Fidel is dead

[Alpha Skyhawk]

THEN again.. without capitalism... people would not want to strive for better...

Some better I've got going on now compared to what I had before, for sure. /sarcasm

Where did you hear that? School? I think school is even more of an indoctrination center than anyone wants to admit. I never believed that quote, not even when I was a kid.

 

[ChopstickSamurai]

Wait, Fidel was still alive?

 

[Rot]

Some better I've got going on now compared to what I had before, for sure. /sarcasm

Where did you hear that? School? I think school is even more of an indoctrination center than anyone wants to admit. I never believed that quote, not even when I was a kid.

STFU...

I'm relaxing... you posting nonsense is upsetting my karma...

I had already said i had given up trying to explain stuffs... I even posted a nice gif about it....

HOWEVER... seeing as you saw fit to try and piss me off when i'm relaxing... i intend to piss you off with a week in the war room... (to be extended if i forget about your worthless ass...)

xROTx

 

[DevilRedeemed]

I heard an interesting theory some years ago, that the US allowed somewhat the revolution to take place and for the island to remain that way - it was a way of having a token left winged government close by which could be used as an example for why such systems don't and should not work. the politics of not intervening in Cuba further than had been done where for the sake of not having a larger more successful 'revolution' elsewhere. I don't know if I agree completely but I found it to be interesting non the less.
Castro was an impressive speaker and articulated some important things, did a lot right, but ultimately all cults of personality are foolish. it is one of the many paradoxes of populism.

 

[famicommander]

I'm going to break this up into smaller pieces and respond to each bit directly, because there's a lot to get to here

They choose by watching what capitalist countries are producing.

The prices in a given country represent the preferences of the people participating in the economy there. The preferences of consumers in a country like the United States would be very different from the preferences of consumers in the USSR, for a variety of reasons. Differences in culture, geography, climate, relative standard of living, cost of producing goods, costs of transporting goods, etc. The prices also reflect the general availability and usability of resources in a given area. For example, wood would be more valuable in a desert than the Pacific Northwest. The USSR looking at prices for American goods doesn't give them any real information about the preferences of consumers in the USSR nor of the availability or condition of the factors of production in the USSR.

Using prices from a different market is a less blind but ultimately still arbitrary method, and the fact that socialism/communism itself relies on there being SOME market prices SOMEWHERE should tell you all you need to know.

It is possible to run a communist regime with an ever growing economy that sidesteps the usual boom and bust of capitalism simply by looking over the fence and controlling appropriately.

The typical boom and bust system you describe has nothing to do with capitalism. It is a function of central banking, which is a form of socialism (specifically, it's banking fascism). The manipulation of interest rates sends incorrect signals to entrepreneurs about the availability and structure of capital in the economy, as well as the savings and preferences of the consumer. The boom happens when companies are producing to meet what they think are the needs of the consumer based on the incorrect information given to them by false interest rates. The bust happens when entrepreneurs realize that poor investments have been made and their resources have been directed towards endeavors that are not actually demanded by consumers. This usually becomes apparent when the central bank finally lets interest rates return (to some approximation of) the natural market level.

The economy of the USSR grew reliably for over half a century, provided universal healthcare and full employment, but was ultimately brought down because of the crushing costs of the arms race. Failures in resource allocation did bring the USSR down but not for the reasons you are making out. It wasn't because they couldn't work out where to put them, it's because they shoved it all into the military as their hand was forced by the US.

This is absolutely and totally false.

First of all, it highlights why the usage of GDP as a measure of the health of an economic is ridiculous. Why? Because the formula for GDP is designed with an assumption that government spending is inherently as productive as private spending. In fact, it assumes any and all spending is just as productive as any other spending. To use a formula that assumes government spending is productive to argue that a concept which relies on government spending is workable is essentially saying, "government spending is productive because government spending is productive." According to GDP, the government paying a man any wage to dig a hole all day and then fill it back up is just as productive as someone who makes the same wage by providing goods or services that are demanded by consumers on a voluntary basis.

Further, it assumes that all capital goods are homogeneous when in fact they are heterogeneous. You can't just represent all the capital in the economy with a number. It's not "x billion dollars with of capital"; it's various individual amounts of tractors, land, computers, factories, or any other conceivable capital good.

