Fidel is dead

[WoodyXP]

Colin Krapernick must be heartbroken.

 

[bloodycelt]

Socialism as a whole is the most dangerous ideology anyone has ever conceived.

No, that would be Objectivism.

 

[StevenK]

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?

And yet 250 million people survived over half a century without starving. So it of course wasn't arbitrary. People need food, people need shelter, people need clothing. The regime produced all of these things. Regularly they got it wrong and there was too much or too little, but to deny they were no closer to getting it right than just a random generator of all of the things humans have ever produced is stupid.

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?

Nobody can rationally argue anything if you refuse to recognise any attempt to quantify anything. We'd just be reduced to arguing over whether a picture of some cold russians in a queue for bread looks worse than a picture of drunk americans living under a bridge.

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.

I've agreed with this multiple times.

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.

I've specifically said this a couple of times now too.

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.

This is just a reorganisation of the points you've already made, that I'd already agreed with, if not already stated myself, prior to you mentioning them. My only argument with it remains the same, that whilst it's never going to be optimal, decisions more rational than randomly generated answers can of course be made. I don't know how you can even try and argue with that.

To suggest that given the option of a mixed ratio of rice, beans, water and Elton John cd's to keep a human being alive, no other human would be able to take a more educated guess than a wheel of fortune is odd.

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.

We're at a curious impasse here.

Firstly despite agreeing on most points you keep bringing up the point I made in the first place as the main argument against me having said it.

Secondly we can't discuss the economy because you say it's logically impossible for something to happen which demonstrably did happen for over half a century, and you won't entertain any measure of an economy anyway.

Lastly you refuse to differentiate people talking about something with someone carrying something out, so we'll have to disagree that having an interest in a method different to your own automatically makes them human garbage. We'll just have to say I dislike your attempts at some kind of thought tyranny and leave it at that.

 

[oliverclaude]

Do you google translate everything?

Hahahaha... great pieces don't exclusively happen in your sig, y'know?

 

[DangerousK]

I like Fami's posts here.

I've argued some of what he has over the years, but never to the depth he has on communism. I'd love to see him discuss this with my friend's brother. He's someone who believes the communist system can work if it is "done properly"...whatever the fuck that means. So he is out rallying for communism at political rallies and so on. I've pointed out that communism is destined to fail because it never takes into account human nature, and that it is simply impossible to avoid that aspect. Society ultimately organizes into hierarchies as it's the natural outcome of groups of people coming together. People always wind up on a ladder of top, middle, and bottom.

 

[oliverclaude]

Once a pig starts walking on two legs, two legs become better then four.

 

[famicommander]

And yet 250 million people survived over half a century without starving. So it of course wasn't arbitrary. People need food, people need shelter, people need clothing. The regime produced all of these things. Regularly they got it wrong and there was too much or too little, but to deny they were no closer to getting it right than just a random generator of all of the things humans have ever produced is stupid.

A statement like this just goes to show that you don't even understand what is meant by the term "rationally allocating resources"

In economics, resources have been allocated rationally when they are directed towards their most urgent use in society. When resources have been allocated rationally the market clears. When the market doesn't clear the people allocating the resources adjust their production processes or they fail, in which case their assets end up in more capable hands.

Hilarious that you would mention starvation, because it perfectly illustrates my point. In just 1932 and 1933, 6.5-8 million people starved to death in the USSR. They knew that everybody would need to eat, they knew about how many people they needed to feed, and they knew how to grow food. And yet millions upon millions of people starved to death in a span of less than two years. The state was unable to anticipate the conditions which led to a famine and they couldn't redirect capital back into that area after the fact because, as we already covered, capital goods are heterogeneous after they've been produced.

The very fact that they were producing other shit while people who had the money to afford food starved to death should tell you that they weren't allocating resources rationally.

It's not just the consumer goods themselves (food), but the higher order production goods (arable land, tractors, irrigation techniques, etc) that the government was literally buying from itself and then putting other government bureaucrats in charge of. They had no way of knowing how much land needed to be directed to growing crops versus set aside for some form of industry.

The fact that you keep saying "well they didn't all starve to death immediately" shows just how little of this you're grasping. They were indeed able to produce SOMETHING but without any method of accurately measuring the real economic needs of their people their action is, again, necessarily arbitrary.

