Stuff you just can't make up

The E wrote:It's quite breathtaking how you can take one part of a statement I made, write this whole rant, and ignore the rest of what I said.

That’s because I’m not talking about your fantasies, I’m talking about reality, and that is the only reality of communism there has ever been. More than a dozen countries were consumed by communism, and they all failed dismally. I’ll allow that some of them may have been started with Good Intentions — but they always wound up as impoverished brutal oppressive dictatorships. Every. Single. Time. You can't just wave that away. They had a hundred years to make communism better, but nobody ever did. In the end, the only improvement was its ugly demise.

The E wrote:Then find a post in which I say that soviet-style communism is what I want.

If there had been any exceptions to those uninterrupted failures, you might have some excuse for still Believing in communism, but there weren’t. All of the evidence is against you. You may be eager to show the world that your Communism Made Magically Perfect By Wishful Thinking is not like every example of communism we’ve ever seen, but where do you propose to run your experiments? Which more-or-less functional country should be turned into a test case for a political and economic system with a demonstrated failure rate of 100 percent? DON’T try it in my country, bub.

Here's a much better idea — take one of those failed communist states, and fix it. Now THAT would be impressive. Apply your Enlightened Communism, and show that it works. If you're right, it should be easy. At least you'd be unlikely to make things worse.

The E wrote:…incoherent…

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Actually, I’m damn sure it doesn’t. Persistently using words in ways inconsistent with their meanings is stupid.

And I do find it hilarious how, when I point out the hypocritical misdeeds of your precious leftists, the only response you can come up with is: “But — but — radical right-wing bigots do bad things too!!!”

Do you actually believe the sins of others somehow cancel out your own? Hell, by that standard, those bigots are innocent! At least they don’t try to pretend their intolerance is tolerance.
———————————
"Who's in the RABBIT?!"

Imaginos1892 wrote:That’s because I’m not talking about your fantasies, I’m talking about reality, and that is the only reality of communism there has ever been.

And?

The only reality of unfettered capitalism and liberalized markets is misery and poverty for the masses, and yet you defend it at every opportunity. You dismiss collective action out of hand, despite it making lives measurably better across the developed world; You defend this abomination of a society you live in all based on you, personally, living an okay (maybe even prosperous) life.

More than a dozen countries were consumed by communism, and they all failed dismally. I’ll allow that some of them may have been started with Good Intentions — but they always wound up as impoverished brutal oppressive dictatorships. Every. Single. Time. You can't just wave that away. They had a hundred years to make communism better, but nobody ever did. In the end, the only improvement was its ugly demise.

The thing is, the only lesson you're taking from this is that communism cannot work, ever. Personally, the lesson I am taking away from it is that a communist revolution, led by a "vanguard party" of some description, will inevitably fail. However, introducing communist policies slowly, organically, so that people can see the benefits, does work rather well.

The thing is, you are mistaking what I would want to see with what I am willing to settle for; At this point, I am willing to settle for a system that defangs capitalism so that it can get back to a point where its strengths are working for us instead of the few.

If there had been any exceptions to those uninterrupted failures, you might have some excuse for still Believing in communism, but there weren’t. All of the evidence is against you. You may be eager to show the world that your Communism Made Magically Perfect By Wishful Thinking is not like every example of communism we’ve ever seen, but where do you propose to run your experiments? Which more-or-less functional country should be turned into a test case for a political and economic system with a demonstrated failure rate of 100 percent? DON’T try it in my country, bub.

*sigh*

This is what I mean by incoherent ranting. I asked you to dig up posts by me where I advocate for the specific things you are railing against, and the above is the result.

I wonder what your response to this will be. Maybe a recipe for cheesecake?

Here's a much better idea — take one of those failed communist states, and fix it. Now THAT would be impressive. Apply your Enlightened Communism, and show that it works. If you're right, it should be easy. At least you'd be unlikely to make things worse.

I have a better idea, I'll make my own country more socialist, given that that's actually something I can work on.

The E wrote:…incoherent…

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Actually, I’m damn sure it doesn’t. Persistently using words in ways inconsistent with their meanings is stupid.