The arms race exposed the degree of the problem of the USSR and accelerated the inevitable collapse, but the idea that the USSR was anything close to the relative productivity of the US that the GNP figures show is absolutely absurd. The people in the USSR were impoverished and their standard of living was terrible. The government was producing all kinds of goods nobody wanted and low quantities of goods everybody wanted and they didn't have a rational method of addressing the problem.

But because they were producing large quantities of "stuff", they called it productive. Never mind that it was stuff that the people in the USSR couldn't or didn't want to use, and they were using resources that would otherwise have gone to providing things they actually COULD use.

You're essentially arguing that communism can work simply because it took quite a long time for it to burn through all the accumulated capital that the country had amassed. The fall was inevitable because it's necessarily implied by what the tenets of collective ownership of the means of production entails.

Here are three articles that expand upon the points I touched on here:
https://mises.org/library/economic-irrationality-state
https://mises.org/library/how-gdp-metrics-distort-our-view-economy
https://mises.org/library/end-socialism-and-calculation-debate-revisited

I'm sure nobody will read them but oh well.

 

[Rot]

What i like BEST about this thread... is not the convos about Government... Or Communism vs Capitalsim... etc etc...

It's the fact that Alpha Skyhawk will be War room locked for at at least a week and if no one cares about letting him out... he can fucking stay there...

xROTx

PS. ##FREESKYHAWK2016##

 

[famicommander]

I wouldn't be interested in taking part in such a thread, could be interesting to read though.

I think both Capitalism and Communism are product of industrialization, and industrialization in itself is something I'm somewhat opposed to, so I have no real interest in how either systems would/should pan out.

socialism on the other hand, saying anyone who advocates it is human garbage, deserves their teeth kicked in

Without industrialization the vast majority of people in the world would either starve to death or have never been born in the first place. Industrialization is a necessary component of an advanced society.

Go ahead try to build a fucking computer or a car without using any industrialized processes. I'll wait.

Or, shit, try to build a god damn #2 pencil.

And it's just like a socialist to advocate for the use of violence against other people.

Socialism is the negation of wealth and freedom. It is everywhere and always a destructive ideology and people who advocate for it are, knowingly or not, advocating for a vast reduction in the standard of living of all mankind.

 

[DevilRedeemed]

Without industrialization the vast majority of people in the world would either starve to death or have never been born in the first place. Industrialization is a necessary component of an advanced society.

Go ahead try to build a fucking computer or a car without using any industrialized processes. I'll wait.

Or, shit, try to build a god damn #2 pencil.

And it's just like a socialist to advocate for the use of violence against other people.

Socialism is the negation of wealth and freedom. It is everywhere and always a destructive ideology and people who advocate for it are, knowingly or not, advocating for a vast reduction in the standard of living of all mankind.

Industrialization and the growth of population are 2 things which bring along a great many problems to the world.

I don't know if I see myself as a socialist, I fall short personally. but in a mature society which truly cares about it's inhabitants, it is as fair as you can get. Scandinavian countries have something of this.

personally I can't help but like a bit of chaos.
hence ng.com

 

[DevilRedeemed]

too much is made of the idea of 'progress'.
it's a very narrow concept and is fundamentally abstract. there's nothing inherently 'good' about having a car or a computer.

 

[Jibbajaba]

There's some serious cognitive dissonance going on when a guy on a fucking video game forum says he's against industrialization.

 

[famicommander]

too much is made of the idea of 'progress'.
it's a very narrow concept and is fundamentally abstract. there's nothing inherently 'good' about having a car or a computer.

Never in all my years on this forum has a post been so worthy of that emoticon

 

[DevilRedeemed]

There's some serious cognitive dissonance going on when a guy on a fucking video game forum says he's against industrialization.

why? I'm not against it per se but I'm not for it.
also I won't advocate all the stuff that gets me off, it is what it is. I'm not militantly opposed to eating a big mac, I may have one from time to time - I know how nasty it is though.
anyway it's a personal point of view, not shoving it down your throat.

 

[DevilRedeemed]

Never in all my years on this forum has a post been so worthy of that emoticon

because you're a fekking noob
in any case provide an argument - I may en up agreeing with you.

 

[famicommander]

because you're a fekking noob
in any case provide an argument - I may en up agreeing with you.

