Communism. Good or bad. What do you really know about Communism?

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

I am sure that you are mathematically skilled enough to realize that the current outsized returns to capital and the finance sector are unsustainable. We don't know how things will change and what will follow, only that change is inevitable and you can't get blood out of turnips.

In all likelihood the Egyptians thought the pharaohs would rule forever, Romans thought their empire was permanent, and medieval barons believed that God had ordained the feudal order.

"In the long run we're all dead" -- true enough, the sun will burn out and the worms are the destination for all of us.

But what's really notable is that folks who modeled "The Limits to Growth" -- as for example in the celebrated Club of Rome report [1972] simply didn't appreciate the remarkable impact that capital allocation in a market economy would have on resources.

Much like the straight line estimates from the 1940s which imagined that decades in the future some large percentage of the population would be employed as telephone operators, technologically static analyses have turned out to be wrong, over and over again.

Similarly, the "Peak Oil" model of recoverable oil turned out to be completely wrong. Apply more capital and more technology to the problem and what was seen as a finite resource turns out to be far more abundant.

Am I as sanguine about the environment generally? Not as much. There are some canaries in the coal mine of fairly catastrophic environmental degradation, systemic indicators -- notably the crashing of insect populations, even in areas presumably not impacted by pesticides; that's very worrisome.

But that's not an economic issue. On the economic side, my best guess is that technology allied with flexible capital allocation will continue to "deliver the goods". When you look at the dramatic improvements in efficiency brought by Amazon, and the potential applications of AI to problems like medicine, there's little economic/technological reason to be gloomy.

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

"In the long run we're all dead" -- true enough, the sun will burn out and the worms are the destination for all of us.
...

But that's not an economic issue. On the economic side, my best guess is that technology allied with flexible capital allocation will continue to "deliver the goods". When you look at the dramatic improvements in efficiency brought by Amazon, and the potential applications of AI to problems like medicine, there's little economic/technological reason to be gloomy.

You have really summed up the main flaw in the capitalist apologia. I have no doubt that corporations will be showing record profits until the moment that human society collapses.

Human stupidity is not limited to capitalists. We can look to the disastrous policies in many communist regimes to realize that we need much better ways of decision making. I have been reading about physics and biology. It is doubtful that the average person has no idea that our areas of ignorance are vastly greater than our knowledge. Even our more successful theories are troubled by considerable evidence that better explanations are probable.

Even mainstream economists are deeply troubled by the fact that our economic decisions are being made entirely on the basis of garnering short term profits.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

Even mainstream economists are deeply troubled by the fact that our economic decisions are being made entirely on the basis of garnering short term profits.

That's not a flaw -- though I would add, plenty of economic decisions are made based on long term proifits, and more than a few of those decisions reflect environmental considerations. The insurance industry, for example, considers climate change explicitly in their analyses.

You make a mistake if you imagine that in a market economy the market is supposed to make all policy choices. There are a few people who may think that -- college libertarian types, perhaps.

But for anyone less extreme than that, you expect the government[s] to make policy issues on things like the environment that constrain the choices that businesses may make. That has worked reasonably well-- look at the global agreement to halt CFC production to preserve the ozone layer, for example.

That the most unconstrained libertarian wet dream is a problem is hardly a surprise. The best environmental decisions are made by market economies with a fairly strong State; if you look at, say, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act passed during the Nixon Administration, you have a pretty good idea of what that looks like.

What you seem to be concerned about isn't "capitalism" so much as it is simply the scale and wealth of the human population generally. Advancing a billion Chinese out of desperate poverty to a better standard of living has had a tremendous environmental burden; but of course China wasn't notably cleaner under Mao-- just much, much poorer.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Comrade xyzde69, you're back!

Just when I thought my blood pressure was under control

Gonna ask for an increase from 20mg a day to 80 mg per day now

Originally Posted by Brian249x

Human stupidity is not limited to capitalists.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by Estreeter

Just when I thought my blood pressure was under control

Gonna ask for an increase from 20mg a day to 80 mg per day now

Spooky my Ramipril dosage has just been increased from 5mg to 6.25mg to keep my blood pressure in check too

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

xyz thinks the environment itself is going to collapse, which will as a side effect kill capitalism.

He may well be right, but I think it will take longer than he thinks. Still, we'll get there, if we don't stop breeding like mad.

Just think that ultra resilient creatures like insects get populations are collapsing.


In almost all the species (apart humanity or domestic cats, dogs, cows, sheeps, pigs, hens...), the populations are collapsing.

Recently two French researchers of the National Center of scientific researchs showed that more than 13'000 scientific studies published all around the world pointed the same fact: life on Earth is... dying.

Humanity steals more and more areas to wildlife.
When biodiversity collapses, life is on the way to disappear.

You probably observed that I like analogies.

So it's like if you lose parts one after the other of your car without knowing it.
If it's the volume knob of your car radio... that's ok, you still can drive, but if it's one of the bolts holding the brake cable, you still can break 20 times and suddenly, you can't break anymore... and you have a terrible problem.

That's the same with biodiversity. We don't know what and how many species, when disappearing, could ruin at least mammal life on Earth.

[bowlinggreen]

If humanity does screw itself, it will probably not be because of global warming per se, but because we eat everything up and cause the collapse of ecosystems.

We have already overfished some areas in the seas, and we have screwed up the bees somehow, with that "colony collapse" thing. That last is quite annoying, since I really like honey, and it is now quite expensive.

I expect all this to get worse, since the human population growth shows no signs of stopping, and more and more former third worlders newly flush with money insist on eating in the style to which we westerners have become accustomed. China in particular may eat everyone out of house and home.

A nice world war would help to curb growth, especially if weapons of mass destruction were used.

A few dozen large radiation-enhanced nukes would probably cut China's population back to a much more manageable 200-300 million people.

Yes, I know that's evil.

But I don't see humans changing their ways anytime soon, so what else is there?

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

Humanity steals more and more areas to wildlife.
When biodiversity collapses, life is on the way to disappear.

No, life won't disappear -- but one certainly can question whether we'll be that life.

Its seems reasonable to conclude that 7 billion people is likely too many for the planet.

[MaxJoker]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

No, life won't disappear -- but one certainly can question whether we'll be that life.

Cockroaches they claim most likely shall survive.
Phew.
In other words at least all the Government institutions won't be affected.

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Its seems reasonable to conclude that 7 billion people is likely too many for the planet.

Only if we keep on letting the conglomerates rape , pollute and poison the planet plus us too. In their drooling need of greed to ever increase shareholder profits. While deftly lobbying so pay ever more dwindling taxes on those profits.
We've allowed a hell on earth get deliberately engendered and maintained to enable a fraction of fuckers to live like emperors.
The abject unjust empathy free short sighted bloody bastard waste of it all infuriates me.
I mean for random example it takes 2,000 gallons of water to make a single pair of jeans.
Not just talking about those special triple X "Husky" ones Greenman wears either.

[sobaka]

I've in both the US and russia, when I compare the state of the ecology in both after 250 years of capitalism vs 70 years of communism, I need to really question whether Maxie above has really done any research of just mindlessly swallows Bernie tonic.

The animals in venezuala's zoos could sing you the praises of the fruits of socialism, but they can't because they've been eaten by socialist victims....

Capitalism goes off the rails when the checks and balances are missing or corrupted. Communism by definition has no check and balances and is therefore inherently corruptible.