there were actually communists were you not aware of that

Well, how come I never get to see a burning, then?

I want two tickets to the next Metagamer Burning! (I'll invite a friend, he loved Diplomacy and he's nuts and loves to cheat, he'll fit right it!)

;)

What did the communist do?

actually communism would theoretically be the perfect economic system if there was not one defining human flaw: Greed.
Now i'm not saying it's the best but usually the reason it fails and has such a bad rep is because some hotshot leader has to go and starve every one else and turn it from a classless society to one where one is on top and everyone else dies slowly.
In very small communities it would probably work as the base idea is everyone shares work, everyone shares pay but like many things in this world it is too easily misunderstood by a curtain of fear and screwups.

With the proper approach to education and society, you can teach people not to be greedy. The reason greed is so prevalent is that we currently have a system - capitalism - which places greed and selfishness at its very heart. "Greed is good" is the mantra of capitalism.

The same could be said for Capitalism. After all, there's only one example of successful capitalistic society and that one has definitely dropped in the past years. Although there has been some recent recovery there but that's due to a Socialist President apparently. If you want to look at the most examples of successful societies you'll find that by far the majority are Socialist. It's not perfect but as you said there's always one little problem. It's operated by humans with their lovely flaws.

Which country are you making reference to , CK?

Greed is present in human beings and cannot be completely removed.
People may be able to resist but the fact that they WANT is greed for something itself.
Its instilled in everyone and is completely in the fact that people always want more.
Once you find someone who never wants anything, is always satisfied, then you've just found Jesus or Buddha or whatever religion you believe in. Chances are you'd never find a person like that in your life.

@Jamiet99uk. I was talking about USA. Would you like to include Britain?

For every person who is "greedy" in a capitalist society, there are an equal number of people who simply do not want to work. At all.

"actually communism would theoretically be the perfect economic system if there was not one defining human flaw: Greed."

Not true, even a society of altruists would need a price mechanism:

Suppose you had communes. These communes would either have to trade freely with each other, be controlled by a larger authority in trade, or be isolationist. If they are trading freely, you still have capitalism-not communism-, albeit where the entities are small communities rather than families/individuals. However, if they are isolationist, then you don't have specialisation and economies of scale, so it is not true that it is a perfect economic system.

So you cannot sustain the communes/communism idea as economically perfect without having some overbearing authority.

The issue is that no person can possibly calculate what is economically perfect, nobody has sufficient knowledge of what each individual in the world actually needs, and how to provide it. Thus a price mechanism is necessary, even for altruists.

What a price mechanism does is allows people to know quickly and immediately which goods are in excess supply and which are in insufficient supply, and then by having people free to trade you can overcome that, even if those people trade and earn in order to give away to others. However, the knowledge over what is in insufficient supply and vica-versa cannot be gained by any other means, because the economy is, bluntly, immeasurable. In other words, it is beyond the mental capability of man to design an effective economy without a price mechanism

"If you want to look at the most examples of successful societies you'll find that by far the majority are Socialist"

What? The correlation is very strong the other way!

(See: http://www.heritage.org/Index/Ranking.aspx)

there is no one perfect economic system and not only cause of greed, we would have to be robots programed to be fair in everything and not care about who gets what, but even if you look at animals and there "economic" models there is always one animal coming out on top in a deal.

@General- pshhhh work who does that anymore ;)

and ghost beats me to it and one ups me before i even respond

And JamieUK...how do you think the USA became the dominant power in the world that everyone likes to complain about? Through a lot of hard work. Incentive driven. Not looking for handouts, not looking for someone else to provide for your family. The US didn't just become great. We had to work at it, and achieved it. Now the trick is keeping it. But this weird image of everyone working together, sharing everything 100% when you know one guy would be busting his ass while another took coffee breaks every 10 minutes is simply not realistic. Incentives my friend, drive people to achieve, and in turn the countries those people reside in become great.

