
Yes, Computers Have Improved. No, Communism Hasn't - tujv
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-02/yes-computers-have-improved-no-communism-hasn-t-
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rorykoehler
I don't know many people who want to try Communism again however Capitalism
also has it's inherent flaws. While Communism suffers from lack of incentive
Capitalism suffers from an incentive to plunder the environment for short term
personal gain. Even as a huge fan of Universal Basic Income, a scheme that
aims to provide the lowest common denominator with a passable quality of life,
I can acknowledge that the environmental problem will not be magically solved.
In order to succeed as a civilization we need to give up the idea that a
single ideology holds all the answers. Good ideas are everywhere and to stick
to one ideology exclusively is akin to religious madness. We have more
scientific understanding now than every before yet when it comes to political
ideology a large portion of society choses to ignore science and go with
whatever narrative they have made up in their head that confirms their own
biases.

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letster
Interesting thing it what will happen, in the future, when computers would-be
improved enough to replace most human professions? It is profitable for
separate producers to use automated systems but unemployed people have no
enough money to buy their products. Will government regulate production like
in socialistic economic model?

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deciplex
You're basically talking about a post-scarcity economy, which is coming in
bits and pieces already. Based on what we've already seen with digital goods,
the answer will probably be artificial scarcity by fiat, with (I would guess)
approximately equivalent results. The letter of the law will assign virtually
all property to a few holders of (intellectual) capital, who will lease it out
at great cost and with unreasonable restrictions. People will break the law
regularly of course, and it will be loosely enforced - but most of the
population will be law-breakers and thus subject to the whim of a police
state.

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orionblastar
Communism is flawed because not everyone is allowed to become a member of the
Communist party to get perks and elite treatment. The government also controls
prices and if they want the price of toilet paper to be low and the price of
bread to be low, there will be a shortage of it because the organizations that
make it won't earn much money and make it at a loss. Then there are lines for
toilet paper and bread to wait for it to be made.

The military is always given priority in food, and the people get what is left
over.

Some argue that the Communism that the USSR had was not the same as Marxism.

I had a Russian coworker once, he tried to quit smoking. He had smoked US
cigarettes and he switched to Russian cigarettes because they tasted bad and
he claimed having bad tasting cigarettes helped him quit. Something about
Russian quality control not being as good as quality control in the USA.

But as AI, automation, and robots improve, they will do the jobs of human
beings and put most of us out of work and then there will be a basic income to
live on. Perhaps that is when Communism works when the technology does the
work for us and doesn't need any motivation to work better.

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duncan_bayne
_Perhaps that is when Communism works when the technology does the work for us
and doesn 't need any motivation to work better._

No, because you still have the fundamental problem that broke Communism (and
which was identified by von Mises and others in the early 20th Century): the
calculation problem.

[https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem](https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem)

This is not a solvable problem. Creating an 'artificial market' is akin to
predicting the weather in great detail 75 years from now. You might, _might_
be able to say "it's likely to be a bit warmer on average", but you could
certainly never say "it'll be raining at 11:00 that day". It's simply
impossible.

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toomuchtodo
I thought the USA outspending the USSR, forcing resource exhaustion is what
broke communism.

If you have unlimited renewable energy, self-driving electric vehicles, IBM's
watson providing clinical expertise instead of doctors, etc, you could provide
socialism without taking from people (because labor no longer has value
compared to software and automation).

~~~
orionblastar
I think Communism broke itself. There is the myth that Reagan created the SDI
program that didn't really exist to make the USSR spend more on research for
space based defense to catch up, but I think that is a red herring.

Communism would pay janitors more money than it paid scientists and engineers,
simply because that janitor was a member of the Communist party. Many
scientists and engineers defected from Russia to other countries to earn more
money. Russia had some great products AK-47, Soyuz rocket and capsule, and
sold the MIG to many nations as well.

Look at Greece right now, they had major socialist programs and they got into
deep debt. The USSR got into deep debt as well with their socialist programs,
and their military was expensive to maintain. Nations that owed them money
like Afghanistan they invaded and the USA countered by training Osama bin
Laden and the Taliban to fight then guerrilla style, on 9/11/2001 we wish we
hadn't trained them.

The USA didn't outspend the USSR it out innovated it with science and
technology. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Sun, etc all
developed better hardware and software and the PC Industry with MS-DOS had
programs that automated tasks and saved money. It wasn't Reaganomics that
boosted the economy it was the tech industry that did so. US companies sold
the technology to other nations and money started to flow into the US economy.
This was back when technology was made in the USA, now it is made in China
mostly.

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chipsy
A hole in the "USA out innovated" premise is that Silicon Valley was based on
military spending. See Steve Blank's "Secret History" series for examples.

And, speaking more generally, the U.S. Department of Defense is the world's
largest employer, 3.2 million strong. When taking into account benefits,
pensions, etc., it may also be called the largest socialist program.

That statistic paints a big picture; it's not that having a market economy was
sufficient to become the sole superpower of the 1990's. It was that the U.S.
had a lot of centralized spending in "the right places at the right times" and
then allowed the marketplace to pick up the results and run with them wherever
convenient. However, it's very difficult to backpedal and reallocate now that
this has been done, and the status quo probably won't change until a crisis
motivates it.

The pattern of every emerging market - Japan, Korea, China - is that state
power still entangles itself somehow, even if there is a marketplace at the
low level. We have never had a "purely ideological" state anywhere.

~~~
reality_czech
To be honest, I find it frustrating when people trot out the old "sillicon
valley was created by central planning" meme. If it were that easy to create a
sillicon valley, there would be dozens of them by now. Believe me, Chinese
bureacurats have tried. There are whole "ghost cities" in China that the
government ordered built, but that people never moved into.
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/07/20/what-
will-b...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/07/20/what-will-become-
of-chinas-ghost-cities/)

The great entrepreneurs who built Sillicon Valley-- Shockley, Ellison, Jobs,
and the rest-- were people who were driven to find funding wherever they could
get it. If the government had said no, they would have gone (and often did go)
to someone else. Similarly, the academics who are getting funding from DARPA
or the DOD now would gladly accept funding from private sources as well. The
money is just as green.

The military certainly jump-started many technologies by putting money into
the hands of engineers and scientists-- in some cases, possibly even by years
or decades. But those technologies would have been invented anyway, just on a
slower timescale.

It wasn't inventing the technologies that gave the West an edge-- it was
commercializing them. And for that you need businessmen, not bureaucrats. If
the USSR could have produced a competitive semiconductor industry, the 1980s
and 1990s would have looked much different. Instead, they couldn't even keep
loaves of bread on the shelves.

