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I'm not defending the GP comment (I don't even know what it's saying) but at least it wasn't completely unmoored from the specific topic.
Edit: your account has been breaking the site guidelines in quite a few other places too—e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39598018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39597981
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39532095
That's not good. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Societies that balance the two (like the post WWII US) are the ones that have advanced their standard of living the most.
The US saw the most spectacular rise in the standard of living from 1800 up to WW2 the world had ever seen. This was all due to the free market, not collectivism.
During WW2, the US supplied its allies England and the USSR, and also fought across both oceans and buried the opposition, a truly spectacular feat. Again, through the free market.
It's funny to watch people try and analyze what made the US the world's dominant global empire when in reality it was a series of complex and contingent factors that can't be replicated because they could have only occurred in their exact historical circumstances.
For example, other countries have tried to replicate American dairying culture, buying into the propaganda put out by the dairy industry that milk drinking is the secret to America's success. So China started up loads of American-style dairies to provide drinking milk for a population... without the gene for lactase persistence.
That's what the free market talk feels like to me. America is at the top and that can't be replicated. There's only room for one at the top. When it collapses, we'll see what circumstances lead to the next great empire. It might be collectivism!
The success of free markets has been replicated many times:
1. the US
2. Japan after WW2
3. Germany after WW2
4. Hong Kong
5. China after it abandoned the cultural revolution
It has nothing to do with geography.
> America is at the top and that can't be replicated
It can be replicated.
> It might be collectivism!
Yet collectivism always fails. No country has managed to feed itself with collective farms, for example. And it isn't for lack of trying.
> The success of free markets has been replicated many times:
> 1. the US
> 2. Japan after WW2
> 3. Germany after WW2
> 4. Hong Kong
> 5. China after it abandoned the cultural revolution
4 of those 5 countries have significant welfare programs (Japan and Germany being the most generous among those on your list).
Welfare does not correspond with prosperity. It's hard to see how paying people to not work contributes to prosperity.
Just asking, because FDR wanted exactly that in his free market economy only produxing for the war effort to goverment set gials and prices in 1945.
Welfare programs mean that life expectabcy is higher, as is quality of life. The US for examole is loosong on both metrics against Europe and ither parts of the world with solid programs. Germanys ascent to economic hight can be in part be traced back to Soziale Marktwirtschaft, combining very solid welfare and social.programs with a free market economy.
> Welfare programs mean that life expectabcy is higher, as is quality of life. The US for examole is loosong on both metrics against Europe and ither parts of the world with solid programs. Germanys ascent to economic hight can be in part be traced back to Soziale Marktwirtschaft, combining very solid welfare and social.programs with a free market economy.
You're just saying this when all the evidence is to the contrary. Is Ukraine depending on Germany or the US? (Rhetorical.)
Supporting people who have trouble sourcing an income reduces the amount paid out to offset starving hordes doing whatever it takes to survive et al.
There's a balance.
The US were a economic power prior to WW1, they only became a true super power during WW2, in particular after Pearl Habour. The full mobilization of society, industry and science made sure of this. This, and the fact the US won the Pacific.
I know it is a popular view of WW1, that it was only the US entry that won it for the Entente. Simply not true, WW1 is not WW2. And even WW2 was not won by the US alone.
Finally, the US war economy of WW2 was decidedly not free, is was a complete structured war eceonomy with production goals set by the government. The implementation of those goals was capitalistic, but not free.
> Finally, the US war economy of WW2 was decidedly not free
FDR mobilized existing free market businesses to convert to war production. It was not a collective, nor was it forced labor. For example, Ford switched from producing cars to producing tanks and airplanes. After the war, Ford switched back to making cars. Ford was paid to do this by the government.
FDR's State of the Union Address of 1945 proposed switching the economy to forced labor. Apparently, he was an admirer of Stalin. Fortunately, he was not able to make that happen.
And you are aware, that France was a major biligerent in WW1, stopped Germany at Verdun and held more than half the Western Front, sucessfully after the race to the sea ended, together with Britain, for years before the US showed up?
Or that the Ententene, without significant US participation, won the strategic victory that defeated Germany during the Kaiserschlacht, the last German offensive in the West? This victory allowed Franch and Britain to start the 1919 offensive already in 1918, the one that ended with German surrender. In fact, they started early, in part, to avoid the impression that it was the US who "won" WW1. Little did they know how WW2 would play out and influence puplic opinion.
Also, being impressed by something doesn't mean being defeated by it... I know the meme, and that is all it is, a meme. And a lazy one at that.