Also, I'm starting to bang my head against a wall because of all this holier-than-thou rubbish about how "its all because people are selfish and greedy". I've yet to hear any convincing argument for why selfishness is wrong that doesn't get down to "well, I think it is".

"if there was not one defining human flaw: Greed." - there are other human attributes which can at times over-ride greed depending on the situation, further greed is not considered a flaw with a 'pure' capitalist society it is a useful trait which is leveraged to motivate people.

That said by just using a pricing system you can indeed grow a successful economy, however that doesn't mean it creates a perfect society, far from it - by using only supply and demand to set market prices (apart from under-lying assumptions about the ease with which producers can enter the market and increase supply) you lose any sense of purpose for society other than the development of personal fortunes - some people who have achieved a peak of personal fortune have set up charitable foundations (Bill gates and his wife to name two) but these individuals - however rich they may be - will not have the same impact as a motivated billion could (and in some cases should) We could have set foot on mars by now. In fact Americans could have set foot on mars on their own by now, the only reason they got to the moon was to outdo the Russians who managed to go into space first.

There is a sense of national purpose which pushes our race forward, not due to personal greed, so in theory war is the greatest of motivators we know, better than greed because your very survival depend on it (not merely your comfort) A cold war is even better - if you ask the humanists - we don't have to kill anyone but the threat exists... (though some people may argue about the psychological impact of telling a nation their lives are under threat every day for a decade...)

@Ghost. Are you really quoting from Heritage.org? Really??

@General Maximus. And I thought the US became a super power by profiting from the war in Europe by selling weapons and supplies to both sides while they persisted in destroying their economies and themselves. I like your flag waving version much better. There's a tear in my beer.

@TGM - selfishness is not wrong - looking after yourself is a huge step in the maturity of any individual.

Some men rely on their mothers, then girlfriends and wives for most of their life and would have difficulty managing alone but they are not usually considered immature they are merely part of a family - There is again nothing wrong with supporting your family, you can act with greed toward everyone else in the world and support your family. That doesn't mean we can't envisage a 'better' world where we identify that all humans are our brothers, and act accordingly - though i don't know how a common cause can be found it does not necessarily need an authority to tell everyone what to do, we are capable of making decisions on a global scale without greed being the sole motivator - that said as Copenhagen demonstrated our politicians are not necessarily capable of coming to agreements - still Arnold schwarzenegger said he would act on a city/state based level rather than country/nation level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJRmik3Lab0

What is a "Freedom Score" anyway? Is that an American propagandist term? Is it related to "Freedom Fries"?

"Incentives my friend, drive people to achieve, and in turn the countries those people reside in become great." - but who decides the incentives? if you are working within a company your manager sets targets and doles out bonuses - in a communist nation your government can set targets and dole out bonuses - there is the same scope for corruption with a corporate system as there is in a communist system - except a company can fail whereas a country is 'too big to fail'

competition between nation states can be compared to competition between corporations. The difference being that corps don't have their own armies at their beck and call...

"@Ghost. Are you really quoting from Heritage.org? Really??"

Hurrah for immature use of the genetic fallacy!

"What is a "Freedom Score" anyway?"

They measure the freedom people have in all countries across the world, and score them on the basis of their findings. Kinda works the same way as every other measurement, for instance the Human Development Index.

"And I thought the US became a super power by profiting from the war in Europe by selling weapons and supplies to both sides while they persisted in destroying their economies and themselves. I like your flag waving version much better. There's a tear in my beer."

You're totally wrong to think that America only grew due to the world wars. Had Europe not been smashing itself up, they'd have been richer and bought *even more* from America.

Plus, America's economy was growing strongly long before WW1.

"That said by just using a pricing system you can indeed grow a successful economy, however that doesn't mean it creates a perfect society, far from it - by using only supply and demand to set market prices (apart from under-lying assumptions about the ease with which producers can enter the market and increase supply) you lose any sense of purpose for society other than the development of personal fortunes"

This isn't true. Price Mechanisms and selfishness do not follow from one another. Altruists would also find that they had to use a price mechanism, because Altruist A knows what his neighbour needs, and Altruist B who is producing it does not know it, so a price mechanism is needed to let him know it.