You seem to have a hang up on that word, but it's the correct term. They allocated resources according to what their view of capital markets in other countries were. But again, the conditions which created said capital markets in other countries were unique. They can never be duplicated precisely and they certainly don't describe the conditions within the USSR itself. The judgment of a bureaucrat was substituted for the market based on his own ARBITRARY (there's that word again) valuation of the difference between the desires of producers/consumers in the USSR versus whatever country they were trying to base their prices on.

Nobody can rationally argue anything if you refuse to recognise any attempt to quantify anything. We'd just be reduced to arguing over whether a picture of some cold russians in a queue for bread looks worse than a picture of drunk americans living under a bridge.

Rational argumentation itself is the method for advancing economic knowledge. You start with a statement that is a priori true; something that self evidently describes a real life phenomenon. And then, from that self-evident truth, you spin out the necessary implications. If A is true and A necessarily implies B, then B must also be true. If B is true and it necessarily precludes C from being true, then C cannot be true. This is the same methodology that you would employ in proving a theorem in Euclidean geometry; if someone asked you to prove that all triangles have angles which add up to 180 degrees, you wouldn't get out a protractor and empirically measure all possible angles of all possible triangles. You would define a triangle and then deduce from the characteristics which define a triangle that all the sides must add to 180 degrees.

I know you said you won't read the three links I posted earlier. But you really, really should. You're way out of your depth here and I'm not willing to continue explaining the same concepts to you.

 

[StevenK]

A statement like this just goes to show that you don't even understand what is meant by the term "rationally allocating resources"

In economics, resources have been allocated rationally when they are directed towards their most urgent use in society. When resources have been allocated rationally the market clears. When the market doesn't clear the people allocating the resources adjust their production processes or they fail, in which case their assets end up in more capable hands.

Woah there, I'm not claiming to be an economist here, I was enjoying discussing this on layman's terms, despite being human garbage for it. If you're therefore happy to agree that what most non-economists would consider to be a logical meaning of the term rational resource allocation fits with my argument then I'm more than happy to concede in an economist's phrases dick swinging competition, no question.

Hilarious that you would mention starvation, because it perfectly illustrates my point. In just 1932 and 1933, 6.5-8 million people starved to death in the USSR. They knew that everybody would need to eat, they knew about how many people they needed to feed, and they knew how to grow food. And yet millions upon millions of people starved to death in a span of less than two years. The state was unable to anticipate the conditions which led to a famine and they couldn't redirect capital back into that area after the fact because, as we already covered, capital goods are heterogeneous after they've been produced.

The very fact that they were producing other shit while people who had the money to afford food starved to death should tell you that they weren't allocating resources rationally.

It's not just the consumer goods themselves (food), but the higher order production goods (arable land, tractors, irrigation techniques, etc) that the government was literally buying from itself and then putting other government bureaucrats in charge of. They had no way of knowing how much land needed to be directed to growing crops versus set aside for some form of industry.

The fact that you keep saying "well they didn't all starve to death immediately" shows just how little of this you're grasping. They were indeed able to produce SOMETHING but without any method of accurately measuring the real economic needs of their people their action is, again, necessarily arbitrary.

Not that hilarious considering I was aware of the starvation of 1932/33 so picked my words very carefully when I said the people didn't starve for over 50 years, which remains true. That's why I never said that nobody starved, and that's why I said that allocation improved as time went on. I stand by that in the terms of which I was speaking about resource allocation. Whether it holds true in the respect you were talking about it is for you to know and, I guess from your responses, it doesn't. Fair enough.

You seem to have a hang up on that word, but it's the correct term. They allocated resources according to what their view of capital markets in other countries were. But again, the conditions which created said capital markets in other countries were unique. They can never be duplicated precisely and they certainly don't describe the conditions within the USSR itself. The judgment of a bureaucrat was substituted for the market based on his own ARBITRARY (there's that word again) valuation of the difference between the desires of producers/consumers in the USSR versus whatever country they were trying to base their prices on.

Again, in economists terms arbitrary perhaps means something else, but in the world I inhabit it means without reason. And again, in that context I stand by the statement that whilst of course it can't be precisely forecasted reason can be applied that can make decisions better than no reasoning at all, which you seemed to be suggesting.

I know you said you won't read the three links I posted earlier. But you really, really should. You're way out of your depth here and I'm not willing to continue explaining the same concepts to you.

