pokermind wrote:CCCP or Union of Soviet
Socialist Rebublics
NAZIs officially the German
Socialist Worker's Party
Shows the Twentieth Century European definition of socialism differs, and has led to confusion
Poker
That is incorrect. The "National Socialist German Workers' Party".
"Nationalsocialist". That has as much to do with socialism as democracy and republic had to do with the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany.
Daryl wrote:Classic communism has been proven to be a failure as modern systems are too complex to be detail managed centrally, and there is no incentive to excel. A supposedly true story of the communist Soviet Union was that chandelier factories were lumped in with other industries that were judged on the weight of their output, and thus produced impractical cast iron light fittings.
Beds, not chandeliers(that i KNOW of at least). It didn´t start like that though, they started with very decent wooden beds, but then there were problems with corruption, so the beds kept getting lighter and lighter because material was sold on illegally.
So the counter was to start using weight as a measure of quality. Which eventually led to the cast iron monstrosities.
However, noone has really PROVEN "classic communism" as a failure, because any system will fail when corruption is handled poorly, or when economics is handled badly overall.
And seriously, have you ever tried running any kind of realistic economic simulator on USSR? Do try it before you say communism failed, because achieving the industrial expansion that happened historically 1920 to 1940 is literally
insanely difficult.
And after the extreme devastation of WWII, well try a simulation running with pure capitalism and by 2015 you will have an economy like the mid 60s at best.
Central planned economy is extremely effective for SOME very limited things, like massive expansion and reaching specific goals, it´s just very poor at keeping up a "nice" economy that people in general will like the results of longterm when there is no good reason not to have all the "good things".
The idea that it must be inflexible is also a myth, because that´s the fault of those giving the orders, a planned economy is in fact potentially more flexible than a market economy(for example, there is never a lack of resources for a new venture, if the venture has been decided on, resources can be made available nearly instantly).
The usual problem is that neither politicians nor planners have much direct input in what they should make the economy do.
As a comparison, it would be like having democracy having an extra layer in between election results and who ends up in parliament. IF that extra layer works well, then it can function extremely well, but achieving that is not a defaultprobability.
