And I do not mean rich people who are in the upper 10% of income, it favours the ultra rich for whom a $100,000 political donation is pocket change.
At a local level money, gerrymandering and propaganda make it impossible to elect politicians who give a fair representation of people's interests. And with a two party system, it's more than likely that both of them fail to represent their policy preferences to begin with.
It frightens me that people are so easily manipulated and exploited.
We need to realistically acknowledge the problems and work toward solutions. Not throw up our hands and give into injustice. The solution to democratic revival is citizen engagement, not despair and fatalism.
Let’s take these two separately. As to money: the evidence shows money isn’t buying results. Wall Street and Silicon Valley strongly supported Clinton in 2016. She outspent Donald Trump by 70%: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/trump-and-cl... ($340m to $581m). But Clinton lost.
Within the Republican Party, billionaires billionaires wanted someone other than Trump: https://fortune.com/2024/02/26/ken-griffin-koch-brothers-rep.... But he’s going to win the primary.
More generally, the donor money in US politics supports globalization/free trade, and mass immigration (for cheap labor). The money is losing that battle not just in the US, but in Europe too.
The problem in U.S. politics right now is that Internet-based donor networks have eliminated the ability of large donors (and institutions) to control the candidates.
As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect? Do you have a numerical estimatr in your head of what the party split would look like in Congress if there was no gerrymandering?
For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
I'm curious as to where you are seeing unrestricted donations. I'm also curious as to the reasoning by which you think this would undermine democracy, given that the election result is still being determined by the voters, and the candidates seek money primarily to use in their attempt to persuade voters.
> Only individuals are allowed to donate to political campaigns, and the FEC sets maximum contribution limits per individual that are far below $100,000.
> For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
It's pretty obvious he probably wasn't referring specifically to hard-money campaign donations, but referring to the post Citizens United situation. That's pretty clear, if you don't read the comment pedantically and over-literally.
So a rich guy can give unlimited amounts to a candidate's Super PAC, an those have ways around the restrictions on coordinating with the campaign itself.
SuperPACs, one of the main engines of US spending on politics.
There's no one stays clean in the Beltway.
The world is of course actually messy and not b&w, but that fact doesn't change that.
It's like saying that killing is wrong, but sometimes we still have to kill. Yes we do, and killing is still wrong. If you kill someone, it's not because "humans are messy". Oh humans are just imperfect and sometmes you just kill your neighbor, it just happens, no way to avoid it. If you actually want to get anything done you can't be so aspberger absolutist and figure out how to work WITH the neighbor killers.
UBI would turn it into a real, consensual market.
No doubt people benefiting from the status quo do not want change.
How did concentrating extreme amounts of wealth work out for the French and Russian royalty?
Furthermore, how did it work out for their nations economically?
First, to bring every reader up to speed, basic income (or UBI)...
Note also that the word citizens is used on the Wikipedia page.
I have a feeling the US will manage to bungle that too.
If you don't like that, you better vote in the next election.
On the other hand it would be nice to know what happened with all of the Covid checks since that also was given to many, but again hardly universal.
I think the main criticism against UBI is inflation and I haven’t seen any reasonable argument to why it wouldn’t happen.
A likely picture would be less money going into assets (where wealthy people money tends to end up) and more money going into consumables (where poor people money tends to end up). However the money pile should stay the same all else being equal.
Let's not overthink this. We don't need to pretend it's a mystery how UBI would play out. It's been commonplace for a century.
The worst possible outcome is the intended one: where UBI recipients spend it on essentials, and society adapts over time such that a large swath of the population becomes dependent on state-issued subsidies for basic sustenance.
This would create an entrenched concentration of "soft" power that gives centralized political institutions -- and by extension, the factions that control them -- an unprecedented level of top-down control over society, which will invariably leveraged for ulterior purposes.
wouldn't the people that the article is accusing of being against UBI, want this outcome?
sounds like if they want more control, they should be for UBI
Of course a lot of other money was spent (1 trillion in direct payments and income support respectively out of roughly 13 trillion in total new COVID spending). But I think giving out free money distorts markets in unpredictable ways.
And that wasn't even enough money for anyone to live on.
I think this needs to be solved before UBI has any chance of working.
