the factories/country." There's nothing unique to communism there. The same holds with capitalism. If only the richest 1% in a capitalist country make the laws and control the factories/country, then it's very likely that they are benefiting the most. The economic system and the form of government are not as strongly coupled as you suggest.
I don't think this is true in general, though it's true for some jobs (mostly jobs that nobody wants to do). For example, I don't think scientists, or even most HN types, are motivated solely by money, and would just sit around drinking beer if they couldn't make more money. Many of us are more motivated by science and technology. Making money is nice, but I would still work on tech if it made absolutely no difference to my salary. The reward is finding interesting things, gaining recognition for my ideas from my peers, etc., not just some monetary bonuses.
If anything I think there's a slight negative correlation between in-it-for-the-money and quality in science. The people who are there to optimize money are usually good game-players, adept at working the system and working their way up bureaucracy. Brilliant scientists often aren't even very good at that, and are more often really driven by the science first, perhaps peer recognition second, and maximizing money a distant third.
Even within a strongly capitalist system like the US, being motivated by things other than money actually used to be closer to the norm for a large number of professionals. The current situation where people change companies a lot, get large bonuses, and have widely differential pay, is a pretty recent phenomenon. At Bell Labs, everyone got fairly similar salaries, despite the fact that some people were much more successful in research than others. Of course, you had to be at a certain level of success to get there at all, but once you were there, you just got the normal Bell Labs salary, with raises tied to seniority, old-corporate-style. Yet many people there excelled anyway, despite the fact that they could've sat around pulling the exact same salary without putting in much effort. Why? Because they were motivated by things other than money, I would guess.
If you'd prefer text here's one: https://thesnarkwhohuntsback.wordpress.com/favorite-passages...
In addition, if you're captured in the United States and labeled a "terrorist," you're less likely to be tortured and held in "black" facilities if you're a U.S. citizen. Perhaps not an optimal reason, but it still exists.
(I need to ask the family, I remember it being more than 30k)
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/world/asia/kidnapped-ameri...
EDIT: In case people are interested, my nationalities are: Dutch, German, Canadian. I was born with all three of them (even though I found out only much later). I would loose both my Dutch and my German citizenship if I were to acquire another one.
My parents sacrificed an incredible deal to come to the US. For the life of me I can't comprehend why someone would do this. Loss of citizenship is permanent. Your kids lose it as well. Why would derek would do this to his kids.
Maybe he doesn't want his kids to have to deal with the U.S. I.R.S. every year of their life, regardless of whether or not they live in the U.S.? Just one of the possible reasons.
After all, it's not a burden on his children until they begin collecting income. If the concern is really for the children, it would be more pragmatic to give them sufficient time to make up their own mind.
No. Parents cannot, under any circumstance, renounce US citizenship on their childrens' behalf. If they gained citizenship at birth, they can only lose it by their own actions.
Perhaps he has decided to obtain Singapore citizenship? Singapore requires those who obtain naturalized citizenship there to renounce all other citizenships they hold.
"Juxtaposing these three theories of the rule of law allows us to see that there is something deeply anomalous in HavenCo’s simultaneous rejection of national self-government and embrace of formal legality and restraint on government. Having started from the premise that the political systems of existing nations could never be trusted to protect free speech, HavenCo needed a place outside of them to stand while it beamed its bits their way and undermined their national Internet laws.
That place needed to be able to stand up to annoyed nations, which led HavenCo to seek Sealand, with its colorable claims to sovereignty. And once HavenCo had chosen a protector with power, it also needed to be protected from the abuse of that power. HavenCo expected international law to protect it from the rest of the world and expected Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself."
We can discuss and agree that people have fundamental rights, but having that discussion only makes sense in the context of establishing a way of enforcing those rights. The day you hold 'no' citizenship is the day that nobody is going to help protect your rights and you become someone else's slave. That isn't a day I would look forward too.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/sealand-and-...
btw: how is the custom board patrol treating you when you cross? some countries like in US while pulling up your name they can see all nationalities you have. I would assume they are hostile towards you in some way, right?
How does a third world tell US which are its citizens. Doubt there is a global citizenship database? Is there?
I could imagine someone holding so many citizenships would be very valuable asset to government agency that hire spies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
"The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA, /juːkuːˈsɑː/ ew-koo-sah)[1][2] is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence among the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand."
They wouldn't necessarily know about others if you got the American one by birth, though if you were born abroad you can be sure that's going to be in the profile.
So if you live in a higher tax jurisdiction (i.e. the majority of the countries in the world), your US tax bill ends up being $0. However, you still have the hassle of filing your US tax return each year.
i.e. Mutual fund account - $32K
As a U.S. citizen you are required to pay taxes on income earned worldwide and from my understanding you can only deduct up to ~95k in 2012.
From what I've read, being a US citizen and working abroad is expensive and one of the main motivations for people to renounce their US citizenship.
Some just optimize based on the most travel permissive citizenships. Like, say the British passports let you in quite a few countries without a visa, so does an US passport but the countries are different.