When I call your rants incoherent, I am specifically referring to how disconnected they are from what I was talking about, how they seem to contain very little original thought and are often made up of regurgitated talking points.

And I do find it hilarious how, when I point out the hypocritical misdeeds of your precious leftists, the only response you can come up with is: “But — but — radical right-wing bigots do bad things too!!!”

Again: Find a post by me in which I dispute, in any shape or form, that previous attempts at communism were a failure.

Do you actually believe the sins of others somehow cancel out your own? Hell, by that standard, those bigots are innocent! At least they don’t try to pretend their intolerance is tolerance.

They do not. They do, however, provide perspective.

The award for intellectual idiocy and intellectual dishonesty goes to the Ostrich Fuhrer aka TheE. I still hear him crying and screaming behind the woodshed. It's almost like he is enjoying the pain.

I do believe that there is a definition mistake here.
The E calls a system "communist" that most else would call "democratic socialist", while Imaginos is referring to totalitarian regimes that claimed to be communist.
Both are holding extreme interpretations of the word. Certainly unbridled capitalism leads to situations like Russia where about 100 people hold 90% or more of the wealth, and even the USA has an abhorrent concentration of wealth at the top end.
I do note Imaginos saying "Which more-or-less functional country should be turned into a test case for a political and economic system with a demonstrated failure rate of 100 percent? DON’T try it in my country, bub." and regard that as a testosterone fueled chest beating threat. Who the hell is trying to implement communism in your country, and what would you personally be able to do to prevent it?

The E wrote:The only reality of unfettered capitalism and liberalized markets is misery and poverty for the masses,

The reality of capitalism is — every major scientific and technological advance since the 16th century. Capitalism drove the Industrial Revolution, which transformed luxuries previously reserved for royalty into commonplace conveniences available to everybody, and introduced new wonders no one had ever imagined before. The computer you’re using to condemn capitalism is a product of capitalism.

The E wrote:You defend this abomination of a society you live in all based on you, personally, living an okay (maybe even prosperous) life.

‘Abomination of a society’ huh? Here we see on display your rabid monomaniacal hate for capitalism, more extreme than anything you have accused me of showing for communism. I can smell the hypocrisy from 8,000 miles away.

What, exactly, is this capitalism that you hate so much? It is really a very simple principle: that your labor, and the money you are paid for it, are YOURS BY RiGHT and can not be arbitrarily taken from you. You can buy anything you want with your money, and those things can’t be taken from you either. If you save up your money and start a business, that is YOUR business, to run as you see fit. To succeed or fail, depending on how well you run it. The profit you make is YOURS.

If you do not have property rights, do you have any rights? If your labor belongs not to you, but to the state, are you any more than a slave?

The law, and the government, exist to prohibit anyone from unjustly depriving you of your money or property, and you from depriving them of theirs. The government’s place is to regulate, to prohibit abuse, not to control. To define crime, arrest and punish criminals. To defend the country from foreign enemies and invaders. Those are the ‘enumerated powers’ set forth in the Constitution which defines this nation.

The ‘income inequality’ denounced by leftists as an unspeakable sin, so self-evidently evil that there is no need to explain why it is evil, is a productive economy’s greatest strength. The fact that you can study, learn, practice, improve yourself and make more money provides the best incentive to do so. Why would anyone put in the time and effort to learn the complex and difficult skills required to maintain our technological civilization without the expectation of some tangible, personal reward? Far too many do not bother, even with the rewards. They seek to loaf along in a career of unskilled labor, and expect to get the same rewards as the people who did do the hard work, improved themselves, and earned them.

Some won’t even do that, and expect to be given those rewards for doing no work at all.

Capitalism does need to be regulated. In this country there are parasites that do nothing productive and take inordinate amounts of money from the economy. Stock manipulators, financial ‘managers’, crooked lawyers, etc. The government protects them, instead of punishing them, because they make huge political ‘donations’. It’s a problem, and the government is part of the problem. Condemning the entire principle of capitalism, nationalizing everything and turning control over to the government will NOT make it all better.

If my car has a flat tire, I fix the tire. I don’t scrap the car. I certainly won’t replace it with an outrageously expensive car that looks shockingly unsafe and has never been successfully road-tested.