Because the absurdity of your position requires no argument -- it falls flat on its own when stated.

You're using the fruits of an industrialized society to argue against the very concept of industrialization. You're engaged in what is known as a performative logical contradiction. Industrialization itself is a necessary prerequisite for the two of us even having this argument in the first place. It's as absurd as arguing that you're dead, or me arguing that I am incapable of argumentation.

 

[DevilRedeemed]

Because the absurdity of your position requires no argument -- it falls flat on its own when stated.

You're using the fruits of an industrialized society to argue against the very concept of industrialization. You're engaged in what is known as a performative logical contradiction. Industrialization itself is a necessary prerequisite for the two of us even having this argument in the first place. It's as absurd as arguing that you're dead, or me arguing that I am incapable of argumentation.

see how hard was that?
too many times these things are about ego challenges - I appreciate when someone takes the time to explain themselves whatever it is they believe - without resorting to terms such as 'human garbage'.
see, I was kind of trolling just now, but in the end it all came up in response to the way you expressed yourself initially.
I wasn't even going to write in this thread more than to kind of back what Rot was saying. I don't care enough about it, and as different my take may be from yours in the US by and large, I respect the way you people think generally if anything because it is what it is. not like you're going out of your way to be cunts. until you do.

I have no problem in admitting my own shortcomings by the way. barbarie comes naturally to me. eating the fruits from the garden of eden while it all burns down around me, that makes me the snake. or just another disorientated deluded individual amongst the many

 

[alphagamer]

Very low Fidelity in this thread the last few posts...

 

[SudoShinji]

Good riddance, what a scumbag.

 

[StevenK]

I'm going to break this up into smaller pieces and respond to each bit directly, because there's a lot to get to here

The prices in a given country represent the preferences of the people participating in the economy there. The preferences of consumers in a country like the United States would be very different from the preferences of consumers in the USSR, for a variety of reasons. Differences in culture, geography, climate, relative standard of living, cost of producing goods, costs of transporting goods, etc. The prices also reflect the general availability and usability of resources in a given area. For example, wood would be more valuable in a desert than the Pacific Northwest. The USSR looking at prices for American goods doesn't give them any real information about the preferences of consumers in the USSR nor of the availability or condition of the factors of production in the USSR.

Using prices from a different market is a less blind but ultimately still arbitrary method

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.

, and the fact that socialism/communism itself relies on there being SOME market prices SOMEWHERE should tell you all you need to know.

I know and I did actually say that.

The typical boom and bust system you describe has nothing to do with capitalism. It is a function of central banking, which is a form of socialism (specifically, it's banking fascism). The manipulation of interest rates sends incorrect signals to entrepreneurs about the availability and structure of capital in the economy, as well as the savings and preferences of the consumer. The boom happens when companies are producing to meet what they think are the needs of the consumer based on the incorrect information given to them by false interest rates. The bust happens when entrepreneurs realize that poor investments have been made and their resources have been directed towards endeavors that are not actually demanded by consumers. This usually becomes apparent when the central bank finally lets interest rates return (to some approximation of) the natural market level.

Agreed, I've actually argued this point before with Norton in favour of deregulation.

This is absolutely and totally false.

First of all, it highlights why the usage of GDP as a measure of the health of an economic is ridiculous. Why? Because the formula for GDP is designed with an assumption that government spending is inherently as productive as private spending. In fact, it assumes any and all spending is just as productive as any other spending. To use a formula that assumes government spending is productive to argue that a concept which relies on government spending is workable is essentially saying, "government spending is productive because government spending is productive." According to GDP, the government paying a man any wage to dig a hole all day and then fill it back up is just as productive as someone who makes the same wage by providing goods or services that are demanded by consumers on a voluntary basis.

Further, it assumes that all capital goods are homogeneous when in fact they are heterogeneous. You can't just represent all the capital in the economy with a number. It's not "x billion dollars with of capital"; it's various individual amounts of tractors, land, computers, factories, or any other conceivable capital good.

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.

The arms race exposed the degree of the problem of the USSR and accelerated the inevitable collapse, but the idea that the USSR was anything close to the relative productivity of the US that the GNP figures show is absolutely absurd. The people in the USSR were impoverished and their standard of living was terrible. The government was producing all kinds of goods nobody wanted and low quantities of goods everybody wanted and they didn't have a rational method of addressing the problem.