You don't make double-digit inflation by giving people barely enough money to cover rent in most low-cost American cities.
EDIT:
Also, let us consider why these payments were necessary and why they had to be funded the way they were. They had to be funded by printing money because the US government is deep in debt and there hasn't been a real tax increase since George HW Bush killed his political career with one in 1992. There is no rainy-day fund for the American people, so the FRS had to make one, and quick, lest you have people in the streets in general revolt, which given that the George Floyd protests were around the same time, was a real risk.
The payments were necessary because the American economy is not only leveraged from top-to-bottom, but in fact requires a good chunk of the population be in a good amount of debt with no savings in order to maintain growth of the credit products that many financial institutions rely on for the production of value for their shareholders. If you had over a hundred million people suddenly not making money, it's like the 2008 financial crisis, except instead of mortgage-backed securities, this time, it's every kind of securitized debt.
There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same.
Yes, printing money wildly leads to inflation. Nobody is arguing that it doesn't. Giving the poorest members of society means the velocity of that money (or the M1 number) doesn't actually cause rampant inflation, as it stays in circulation because it is used quickly.
Giving 1.7 trillion largely to corporations who don't NEED it causes inflation. A corporation who sits on that cash (and then doesn't actually have to pay taxes on that cash, nor actually distribute it to employees) does cause inflation, because that's a whole lot of money just sitting around instead of flowing through an economy.
https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco...
> Global supply chain disruptions following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the rapid rise in U.S. inflation over the past two years. Evidence suggests that supply chain pressures pushed up the cost of inputs for goods production and the public’s expectations of higher future prices. These factors accounted for about 60% of the surge in U.S. inflation beginning in early 2021. Supply chain pressures began easing substantially in mid-2022, contributing to the slowdown in inflation.
https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...
> The causes of the housing supply crisis are widely understood. After the Great Recession, new home construction dropped like a stone. Fewer new homes were built in the 10 years ended 2018 than in any decade since the 1960s. By 2019, a good estimate of the shortage of housing units for sale or rent was 3.8 million. The pandemic-induced materials and labor shortage exacerbated the trend, however, as evidenced by the surge in rents and home prices in 2021.
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/cor...
> Corporate profits rose quickly in 2021 along with inflation, raising concerns about corporations driving up prices to increase profits. Although corporate profits indeed contributed to inflation in 2021, their contribution fell in 2022. This pattern is not unusual: in previous economic recoveries, corporate profits were the main contributor to inflation in the first year and displaced by costs in the second year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/08/excess-profits-of-big-firms-...
> “We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation,” the report said.
> The author’s analysis of financial reports from 1,350 companies listed in the U.K., U.S., Germany, Brazil and South Africa found nominal profits were on average 30% higher at the end of 2022 than at the end of 2019.
That's about how much those experiments are worth.
In the test, wealth is coming from outside the system to individual economic agents within it. Of course those agents become better off than others who are not granted this wealth. But a government does not create wealth by fiat; they take it through taxation to distribute and spend according to priorities (ideally) set through popular decisions. They cannot make the group as a whole objectively richer - schemes to try anyway through blanket money printing result in unwanted inflation.
What I would actually expect to happen, should UBI somehow be implemented, is an immediate capture of the extra wealth by the capital-owning class. It won't be used by the currently homeless to afford homes, because the day after it's announced, rent prices will shoot up by about 70% of the amount. You will still need a job to afford a place to live. Likewise all basic goods; food, fuel, education, all their prices will rise to consume the greater discretionary income that people have. You can't win the Red Queen's race. Speeding everyone up the same amount doesn't change their relative positioning.
True, it would make debts suddenly worth a lot less. The government could also choose to do so by fiat, but they are very unlikely to. It's not difficult to imagine why.
Worse, the expense of doing this - it would cost more than the federal budget in the USA, assuming everyone is given a modest $2,000 monthly - means that taxes would have to rise, making it harder for people to actually rise in economic status through productive labor. I can see, assuming that this state of being continues long-term (which I personally doubt it would), a permanent divide appearing in the economic strata in the population over this, between people lucky enough to own property at the time the UBI was implemented and those who weren't.