The E wrote:The thing is, the only lesson you're taking from this is that communism cannot work, ever.

I go by the evidence and examples of failed communist states everybody has seen over the last hundred years. Do you have any examples of successful communist states to present? Any actual evidence that yet another experiment in communism would fulfill the grandiose promises that were made for every one of those failed states?

The E wrote:This is what I mean by incoherent ranting.

You don’t get to redefine the meanings of words, unless you are only talking to yourself. Look up the actual meaning, and use it properly.

The E wrote:I asked you to dig up posts by me where I advocate for the specific things you are railing against, and the above is the result.

You are trying to evade the point, which is that EVERY example of communism we have ever seen has resulted in those ‘specific things I am railing against’. You have not put forth one word to show how ‘your’ version of communism would be any different, why it really, really would bring about The Workers Paradise.

Here are some more definitions you should know, and not misuse. An an idea that has been tested repeatedly, in multiple ways, and has never failed is called a theory. An idea that has never been tested is nothing more than wishful thinking. An idea that has been tested, and failed, is a discredited theory. Like communism.

So, have your ideas been tested? Where, when, and how? What were the results?


Everything you post is all about order imposed by the government. Every aspect of life must be safe, and predictable, and ‘taken care of’ by the government. You want the government to control employment, housing, education, health care, trade, travel, mass media, the internet, phone service and the economy. Nothing must be allowed to challenge the all-powerful state. You are opposed to religion, corporations, people who have ‘too much’ money, and of course all those peons who must not be allowed to own guns for their own defense. Everyone must be dependent upon the government for everything, because they have nothing of their own.

How can there be a free and independent press when the government owns their tools, and all means of communication? Pravda, anyone?

To me, your statist utopia sounds like the kind of order found in an ant-hill. I don’t want to be an ant, or live in an ant-hill.

I am not so fond of imposed order. Indeed, I celebrate the glory of disorder — the immense power of creativity unleashed by millions of different people doing different things in different ways, just because they want to. The discoveries and achievements made by people who had an idea and persevered despite everybody telling them they were wrong. Sometimes they are wrong. Their ideas fail, and we all learn something. Sometimes they are right, and we all benefit.

If some crackpot wants the government to spend time and money developing an idea that ‘everybody just knows’ is crazy, it ain’t gonna happen. In a capitalist society the crackpots can spend their own time and money, or convince people to voluntarily invest their money, and find out if, just maybe, that idea is not so crazy after all, and something amazing comes out of it.

Capitalism allows us to try many more possibilities than collectivism. We discard the failures, and benefit from the successful ideas. It’s dynamic stability through diversity, rather than static stability imposed by fiat.

When something goes wrong in a capitalist society, it can be corrected. One corporation, one rich and powerful individual, is only a small part of society and can only do limited damage before they are stopped. In engineering terms, it’s a much more robust system than a collectivist society that concentrates everything into a single point of failure.

When a collectivist society’s one and only almighty government abuses its power, that society is in deep, deep shit. When they abolished private ownership, there went every counter-force capable of resisting an abusive government. There is no recourse, because nothing remains to oppose them. If any resistance does arise, those committing the abuse will act to eliminate any perceived threat to their power. As we have seen, over and over.

People will always be people. You don’t trust them to run those corporations you hate so much; WHY would you trust them to run a government with far more power? The same greedy sociopaths will seek that power, and being in the government will not make them better people. Indeed, it will afford them greater scope to exercise their greed.

Corporate executives do not have the legal authority to confiscate their employees’ money and property, deprive them of their rights, imprison them, or put them to death. Government officials have all those powers, and more. Many of them seem to believe that also gives them the moral right to impose their will on the serfs they rule.

If you don’t like your employer, you can quit and find another job. If you don’t like your landlord, you can move. If you live in a capitalist society, you can buy your own house, start your own business, and never have to deal with employers or landlords again.

The government gives you no choice. If you don’t like your government, tough shit. You can’t quit, and you can’t move out.
———————————
There is no shortage of people convinced they can create the perfect world. Trouble is, they always start out by fucking up the only one we have.

