All true to an extent but you underestimate human ingenuity. They DID get better at allocation as time passed, and they doubtless would have continued to do so. Your concession that there are ways to be less blind makes it the very opposite of arbitrary. Why didn't they have zero food and the entire economy producing nothing but ashtrays? Obviously not arbitrary. Difficult, but not impossible.
Just because they produce SOMETHING doesn't mean the system works. Anyone can look up the production process for something and duplicate it. The issue at hand is what resources to deploy and how you deploy them in pursuit of your goal.
Just because there are different degrees of blindness doesn't mean the issue at hand isn't the same: when resources are publicly controlled, allocating them rationally is impossible. The central premise of communism has been turned completely on its head. It's not a matter of trying harder to duplicate the effects of capitalism; it's a matter of knowing specifically what the people value and how to deliver it to them. It cannot happen unless market prices are allowed to arise in the factors of production.
This is an example of the broken window fallacy. You look at Russia and see that, obviously, they've produced
something. But at what cost? More importantly, what other economic activity that WOULD have taken place was foregone in pursuit of the arbitrarily chosen aim of the state?
I'm certainly not going to argue that GDP is a flawless measure, it's just prevalent, and obtainable. By all means pick a different measure, compare and contrast.
I don't have to provide you with a workable alternative to GDP to point out that GDP is nonsense, first of all. An economy is the process by which people fulfill their needs by employing scare resources according to their own personal scale of values. I don't think you can mix the individual value scales of billions of people making countless decisions based on countless factors and condense it all into some convenient formula that tells you in numerical terms how the economy is doing. Further, even if there were something (besides GDP) that could do what I've described, it still wouldn't be useful in informing economic decision making because you have no means of empirically testing these economic propositions. Empiricism requires a control group, and you can't have a control group if you don't have access to the information that would have informed the decisions of people in a hypothetical situation where whatever action you're trying to test didn't occur.
Not that I'm saying it's a fruitless or unworthy endeavor to try to use numbers to try to better describe and understand the economy. Just that you have to start with a coherent theoretical explanation of the economy. If whatever tool you're using flies in the face of basic logic, it's time to abandon that particular tool.
In 1990 the Soviet GDP per capita was about half of what the US's was. Would anybody be able to rationally argue that people in the US were precisely "twice" as well off as their Russian counterparts? Or that Americans were only twice as productive as an economy that was literally crumbling before our eyes?
Not sure what you're getting at here - of course the USSR was miles behind the USA in any terms of output, no one has ever argued differently. When the USSR was formed it was little more than a giant land mass of snaggle toothed farmers dragged together largely against their own will. At the same time the US was one of the most industrially advanced nations on earth, of course it was going to be superior. We were discussing growth.
And I'm saying that you can't empirically measure the growth of an economy in numerical terms, and also that regardless of however much "growth" occurred under communism
basic logic dictates that people would be more productive outside the communist system.
You can't just pick one aspect of a society and decide it's the determining cause of its current economic situation.
Not at all. My argument, if you re-read it, is that communism can work only if capitalism continues concurrently so it can copy it. What could be more damning than that?
But that's not "working". It's literally failing to achieve the stated goals of communism, which is the abolition of private property. If your system relies on the existence of its complete antithesis to even exist on any scale, your system has failed.
Again, just because countries don't instantaneously implode when adopting communism doesn't mean communism is "working". It means that whatever minor capitalist elements they've allowed into their society are momentarily delaying the inevitable long term consequences of the ideology which governs their actions.
Of course no one's going to read them, to be frank, your attitude sucks. You write as if you are presenting fact rather than opinion. You need to tone down your rhetoric.
On this particular case, that's exactly what I'm doing.
The theoretical basis of communism contradicts reality and the basic elements of economic thought. Communism is incapable of rationally allocating resources. Just because they can employ those resources to make "something" doesn't mean they've allocated them rationally. To allocate resources rationally in the economic sense means to deploy them to where they're most urgently demanded by people trying to engage in production. To approximate what they think are what the factors of production are based on what they cost in capitalist economies is necessarily arbitrary because the conditions that created those prices don't exist in the communist country.
You could save yourself and everyone else a lot of time if you put "everyone who doesn't agree with (my narrow view of) libertarianism is human garbage" in your signature and fucked off.
We're not talking about abstract facts here. We're talking about people arguing in favor of an ideology that has killed hundreds of millions of people and done immeasurable economic damage.
If people were in here defending Nazism nobody would bat an eye at calling them shitbags, because obviously Nazis are shitbags. But communism is different from Nazism by degree, not by type, and both are forms of socialism and both should be openly ridiculed any time anyone tries to rehabilitate their image.
Socialism as a whole is the most dangerous ideology anyone has ever conceived.