Despite the woe about wealth mobility that already exists (at the moment, people in the bottom quintile economically have a 40-60% chance to escape it[0]), it can always get worse. Ideas to fix it should not be judged based solely on their intent. UBI is a solution that is conceptually simple (there are poor people? just give them money!), politically easy (who doesn't like free money?), and absolutely rife with harmful second order effects. People change their behavior according to incentives - this is true both of the poor who historically have been the targeted beneficiaries of UBI tests, and the landlords and corporations that will change their policies to optimally harvest a new bounty if these policies were ever implemented more widely.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealt...
Communism is one big UBI. Everyone has something to do and everyone gets paid enough to buy basic goods and services even if sometimes some good and services become scarce. Communism proved it works, but it's not efficient. It means you have to choose between a somewhat stagnant society and a progressive society (not progressive in the political but rather technological sense).
For some this would be good. But for others not. Moreover, the government can dictate what it wants from you since you are beholden to it and don't have much mobility.
It seems likely that the article's assumptions about who is opposing UBI and why they are opposing it are erroneous. I personally oppose UBI for the reasons I described above, by my motivations have nothing to do with anything the article is talking about.
It's also possible that various factions are using positioning around UBI proposals as a proxy or as a tactic to advance other, more complex, political aims.
If you want UBI long term you would need to heavily tax the middle class - people who work a lot and provide value every day. This is what always happens with such programs and happened in my country as well (where the UBI was very limited to 125$/month and only given per child).
It's easy to point into "evil billionaires" and say to take for them but in reality you need to take a lot more from a guy who built his career for 15+ years and is now a doctor or a programmer or a small business owner. This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make.
> This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make.
In theory, on paper, without any fiddles. In practice... nah. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/forbes-400-pay-lowe...
"A study by White House economists released on September 23 found that the 400 wealthiest U.S. families paid an average income tax rate of just 8.2 percent from 2010 to 2018."
The corrupting influence of DC can't be avoided. You swim in the cesspool with the gators, you come out covered in crap.
The alternative is neo-feudalism.
However, the status quo reality doesn't fully reflect what you're complaining about, because the "ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital" is something that is distributed widely across society, with a vast plurality of institutions and communities, having varying and often opposing motivations, all having the capacity to independently develop their own capital.
Conversely, the political state is a single institution with structural incentives that converge toward a single set of objectives, and no, the electoral process is not a sufficient mechanism of accountability.
Effectively, what you are arguing for is taking the pattern that you find unfavorable in the first place, and putting it under the control of a single centralized monopoly with insufficient safeguards against abuse.
Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior restraint on speech.
Only when viewed over-literally. If you take a perspective akin to "duck typing," it's both.
But even if you're totally right, this whole digression on the term "campaign donations" is a nitpick that doesn't undermine the OP's point. Which was billionaires spending unlimited money on politics is anti-democratic (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is).
Further, the problem with unlimited campaign donations -- i.e. actual transfers of funds into the hands of candidates -- is that it creates a situation in which a given candidate might become materially dependent on a specific individual or organization to the point that it creates an entrenched quid-pro-quo relationship that would control the exercise of their duties in office.
But in this case, the complaint of "billionaires spending unlimited money on politics" doesn't describe an instance of that problem at all, because the money is being spent in an attempt to persuade voters, not create patronage relationships with the candidates themselves.
The elections are still up to the voters, and to describe people using their resources to publish their opinions in open discourse as "anti-democratic" is exactly backwards -- creating an apparatus that can preemptively restrict what political information voters are allowed to see is about as anti-democratic as it gets.
> (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is)
The closest thing to "one-party control of the media" being threatened here is a situation in which a state body (ultimately under the control of incumbent politicians) is allowed to preemptively curate what information may be distributed by the media. This is the exact thing that the Citizens United ruling put a stop to.
Legality aside, not considering donations people make to these single-candidate SuperPACs as just as much “campaign donations” for all practical purposes as those made to candidate committees is willful blindness.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/10-ways...
Can be said for UK, France at least. Current UK prime minister is basically a guy who was parachuted in after the previous nominee was couped by her own party, France massively reformed the pension system last year by using a legal hack. Germany we'll see where it is in a year.