True, but I'm not as far out of my depth as you are up your own anus.

 

[Tanooki]

Just going to throw it out there for the fun coincidence of it all. Ironic, the big communist was about as anti-capitalism as possible, and then he goes and dies on Black Friday the biggest show off of American capitalism of the shopping year just 90miles off his shores.

 

[norton9478]

It's all bullshit.

Capitalism, Communism.
Just a bunch of words turned into fake ideas to ply people to the will of others.

Fidel didn't want to take over the world... He just wanted his part of the world free from Capitalism...

He did send forces to Angola

 

[DevilRedeemed]

It's all bullshit.

Capitalism, Communism.
Just a bunch of words turned into fake ideas to ply people to the will of others.

agreed

 

[DevilRedeemed]

True, but I'm not as far out of my depth as you are up your own anus.

all things considered, objectively speaking, putting aside the provocative language employed and focusing on what is being said -
truth

edit: in so far as you are being, as you would say, a douche.

 

[SudoShinji]

Just going to throw it out there for the fun coincidence of it all. Ironic, the big communist was about as anti-capitalism as possible, and then he goes and dies on Black Friday the biggest show off of American capitalism of the shopping year just 90miles off his shores.

It was also Pinochet's bday, free helicopter ride for Castro.

 

[bloodycelt]

I like Fami's posts here.

I've argued some of what he has over the years, but never to the depth he has on communism. I'd love to see him discuss this with my friend's brother. He's someone who believes the communist system can work if it is "done properly"...whatever the fuck that means. So he is out rallying for communism at political rallies and so on. I've pointed out that communism is destined to fail because it never takes into account human nature, and that it is simply impossible to avoid that aspect. Society ultimately organizes into hierarchies as it's the natural outcome of groups of people coming together. People always wind up on a ladder of top, middle, and bottom.

Capitalism vs. Communism is like the Pope and the Patriarch arguing over who is head of the church. A huge multinational corporation controlling a market is just as bad a single-party government.

 

[CrackerMessiah]

Capitalism vs. Communism is like the Pope and the Patriarch arguing over who is head of the church. A huge multinational corporation controlling a market is just as bad a single-party government.

But... it's got what plants crave!

 

[Heinz]

But... it's got what plants crave!

E L E C T R O L Y T E S!!

 

[LoneSage]

Been reading more about Cuba and the revolution recently.

This guy, the dictator of Cuba before Castro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

was a total dickhead who deserved to be ousted even though he was backed by the US. Even JFK said the first rebels were right in rebelling against him. Eventually fled with $300 million on New Year's Eve '58.

Then going to Fidel's wiki. Things seem dandy the first couple of years, building infrastructure, opening more schools than ever, unfortunately a brain drain occurred but that's normal in every revolution, getting face from the Bay of Pigs failure, etc. Then the dude went full retard and pulled this stunt:

Influenced by China's Great Leap Forward, in 1968 Castro proclaimed a Great Revolutionary Offensive, closing all remaining privately owned shops and businesses and denouncing their owners as capitalist counter-revolutionaries

After that, things just spiral downward. He stopped smoking cigars in '85 which is new to me. 70s were shit, 80s were shit, 90s were shit. Oh but this quote was a sick burn:

Commenting on Castro's recovery in 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush said: "One day the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away". Hearing about this, the atheist Castro ironically replied: "Now I understand why I survived Bush's plans and the plans of other presidents who ordered my assassination: the good Lord protected me." The quote was picked up on by the world's media.

Man just such a shame. Things coulda gone differently. Real life The Ninjawarriors ending:



Anyway here's a cool Cuba photo gallery from a tourist in '98: http://imgur.com/gallery/fo0ft

Any Americans here interested in visiting?

 

[Fuzzytaco]

Only got to personally hear my grandmother and my greatgrandmother's take on things but, both Batista and Castro were pieces of shit. And according to my mom, my grandfather espoused the same sentiment.

 

[StevenK]

You're way out of your depth here and I'm not willing to continue explaining the same concepts to you.

Cold light of day, you're right.

I come here in the evenings to drink and debate, regularly about things I know absolutely nothing about and when I get rumbled I should know when to quit.

Consider this an apology and my position abandoned.

 

[BladeDancer314]

Stick to chorizo, Steven.

 

[StevenK]

Stick to chorizo, Steven.

Your recipe sucked