"it is a useful trait which is leveraged to motivate people. "

But of course altruism could be equally leveraged in a capitalist manner, if it were present. What you really need is *desire*.

@ ReaverNecris: "Greed is present in human beings and cannot be completely removed.
People may be able to resist but the fact that they WANT is greed for something itself."

Please prove this.


@ General Maximus: "And JamieUK...how do you think the USA became the dominant power in the world that everyone likes to complain about?"

The USA is not Utopia. There are huge inequalities and a lot of your people live in poverty. This represents a massive failing in your system.

"That doesn't mean we can't envisage a 'better' world where we identify that all humans are our brothers"

So there is something wrong with selfishness if you can make it "better"

"The USA is not Utopia. There are huge inequalities and a lot of your people live in poverty. This represents a massive failing in your system."

He never said it was Utopian. However, America does far better by its citizens than Cuba, Russia or China.

Also, what's wrong with inequalities. If you could make the poorest people twice as wealthy as they are, but at the same time you'd make the richest twenty times as wealthy, it would mean that everyone was better off, but inequality increased.

If you think inequality is a bad thing, you will presumably have to agree with me that it would not be a good thing to make a poor man a penny richer if it made all the rich men of the world 100 times richer, or 1,000, or 1,000,000 etc.

@ TGM: "He never said it was Utopian. However, America does far better by its citizens than Cuba, Russia or China."

What is the relevance of mentioning Russia and China here? Neither are communist countries. Have you really paid such little attention to world events over the last 20 years, that you think the Communists are still in power in Russia?

And as for Cuba, it's hard to judge Cuba's performance when you consider the fact that they have been subject to an illegal economic blockade by the USA for many years.

"If you think inequality is a bad thing, you will presumably have to agree with me that it would not be a good thing to make a poor man a penny richer if it made all the rich men of the world 100 times richer, or 1,000, or 1,000,000 etc. "

Well, technically, wouldn't that simply lead to inflation which would wipe out the value of the additional penny given to the poor person?

@Jamiet99uk - So, its up to you whether the economic blockade of Cuba is illegal? You know, for the most part, most of the people on this site are pretty respectful of others countries. Most. No one is saying that the USA system is perfect. But, I will take it over any other without question. We aren't some tiny little country that is trying to hold on to its past. We are one of the largest economies in the world, with the one of the largest militaries in the world (that is doing most of the dirty work for all of the good guys in the world), and we kind of like it over here. As for the "massive failings in our system," most countries would be lucky to have our problems.

"What is the relevance of mentioning Russia and China here? Neither are communist countries. Have you really paid such little attention to world events over the last 20 years, that you think the Communists are still in power in Russia?"

These apply to both China and Russia:
1. It is still less economically free than America
2. We can still look at the fact that when they actually were communist, it didn't work.

"And as for Cuba, it's hard to judge Cuba's performance when you consider the fact that they have been subject to an illegal economic blockade by the USA for many years."

But I thought you were opposed to free markets? I thought you were a commie?

How come Cuba *needs* the US economy, if the US has such a poor, capitalist economy and only the communist systems work? Are you seriously suggesting that every free country in the world only does better than Cuba because it gets to trade with America?
"
"If you think inequality is a bad thing, you will presumably have to agree with me that it would not be a good thing to make a poor man a penny richer if it made all the rich men of the world 100 times richer, or 1,000, or 1,000,000 etc. "

Well, technically, wouldn't that simply lead to inflation which would wipe out the value of the additional penny given to the poor person?"

I'm not just talking about money, but about wealth. If you made a poor person wealthier to a sum equivalent to 1 penny (by giving him a sweet, say), but at the same time made all the rich men own 100 times as much stuff, or 1,000, or 1,000,000 etc. would there come a point where the equality was so intolerable that you wouldn't allow it?

*inequality