> Large part of electorate to cheer it on
When parties that are "far-right" (as labelled by mainstream media) are above 20% in most countries sure seems like we are getting there (given that most of these parties like RN, AfD, Vox, etc are branded as anti-democratic/autoritarian).
>Gerrymandering and propaganda
I mean in France 2 of the biggest TV stations (BFM/Cnews) are billionaire owned and run a certain line. Same can be said in UK(Skynews). Germany has dark money campaigns exactly like the US, only you don't hear about them(because all the money goes to CDU/CSU).
>Two party system
I guess this is the European innovation, but with the concept of Brandmauer/Cordon Sanitaire you effectively have that any opposition party can be frozen out of government by the "establishment" parties.. I don't care that CDU/CSU and SPD are 2 different parties when they basically switch between each other for the last 20 years. Same thing was the case with PS/LR in France.
I am not familiar with Nordic countries, they are probably fine, but in the heartland stuff is not going in the democratic direction. And I didn't even mention countries like Poland, Hungary, etc.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1220443867/trump-s-rhetoric-i...
"Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their policy preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy."
"Still, the researchers hold that gerrymandering harms our democracy. “Elections are a way to hold politicians accountable for what their constituency wants,” said Kosuke Imai, professor of government and of statistics as well as leader of the ALARM Project research team, which uses big data and computational algorithms to study redistricting. “But if many lawmakers are in safe seats, guaranteed to win by a relatively comfortable margin, there’s less incentive to respond to what voters want."
There are different kinds of results.
There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets my favored politicians into office” which apparently isn’t working out too well.
There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets politicians to give me favors at the expense of their constituents” which unfortunately works very well.
And, there’s “Money being spent on campaigns gets politicians to favor laws that encourage donatory competition between big donators even if it is at great expense to everyone including their constituents” which is also going just swimmingly.
All of this is because politicians know that if they don’t play the asshole here, their competition will and they’ll end up with a large multiple of their campaign budget. And, that will put them out of office. A small difference like 2x might not work so well, but 10x certainly does.
Without gerrymandering the Republican party would have last controlled the House in 2007.
As long as we are talking about counter-factual political systems: If the US had a parliamentary system like most democracies, Republicans would have controlled the presidency for 8 of the last 16 years. Given their coalition of disaffected minorities and recent immigrants, Democrats benefit tremendously from the quirks of the US Presidential system, which lends itself to nationwide machine politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re...
Emphasis on this part
Essentially, the likelihood of a particular bill being passed doesn't matter at all on how many average citizens want it to pass. It does matter greatly, almost 100%, on how much the economic elites want it to pass.
Gerrymandering absolutely has an effect, and this has been well documented. Here, for example: https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2024/01/analysis-of-pr...
The point that directly elected executives give rise to different political dynamics is no less objective. Among those political dynamics is the feasibility of blasting a nationwide message that embodies the party in a person low information voters can relate to. That’s been a major enabler of Democratic machine politics aimed at immigrants. And these days, it’s an enabler of MAGA machine politics.
It’s quite different in Westminster style parliamentary statements, where people in different districts vote for different candidates.
Is it? It looks to me like they're exploiting loopholes, which is legal.
The article's from 2015, and I understand that stuff is still going on (e.g. Ron DeSantis's campaign and SuperPAC coordinating through open letters discussing strategy).
> against SuperPACs that engage directly as part of candidates campaigns.
Who said anything about "directly"? I've noticed you doing that a lot in this thread: missing the meaning, twisting it, then quibbling with your reinterpretation.
If this is actually happening, again, it's already illegal.
> Who said anything about "directly"?
The only thing the law applies to is behavior that directly violates precisely-mapped rules. I don't know what alternative you're proposing, other than to allow subjective, ever fluctuating criteria to determine who is and is not acting within the law -- if so, that is just not the way our society works.
The idea of allowing the state to preemptively control public discourse because some people might occasionally break the law and get away with it -- a risk with all laws in all cases -- is both based on a dysfunctional approach to law (that increasingly encumbers the general case to address worst-case outliers until the general case no longer functions), and also has the terrifying implication of allowing incumbent politicians to manipulate public discourse for their own factional benefit.
A politician with Trump's Reality Distortion Field is bound to arrive in Europe within the next decade or so, at which point it will be the same thing.
