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Comment by foco_tubi | Hacker News Reader

These gymnastics are very impressive

I'm astounded that people actually think this is mental gymnastics... would you like the KGB banging on your neighbor's door at 3am and sending them to the gulag for saying something critical of the government?

No, but you seem to be conflating an economic model with a particular governmental regime.

Collectivization is impossible without expropriating people by force. How would you propose accomplishing that without the government's involvement? Central planning also requires a government to allocate resources and fix prices.

If you disagree, I'm curious what government types you think collectivization and central planning can be accomplished with besides those that directly take charge of those things.

We have some good examples to pick from throughout history - postwar Britain nationalizing major industries, Sweden’s soc-dem era, Allende’s Chile (though the US put a quick stop to that), Israeli kibbutzim…

You are collapsing three different questions into one illogical conclusion, leaning heavily on one of the least successful examples of collectivization in the history of mankind. One could use your line of reasoning to argue that because there are bad capitalist countries with authoritarian governments, who do indeed go door to door and murder its citizenry as political suppression, capitalism itself is bad. But they still wouldn’t be logically correct.

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