And this would be the same tired refrain of every tankie who will justify atrocities committed under communism by pointing out that bad things also happen under capitalism.
I'd call myself a neoliberal (for lack of a better term), but I agree that the OP's comment is naive and is the kind of things that almost always comes from people who have never experienced actual scarcity or desperation for more than a second of their lives. But the idea that any form of communism can be put forward as a general solution to scarcity would be amusing if it wasn't so common.
Capitalism is shit, but it's shit for the same reason that every communist system ever instituted ends up shit. Because every system is vulnerable to exploitation by a small group of well-positioned individuals, and if those individuals are shitty (or become enthralled to a single shitty individual) then your whole system turns to shit under them.
Communists (and libertarians) seem to only learn enough history to speed-run through all the same mistakes... It's the same mentality of people who design a new framework/language believing it solves a bunch of problems in existing languages/frameworks, while naively ignoring the problems that those existing bloated languages/frameworks had been designed to solve... usually problems of scale, fault-tolerance, and reliability.
And to be clear, there isn't anything wrong with designing new languages, or frameworks, or economic manifestos. These are all good exercises that more people should take on, if only to learn for themselves how difficult and complex they can be and to disavow themselves of the notion that who came before must have been corrupt and/or stupid.
Imo, there is no "one size fits all" framework for good governance and we'd be better served by talking more about design patterns, anti-patterns, best practices, potential vulnerabilities/exploits, and how well each system we've seen implemented implemented their solutions... is the pattern itself bad, or the implementation? Or maybe it's a fine pattern that is just really hard to implement and doesn't scale reliably because of certain properties of the underlying language we're using or the machine architecture we're deploying onto?
> And this would be the same tired refrain of every tankie who will justify atrocities committed under communism by pointing out that bad things also happen under capitalism.
Oh look. The name callings begin almost immediately. Isn't there some badly applied rule here on HN about insults?
Anyways, I never said I was communist either. One can critique capitalism AND communism both. And this is about capitalism and the abdication of any responsibility of the capitalist rules that cause poverty. I just find that capitalists can never actually talk dispassionately about the sufferings their system costs. It's always the "best-est-est system the world has ever known".... except for all those thrown away by capitalism. However capitalism does what it's best at, is by externalizing those human costs and blaming the individual for systemic choices.
Then again, that externalization is what is going to get our world baked, literally. (Climate disaster, not cannabis)
Try *being* homeless, or permanently injured, or born in the wrong family, or in a location that has high unemployment and no way out, or hunger, or countless other reasons. All of these can be solved with various amounts of money.... but by being in poverty (or "shit life syndrome"), they do not have.
Social murder (German: sozialer Mord) is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. The phrase was coined by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 work The Condition of the Working-Class in England whereby "the class which at present holds social and political control" (i.e. the bourgeoisie) "places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death".[1] This was in a different category to murder and manslaughter committed by individuals against one another, as social murder explicitly was committed by the political and social elite against the poorest in society.
"Shit Life Syndrome" is just a euphemism for capitalist social execution of the "undesirable group" aka a group that can't be profited on. But again, it's just easier to blame the individual for systemic choices, and not do anything to help the situations. And gods forbid if you're a man - you're doubly expendable.
(As an aside, communism ala China and USSR, etc all traded shitty capitalist dictator for a shitty government dictator. I don't count that as a win in my book either.)
EDIT: I'm not going to spend a comment to refute a poorly constructed No True Scotsman fallacy. Sure there's 'less bad capitalism', but that's not the article subject, is it? And it's obvious we're not talking about the willful choice to eradicate Finland's homelessness like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197785 ... Which are choices NOT to implement... Hence Social Murder.
> This is what neoliberalism does to the brain... Notice that when communists are discussed...
> Oh look. The name calling begins... I never said I was a communist...
Try reading to yourself, and recognize that you literally opened this thread by accusing the OP of being a neoliberal (he never said he he was!) and disparaging their cognitive ability based on your assumption of their ideological belief. You then follow up with a defense of communism, but then make out like I'm the one jumping to conclusions by assuming you're communist.
You can read 19th century political philosophy till your hair is grey, but I think you may have some pretty important philosophical (and personal) truths staring you right in the face here.
Also, it doesn't seem like you read my reply beyond that first line because I also said that OP's comments usually come from people who have never experienced actual scarcity, I agree with your sentiment, just not on your conclusions. Every form of communism seems to have also implemented their own form of social darwinism, it's just that the "undesirable group" and the means for removing them from society are different.
You're stating "capitalism" as if this is somehow a well defined word and as if it's statically implemented in that particular way in the system you have in mind. There's many shades of capitalism, communism, and all sort of -ism along a multidimensional space of economic principles.
The economic system in the US isn't straight up capitalism. Each locale, county, state, is different and many aspects of society are not strictly capitalist. Plenty of govt regulation and intervention goes around.
Plenty of well functioning developed countries have similarly heterogeneous mixes of economic styles, with social or private healthcare, housing, income, utility, business regulation, etc.
I'd call myself a neoliberal (for lack of a better term), but I agree that the OP's comment is naive and is the kind of things that almost always comes from people who have never experienced actual scarcity or desperation for more than a second of their lives. But the idea that any form of communism can be put forward as a general solution to scarcity would be amusing if it wasn't so common.
Capitalism is shit, but it's shit for the same reason that every communist system ever instituted ends up shit. Because every system is vulnerable to exploitation by a small group of well-positioned individuals, and if those individuals are shitty (or become enthralled to a single shitty individual) then your whole system turns to shit under them.
Communists (and libertarians) seem to only learn enough history to speed-run through all the same mistakes... It's the same mentality of people who design a new framework/language believing it solves a bunch of problems in existing languages/frameworks, while naively ignoring the problems that those existing bloated languages/frameworks had been designed to solve... usually problems of scale, fault-tolerance, and reliability.
And to be clear, there isn't anything wrong with designing new languages, or frameworks, or economic manifestos. These are all good exercises that more people should take on, if only to learn for themselves how difficult and complex they can be and to disavow themselves of the notion that who came before must have been corrupt and/or stupid.
Imo, there is no "one size fits all" framework for good governance and we'd be better served by talking more about design patterns, anti-patterns, best practices, potential vulnerabilities/exploits, and how well each system we've seen implemented implemented their solutions... is the pattern itself bad, or the implementation? Or maybe it's a fine pattern that is just really hard to implement and doesn't scale reliably because of certain properties of the underlying language we're using or the machine architecture we're deploying onto?