Would you be shocked to learn the inflation had a number of causes, including the vast COVID stimulus? I mean, your quote above attributes 60%, and that supply chain issues resolving "contributed" to inflation easing.
I'm for UBI if we can figure out how to implement it. We've experimented with it here in Canada. But handing people money has inflationary consequences, it's not rocket science. Otherwise, generic extreme argument: give everyone a billion and we all win.
> Otherwise, generic extreme argument: give everyone a billion and we all win.
No reasonable person takes this argument seriously. The discussion is "will providing for everyone's basic needs through UBI cause inflation?"
Try any economics textbook, and common sense. I couldn't care less what you believe. This stuff has been written about for 100 years, currency is susceptible to the laws of supply and demand like any other commodity; over supply affects prices.
>No reasonable person takes this argument seriously.
Oh, really? What's the right amount we should give to people then? Please bring data.
You sound like the MMT folks, who endlessly told us printing money didn't matter. Until it did. Then "real MMT has never been tried!"
Inflation was driven primarily by low interest rates, very generous financial support/relief(rent moratorium, student loan pause, bolstered and extended unemployment), and the ability for most white collar workers to keep on working from home.
Supply chain issues didn't help, but it's not even clear if 2019 supply chains would have been able to keep up with the insane consumer demand of 2021.
My citation is the Kansas City Fed in case you missed it.
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-review/how-m...
At heart, inflation is a mismatch between the real value of the economy and the currency placeholder used to represent that. This is why governments can (and need to) keep printing money as the economy grows.
Some printing may even lower prices because it allows production at scale to happen.
If you just print and just helicopter money you will have some inflation but this doesn't happen at scale significant enough to matter in any civilized country.
You are aware that the increase in money supply from 2020 to 2022 is about the same as the increase from 2010 to 2020, despite ~45% lower GDP growth?
Wouldn't that be in aggregate? So maybe some inflation for food and deflation for luxury yachts.
https://www.ippr.org/media-office/revealed-how-powerful-comp...
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/18/once-a-fringe-theory-greedf... ("In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on "profit margin-led inflation," describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn't really.)"
https://www.interest.co.nz/business/122533/paul-donovan-what... ("Paul Donovan on what profit-led inflation is, how it happens and how to combat it")
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/brainard202.... ("Retail markups in a number of sectors have seen material increases in what could be described as a price–price spiral, whereby final prices have risen by more than the increases in input prices."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/business/pepsico-earnings... | https://archive.today/RgxsB ("Price Increases Lead to Big Jump in Profit at PepsiCo")
Yeah of course corporations were racking in cash, so were consumers.
You are confusing the manifestation of inflation (rising prices) with the cause of inflation (more money on the table than hard value underneath it). Yes, rising prices perpetuate inflation (a price-price spiral as mentioned in the research), but the root cause of inflation was not corporations suddenly learning of this new tool called "raising prices". It was a reaction to the unrivaled level of economic stimulus pumped into the economy.
So yeah, allocation will lag a bit behind where the money is.
So if you take away their wealth you're transferring ownership and control from one group of people (who have managed and grown that productive asset) to another (randomly chosen). Naturally you would expect the productive assets to stop being so productive over time, kind of like what happens when a state expropriates businesses as if there is some magic in the walls of the building that generate value
> So if you take away their wealth you're transferring ownership and control from one group of people (who have managed and grown that productive asset) to another (randomly chosen). Naturally you would expect the productive assets to stop being so productive...
No. People who run companies very, very frequently do not own them outright or even have a controlling stake.
So even in an extremist toy model, where you "take away their wealth," you can still leave the existing manager in place or make the former owner a manager-employee.
You could even be very capitalist about it, and motivate the former owner to do a to do a good job as a manager, by making it clear that he will starve if he doesn't (that's how capitalism works for most people).
> Family businesses account for 64 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, generate 62 percent of the country's employment, and account for 78 percent of all new job creation.
https://www.familybusinesscenter.com/resources/family-busine...
If you give the rich more money, they're not likely to spend it on restaurants and merchandise and services: they can already afford as much of those as they want.
If you give money to people who couldn't afford them without the extra cash, though, you're artificially boosting demand, which would impact inflation.