During WW2, economies in the UK, the US and the USSR had a lot in common. Mainly them being not free to choose what they produced. The degrees of freedom regarding how it was produced differed, but that is not what defines an economy as free or not. And please tell me you don't think the USSR functioned without money? People were paid to produce stuff, they didn't have the likes of Ford getting rich building war material so.
Edit: I forgot one theatre in WW1, the Ottoman Empire. Arguably at least as important for Britain than the Western Front, and there the US didn't participate at all. And still Britain won.
This is not to downplay the role the US played in WW2, far from it. Projecting this role to WW1 is just plain wrong so, and only feeds into a whole bunch of wrong preconceptions about WW1. I partialy blame Cold War propaganda for this, that downplayed the Soviet role in WW2, for obvious reasons, and over played the US one. Regarding WW2, this narrative is finally changing, for WW1 not so much. And I don't like factually wrong narratives for historical events.
Edit 2: Just read the first half of FDRs 1945 State of the Union during my lunch break. Not sure how you can consider a national service obligation, in parallel to the normal recruiting of workers, to be equal to forced labour...
You really should look up what real forced labour looked, and looks, like.
Also, the same guy, FDR, who called for "forced labour" and was a "friend of Stalin" was in charge of the war economy. And yet, you claim the war economy led by him was a free market. One of those things is not true, I'd say.
Forced labor is exactly what it is. "You go work at this job we assigned you or you go to prison" is forced labor.
> "friend of Stalin"
I didn't write that. It's your strawman.
> being impressed by something doesn't mean being defeated by it
They knew the war was over when they encountered the well-fed, tall, and well-supplied US soldiers.
> that France was a major biligerent in WW1
Yup. I also know that France was bled white at Verdun. The slaughter was so bad that the average height of French soldiers in WW2 was an inch and a half shorter than in WW1.
It is not unreasonable to say that France lost WW1.
German soldiers knew the war was over when the Kaiserschlacht failed, before the US showed up. Heck, even before that. Leadership did, too. There were mutinies before 1918, on both sides. The German Navy sailors caused a revolution, without ever seeing a single American. And the likes of Luddendorff and Hindenburg wanted to save face, and waited until a new civil government negotiated the Armistice, so they could later claim Germany was undefeated in the field. Please tell, you din't believe that crappy piece of propaganda...
And no, a national servide mandate, or whatever FDR propsed (a speach is hardly well defuned policy, is it?) is not forced labour... Forced labour is what what the Nazis did for example, with POWs and camp inmates. Also, forced labour is unpaid, not sure where you assume FDR didn't want to pay peoole. After all, the US would never do that, free market and all that, right?
The loss of people has no impact on the height of future generations... Where do you gt that idea from? And while Verdun was a brutal battle, in which Germany had equal losses, it was not the main source of cassualties on the Western Front for either side. Same for the Battle of the Somme.
Seriously, France lost WW1? Small soldiers in the next war are caused by cassualties in previous one? It took well equipped and well fed Americans for German soldiera to realizebit was over?
Austria-Hungary alone was on the brink of collapse without ever engaging American troops in a large-scale battle, and its collapse would have brought the already weakened Kaiserreich down as well.
And yes, Austria-Hungary was done, earlier than summer 1918 in fact. As I said earlier, there is the risk of viewing WW1 in terms of WW2, whixhbis dangerous and wrong. It leads to ignore the Ottoman theatre of war, the fact Austria-Hungary was major power until the end of WW1 and that Italy was on the side of the Entente. And that France was never defeated in that war (man, I hate the memes of French warfare so, so much..., different topic so).
Another fun fact: Spain was one of the big arms and ammunitions suppliers in WW1.
It's not surprising German troops starving in trenches for four years considered brand new entrants to the war equipped with the newest French-designed and manufactured tanks[1] to be well fed and equipped, though there was nothing spectacular about their combat performance. There's no doubt that weight of American numbers helped accelerate the timescale for winning the war, but it's difficult to imagine anything that has less to do with laissez faire capitalism than the scale of the US draft...
[1]The US decided to produce their own tanks in 1917, but manufacturing issues meant their first arrived two days after the Armistice so they relied on French units
Also, most Western European societies.
Literally any time two people work together that’s dangerously close to collectivism as it’s not individuals working in their own. Down with the collectivists, every person should be an independent operator
Working together is not collectivism.
That may be true, but that's not sufficient to define collectivism. There are many other forms of societal structures where "deciding for others" exists as well. Unless you mean to lump all these together, and say that companies and tyranny for example are the same as collectivism?
> If it’s fully voluntary it’s individualism.
If I _voluntarily_ decide to join a "collective", am I individualist or collectivist?
An individualist, if you are free to leave it at any time. There's nothing wrong with forming a collective in the US, I think like 20,000 of them have been formed over the last 240 years.