But because they were producing large quantities of "stuff", they called it productive. Never mind that it was stuff that the people in the USSR couldn't or didn't want to use, and they were using resources that would otherwise have gone to providing things they actually COULD use.

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.

You're essentially arguing that communism can work simply because it took quite a long time for it to burn through all the accumulated capital that the country had amassed. The fall was inevitable because it's necessarily implied by what the tenets of collective ownership of the means of production entails.

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?

Here are three articles that expand upon the points I touched on here:
https://mises.org/library/economic-irrationality-state
https://mises.org/library/how-gdp-metrics-distort-our-view-economy
https://mises.org/library/end-socialism-and-calculation-debate-revisited

I'm sure nobody will read them but oh well.

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.

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.

 

[LoneSage]

oh shit bringing out the multiquotes

 

[90s]

Feel conflicted. There is no doubt that the economical system in place there and human right violations have caused significant hardships for Cubans. Looking at Castro himself though, he was arguably a competent leader in a military sense, and also charismatic to certain degree. If he had set up a democracy after the revolution, he might have been a hero. As it turned out, he just placed himself in control.

The thing is, there are lots of countries in the caribbean/central america that appear to be just as bad as Cuba in terms of poverty (maybe worse), and maybe worse in terms of education, medical care, and crime (not including the human rights violations) which also appear to be "democracies". All things being the same, I guess I would rather live in a country that at least has the promise/illusion of freedoms and opportunity foe economic advancement than live in a country where there is no doubt that those things are not possible.

The real question is, was Fidel good enoughto play in the major leagues?

 

[famicommander]

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.

 

[Jibbajaba]

Holy fuck, way too much reading.

 

[LoneSage]

I think it was a shame America put an embargo on Cuba. That really hurt the people.

 

[famicommander]

I think it was a shame America put an embargo on Cuba. That really hurt the people.

Absolutely. It's a case of one government harming its own citizens and the citizens of another country to spite the government of said country.

Fuck Castro, but the embargo doesn't hurt Castro at all. It just makes people living under an already horrible regime have a little bit more shittiness in their lives.

 

[DevilRedeemed]

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

jesus fuck.
I personally think ideology of any sort is potentially dangerous. it is also potentially beneficial.
I'd rather not fight with you, I just think you make a lot of sweeping statements.
also maybe in an attempt to swerve off the road I may have made a claim which appears ridiculous - what I wanted to get across is that the method of production we have concocted has helped us a great deal with regards to benefitting much of the general populace worldwide.
when I say there is nothing inherently good about a manufactured product I'm not saying it as a criticism, I'm only stating the obvious. I think the idea of progress as heralded during the enlightenment period is not good nor bad - I don't think it should be defended beyond it's observable merits. to often, in the name of civilization and progress, we have done very stupid and/or evil things.
what I mean is - socialism, communism, capitalism - there is nothing essentially good or bad about any of these systems. at the root of it, there is an attempt to make human life better - if it works or not is a different matter - but I don't see the sense of making sweeping statements about any of it.
to say Nazism is a form of socialism - and so socialism is potentially evil and dangerous - is a stretch in my opinion. I see some of what you mean, but I think there is definitely room for contextualization.
I said I was somewhat opposed to industrialization which was a ridiculous thing to state - I wanted to say that many of the disputes we have - many of the ideas of what is good and what is bad - is constructed on the platform that industrialization is invariably necessary or unquestionably 'good'.
I am just wanting to point out that the current form of industrialization we have - the model that is still relatively young - may give us a skewed view of ourselves, our reality. industrialization the way it has been up to now needs for us to extract and destroy, process, consume and discard. it is sustainable to a point.
also the growth of human population is a problem, can that be denied?
maybe I was unreasonable in how I worded what I said up to now, I'm not a pacifist in the hippie sense but I definitely feel we all need to work together to sort our shit out - and that means being honest and putting aside our indulgences. I'm not procrastinating, and I won't cast the first stone by any means. but it seems clear to me that we have made a big mess for ourselves, and the only way out would seem to be to consume with our eyes closed until we've tunneled out.
I don't have many answers but I'm at least looking for the right questions to ask. and I'm saying all this as a point of view, my own, something I am sharing.
apologies for being so rude