No it isn't. The problem is that all these programs never actually end up redistributing wealth, but they always end up redistributing income, usually taken via higher taxes from the already shrinking middle class, leading to further deepening of wealth inequality.
As the super wealthy don't just have a public bank account with billions of $ under their own name, like your grandma, but have their wealth under various assets, entangled corporations, trust funds and non-profits, spread across various tax jurisdictions both on- and off-shore, making their wealth very difficult to track and tax correctly, plus gaming the financial system so that their companies are always billing each other for services till they're running at a loss, never seemingly generate any meaningful profits in their home "high-tax" jurisdictions.
FFS they have entire teams of well paid experts dedicated to these "tax optimization schemes", something the middle class and small business owners can never afford. THIS IS WHY WE HAVE WEALTH INEQUALITY, not because some middle class people earn higher wages after busting their asses in school and university. Just look at IKEA's elaborate tax dodging scheme. [1] Why can't he pay Swedish taxes like all Swedish businesses?
[1] https://www.greens-efa.eu/legacy/fileadmin/dam/Documents/Stu...
Report it and have it taxed. A private company can land a rover on the moon but we can't perform ETL operations on asset reporting?
Our system is far from perfect but I believe history shows that communism is even worse.
I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have.
The problem is most likely the new system would not end up favoring the same winners of the current system, hence there's no desire to ever change the status quo, so we have the communist system as a perpetual boogieman to discourage any other systems being trialed as if that's the only other option.
That isn't an obvious conclusion. To the extent the current system is one, improving it with such an approach doesn't account for:
- It having too many parts to understand without resorting to highly lossy models.
- Its non-features being far more impactful than its features.
Even the US has had outright state-sponsored corporations at times (Springfield Armory etc) and it’s fine. The Manhattan Project literally won the war, alongside collectivization of the economy for war production.
Collective worker ownership of the means of production is extraordinarily normalized in Germany (and a frequent source of conflict with US politicians who solicit automaker facilities in anti-labor locales) as well as other european countries (Husqvarna Vapensfabrik, Royal Dutch Shell Company, etc). There is no particular slippery slope here, some companies operate for centuries like this.
The communistic nature of kibbutzim in israel were/are also extraordinarily successful.
These things generally are good for workers and bring equality and stability to their countries. You just have to get past the trite third-grade "communism is actually bad" soundbyte (and the tendency to funnel anything that's mildly pro-worker into the "communism" bucket of course).
And remember, there's plenty of Pinochets and Suhartos and Malaysian juntas to go around for all political systems. Just like there are also plenty of inefficient capitalist organizations too - capitalism is not a magic wand for efficiency either.
In fact when you get down to it... corporations are really their own small little centrally-planned economies and dictatorships. And if they become too large to fail you get exactly the same failure modes as state corporations etc. Boeing might as well be a soviet OKB for all it matters. What, precisely, is the value or merit in quibbling over such a distinction?
Human societies surviving the next century is going to require a great deal of collectivism and cooperation, let alone the obvious internal problems with social equity. But people still think “but communism is bad” (by which they of course mean anything from German cooperatives to Stalinism) is the height of political discourse like they’re in a Fox News primetime special lol. Like, they got you real good didn’t they?
I think it's also something of an X-Y problem... people identify with "capitalism = rugged individualism" and don't realize that Boeing siphoning taxpayer dollars for airplanes the doors fall off of, or pinochet giving citizens "helicopter rides" or suharto burning citizens alive in barrels or the world's most repressive prison system is just as much a feature of capitalism as OKBs or the gulag archipelago or stalin's purges were a features of communism. Because those are orthogonal problems, those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization.
But "communism bad" - thank you so much for that contribution to the discourse! Nobody's ever said that before! /s
> those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization
Communism requires authoritarianism. It's inherent to operating system. When you take resources from some and distribute to others, who, exactly, does the taking and giving?
Monoculture micro-communities like kibbutz don't show anything. Nation-states are diverse groups of hundreds of millions with competing beliefs, values, and goals. Communism cannot serve these diverse interests. It requires a group of authoritarians that choose from whom to take and whom to give and the abject suffering of many is the result, every time. There is no freedom or liberty, that's by design. It's a failure with disastrous consequences.