Imaginos1892 wrote:The reality of capitalism is — every major scientific and technological advance since the 16th century. Capitalism drove the Industrial Revolution, which transformed luxuries previously reserved for royalty into commonplace conveniences available to everybody, and introduced new wonders no one had ever imagined before. The computer you’re using to condemn capitalism is a product of capitalism.

Oh hey, look, I found a depiction of you!
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha

And the reality is both. Yes, capitalist systems have driven an unprecedented amount of change. We are now, collectively, more wealthy than at any other point in history, we're more prosperous, more healthy, happier. All of those things are true.

But, at the same time, we have handed off control over our lives in the name of liberating them. Where we had to bend the knee to feudal lords lest they send their thugs to rob and murder, now we have to bend the knee to the rich, lest they decide that our services are no longer required. It's infinitely more civilized, immeasurably gentler, but at least in the more untamed capitalist societies like yours, no less devastating.

The only way to reclaim a measure of balance is to collectivize. To use the tools of government to make sure that noone gets trampled into dust.

‘Abomination of a society’ huh? Here we see on display your rabid monomaniacal hate for capitalism, more extreme than anything you have accused me of showing for communism. I can smell the hypocrisy from 8,000 miles away.

I am not sure what else to call a society that thinks poverty is a moral failing. I do not have a better description for a system where the ultimate goal is to seek rent, to find a niche where everyone is forced to pay you for something essential.

What, exactly, is this capitalism that you hate so much? It is really a very simple principle: that your labor, and the money you are paid for it, are YOURS BY RiGHT and can not be arbitrarily taken from you. You can buy anything you want with your money, and those things can’t be taken from you either. If you save up your money and start a business, that is YOUR business, to run as you see fit. To succeed or fail, depending on how well you run it. The profit you make is YOURS.

On the surface level, all of those things are true.
But all of those things are true despite capitalism, not because of it; they are fixes and patches we've decided to apply to it, not things that are in capitalism's nature to seek.

Ask yourself this: Who, in a capitalist system, is the most efficient participant? What traits does such an actor have? Is it a person acting out of compassion, or someone acting purely in the interest of amassing more wealth?

What I hate about capitalism is that its most successful participants are utterly immoral and bereft of compassion and humanity. That it promotes a very blinkered worldview that is perfectly encapsulated in the phrase "Fuck you, got mine".

If you do not have property rights, do you have any rights? If your labor belongs not to you, but to the state, are you any more than a slave?

And this is where your ignorance comes into play. Under communism, you still have property rights. Your labor still belongs to you. What you do not have is the right to use your property to extract labor or wealth from others.

The law, and the government, exist to prohibit anyone from unjustly depriving you of your money or property, and you from depriving them of theirs. The government’s place is to regulate, to prohibit abuse, not to control.

And successful capitalists (including both actual humans and companies) spend an enormous amount of time and effort into making sure that your government creates an environment most favourable to them, instead of the actual people living in your country.

If this government was blind to the influence of the people with the money, you might have a point. But it isn't, is it? Instead of fair arbitration, you have a decidedly unbalanced system where 100000 USD of donations by one person weigh more heavily than 100000 donations of one USD by 100000 people.

To define crime, arrest and punish criminals. To defend the country from foreign enemies and invaders. Those are the ‘enumerated powers’ set forth in the Constitution which defines this nation.

So?

Remind me, does your justice system still punish possession of small amounts of weed harder and harsher than causing economical instability responsible for uncountable amounts of damage?

The ‘income inequality’ denounced by leftists as an unspeakable sin, so self-evidently evil that there is no need to explain why it is evil, is a productive economy’s greatest strength.

*Sigh*
Just so we're clear, I have never, in my entire posting history on this forum, offered an opinion on this matter. We're deeply in "What Imaginos thinks all lefties think" territory here.

The fact that you can study, learn, practice, improve yourself and make more money provides the best incentive to do so. Why would anyone put in the time and effort to learn the complex and difficult skills required to maintain our technological civilization without the expectation of some tangible, personal reward? Far too many do not bother, even with the rewards. They seek to loaf along in a career of unskilled labor, and expect to get the same rewards as the people who did do the hard work, improved themselves, and earned them.