You don't hear about them much because they all failed. You're free to start a collective anytime in the US and try to make it work.
Isn't freedom great?
The NCBA maintains a list of several thousand collective/coop businesses.
Most definitely not a failure.
https://rootstalk.grinnell.edu/past-issues/volume-vii-issue-...
https://www.linkedin.com/company/east-wind-community
I couldn't find out how high that was, but I've seen another "successful" commune with an average stay of 2 years. It takes people an average of 2 years to discover they don't particularly care for communes.
That divide between individual and collective as stated above was very sketchy, and I merely wanted to indicate that.
If one take the strict definition of individualist and collective from a dictionary (well, which one, to begin with?), of course they are opposite, just looking at the idea conveyed by the word radicals (ie individualist -> individual, vs collective).
As always, we all start talking about things without first defining the terms we use to discuss those things, and of course confusion, anger and frustration ensue.
Just like how a large company is essentially governed in the same way as a planned economy is, but nobody’s under the impression that JPMorgan is a socialist institution.
It's a good thing China switched to free markets.
To be clear I don’t think this arrangement is a problem, and if you were describing this in academic terms I mig even agree with you and have been too harsh. Unfortunately the word “collectivism” is used as a perjorative dog whistle and so I was pointing out how common behaviors most people would think are fine or even ideal can be cast in a “collectivist” light to point out that it’s not bad.
I’m assuming by the vote difference in our two comments that multiple people had the same assumption
The Communist Manifesto was published during the Great Famine in Ireland, and that famine was much worse than it needed to be because the UK government didn't intervene.
And a big part of the growth in capitalist societies is related to corporate structures, which are small scale collectives, with bosses who make decisions for all.
When the US civil war happened, that resulted in the North collectively imposing the decision that nobody had the "business freedom" to own slaves; much to the dismay of the south and I presume joy of the enslaved.
USSR famously bad, but (a) even though it started from very poor conditions thanks to the Tsars, developed to beat the USA to orbit, (b) the collapse of it, replacing communism with capitalism, regressed their economy and living standards.
And that's why no country is entirely either collective nor individualist, and also separately neither capitalist nor communist (both anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists are a thing, just as both can be dictatorial).
My opinion is that as both capitalism and communism were formalised over a century before Nash game theory, both are wrong — they assume that people, when free, make choices that are good for all.
Communist industry and economy worked reasonably well for the stuff were the state is the natural customer in any society: defence. Everything else, not so much.
One thing I've been wondering: would housing, transport infrastructure, energy grid(s)[0], banking and similar basic financial services, water, basic food[1], education, emergency services, healthcare, waste disposal in general and public toilets in particular, be in the same category here as defence?
Possibly even all of the primary economy, so include all mining as well as agriculture?
[0] both electricity and physical fuels
[1] at the level of where most of the calories and proteins come from, possibly even "basics" ranges in supermarkets, but not at the level of restaurants or fancy food ranges in supermarkets
And before someone says Venezuela or North Korea, the former is a deeply corrupt cleptocracy while the latter used to be the last stone-age version of Stalinism before the whole nation was turned into an open air concentration camp by its dictator.
I'm not sure if you lived in a Soviet country during these times, but I think you will get MANY opinions that this was not working well.
- military and space tech was mostly on par (a bunch conflicts, incl. Vietnam, show that)
- economically, the USSR was stable
- people were not starving
Of course, the was less luxury and consumerism, but that was true for a lot of other countries as well in Western Europe. It started to fall behind latest by the early 80s on all metrics.
And for Soviet leadership, personal luxuries for the people were simply no priority. And there is no question which system "won" this conflict, is there?
So the question is, was communism actually working well in that period, or was it more or less an unsustainable fluke due to the post-war boom era, and as soon as that ended it got left in the dust?
Worth pointing out, Germany outpaced the European allied nations economically pretty quickly, as did Japan.
Being competitive for decades, and the most part of the Cold War, surely is no fluke. In the end, capitalism won out, no doubt about it. Also worth pointing out, capitalism does not lead to freedom, China is a very good example of that.
By the way China, they became the economic power house in the early 2000s. Is the Chinese system a fluke?
And anyway, they had no freedom, which is the real issue. Communist governance is fundamentally opposed to liberty; the system can't allow it.
Individuals are always individualist unless they get lobotomized. The question of governance is how to manipulate that individualism to good ends.
Rats jump ship in an individualistic system, in a collectivist system you expect the rats to sacrifice themselves to save the whole. Managers often tries to sell you on the collective so you work harder and demand less pay, but that is just him as an individual trying to get more out of you that doesn't mean it actually works like a collective.
Or in other words, that is an individualistic organization.
> care about their work quality, and the impact their work has in their colleuges work
Yeah, they care about their own ideals, not the organization itself. They can care about their coworkers, but they don't care about Wallmarts bottomline.
So as you see, this individualistic organization can still draw from the power of human collectivist needs, so you get the best of both worlds, you get the collectivist goodness at small scale and the greed that glues together them and make them power through even when they are too tired to care about the collective.
In any system people have to work to live: food, housing and such cost money. Doing "good" has nithing to do with it, and I never said that. The question is, do you care about more than the monthly pay check for something you pass most of your day doing or not?
What keeps the workers showing up to work is the need to live. What keeps them at a particular place is a myriad of things. Individualism is not part of that.
And why do you go immediately to "remove the pay"? There is quite some territory between working for free and not valueing a sufficient salary above all else.
Funny so, how everybody working in a sector withbstrong labour unions is basically making more, for less hours, on average than those without them. Seems individualism is a great way to devide and conquer for people holding all the power, because once peoole are convinced individualism is better than cooperation, they voluntarily devide themselves.
Lets say an equivalent company with similar culture and people offered twice the salary, how many would say no? People saying yes in that situation are not there for the collective, they are there for their own sake first and foremost. The collective is an afterthought since they abandon it the instant a better opportunity appears.
You can convince people that radically different things are in their self-interest, from joining hands and singing Kumbaya to Genocide.
The notion of self-interest (or I guess in your case individualism, which is even shakier) is an empty vessel you can fill with nearly anything.
No, that isn't the same thing. A collectivist would do things he hates and he doesn't believe in personally because the collective wants him to do it. He would sacrifice himself because the collective told him to. There are many examples of societies and organizations that worked that way, such societies are collective societies.
Military is the most common example, they are often run as a collectivist organization, most soldiers aren't there because they want to or they believe in the war, they are there because they support their country or they were forced to support their country against their will by authoritarian collectivism. And they wouldn't go and support their other country if they were paid more since they are there just to support their country, those are mercenaries.
Our capitalist societies aren't like that at all, we are so individualist that people like you don't even understand what it means to not be individualist. The closest to collectivism in USA wouldn't be corporations, but national anthems, school children saying the pledge, religion etc.
So something like the stock market, as the engine of American capitalism, only works if everybody in your society believes that it is worth taking risks in order to possibly get a huge windfall. But is that really in people's self-interest? Maybe what one would interpret as some kind of natural individual desire is actually a particularly American level of risk tolerance that has been inculcated because it has led to a lot of collective success.
If you mean that humans sometimes do more than the bare minimum, sure they do that. But that is an inherent part of humans, that has nothing to do with individualism or collectivist systems, humans do that in all systems, that is a part of the value of a human worker and why you pay them to work for you.
Because I know people that work there, and money surely isn't the first reason you are teaching a bunch of brats while having parts of the public look down on you if you can easily get double the amount somewhere outside of the field. Same for political work, crowdsourcing, .. People take gratification in doing something that matters to society. Yes, they want to survive, but they are quite often not doing it for the money, the money is a nice bonus and enables to do it full-time, but that is not always the reason you do it.
Also you are goalpost moving, you said first they are only doing it only for themselves not for "the company", and people often do it for the institution that employs them. Not because they are paid, but because they believe they are doing something that matters.
That would apply to those teachers and doctors and nurses as well, almost all of them would gladly abandon their current kids/patients to go help other kids/patients if they were paid twice the salary. That is how we know they aren't there for the collective good of the organization, they just care about doing something good at any place with no feelings for that particular collective.
If you mean that people are helpful etc, then that is a completely different thing from them actually caring enough about a particular organization.
Capitalism was the end of such arrangements in the most developed parts of the world. Individualism helps since individual investors benefits from investing in better equipment making people more productive and thus helping living standards overall.
Social solutions to the same problem doesn't come close to being as effective at eliminating such inefficiencies. The main thing social solutions can do is provide baselines to the population such as education and healthcare as you say, but without capitalism to follow-up with targeted investments the country will remain poor even if its population is extremely educated. Social solutions are just very bad at using peoples talents well, they have a too collectivist view and don't see the individuals.
It’s possible communism had a uniquely positive influence on Russia’s transformation, but I remain skeptical considering it seems to be the only example of communism to ever to do so, the place from which Russia was coming, and the place in which it ended.
As in most things in life, the golden path is usually somewhere in the middle, and US individualism has lurched far to the extreme, and is going to lead to its collapse if not reversed.
So many here are so fucking full of shit.
"I make 150k a year man, its not fair man, we need more communism"