Some won’t even do that, and expect to be given those rewards for doing no work at all.

I have literally never heard anyone actually say this, and I've been poor most of my adult life.

Capitalism does need to be regulated. In this country there are parasites that do nothing productive and take inordinate amounts of money from the economy. Stock manipulators, financial ‘managers’, crooked lawyers, etc. The government protects them, instead of punishing them, because they make huge political ‘donations’. It’s a problem, and the government is part of the problem. Condemning the entire principle of capitalism, nationalizing everything and turning control over to the government will NOT make it all better.

What you do not realize is that the people you think are bad actors here are the most efficient participants in the system. Their existence is a necessary consequence of capitalism; They found their niches in which they can safely sit and drain wealth from society.

If my car has a flat tire, I fix the tire. I don’t scrap the car. I certainly won’t replace it with an outrageously expensive car that looks shockingly unsafe and has never been successfully road-tested.

Fair enough, I wouldn't ask you to.
However, what about things that have been successfully road-tested? Things like socialized medical care, for example?

I go by the evidence and examples of failed communist states everybody has seen over the last hundred years. Do you have any examples of successful communist states to present? Any actual evidence that yet another experiment in communism would fulfill the grandiose promises that were made for every one of those failed states?

Full communism? No.

Heavily socialist policies? Yes. As evidence I present most of northern Europe.

You don’t get to redefine the meanings of words, unless you are only talking to yourself. Look up the actual meaning, and use it properly.

I'll do that once you demonstrate that you can actually understand the concept of private property versus ownership of the means of production.

So, have your ideas been tested? Where, when, and how? What were the results?

Socialized health care is a great success.
State-owned infrastructure works much, much better than privatized infrastructure.
Completely tax-funded education produces better results for a lower cost.
Several experiments testing universal basic income concepts have found a marked increase in the quality of life of all participants, with no drop in productivity.

All of these things are tested and proven (UBI admittedly less than the others). All of them are hallmarks of what I have in mind when I talk about an ideal society.

Everything you post is all about order imposed by the government. Every aspect of life must be safe, and predictable, and ‘taken care of’ by the government. You want the government to control employment, housing, education, health care, trade, travel, mass media, the internet, phone service and the economy.

This is why I asked you to dig into my posting history. Because I never said that. These are things you imagine I want.

I mean, it's true that I want more things to be government-controlled, but only because it's very apparent that some things shouldn't be run on a for-profit basis.

Health care is the big one. The goal of health care should be to keep people healthy and help them when they're not -- and nothing else. It shouldn't turn a profit, and yet, decades of management consultants with expensive MBAs have told us that everything must be streamlined as much as possible, to the detriment of the quality of care (and this is around where I live; the less said about the complete clusterfuck that is the US health care system the better).

For other areas you've listed, like education and telecommunications services, similar principles hold: These are areas where maximizing profits means degrading quality.

You say I want "the government to control employment". No, I don't. I want people to be free to spend their time how they want to, whatever that may be (within the confines of lawful behaviour, of course), without being forced to do something because not doing so would mean not having food, clothing or a home.

Nothing must be allowed to challenge the all-powerful state.

Could you stop putting words into my mouth, please.

You are opposed to religion, corporations, people who have ‘too much’ money, and of course all those peons who must not be allowed to own guns for their own defense.

In order:
Religion: I am opposed to it on personal grounds. I am not religious, and what I've seen of organized religion has shown far too much potential for abuse. Wouldn't dream of telling anyone to stop being religious though.
Corporations: Well duh.
"People who have too much money": When you have amassed so much wealth that governments start to warp around you, that's a bad thing.
gun owners: Go ahead, own all the guns you want. I don't care -- however, I will point out that gun ownership does not actually make you safe (only gun usage will do that, to a point), and that if you have to own a gun to feel safe when amongst other humans (or even just living next to them), something has gone terribly wrong.

Everyone must be dependent upon the government for everything, because they have nothing of their own.

More things you imagine about me. Yawn.

How can there be a free and independent press when the government owns their tools, and all means of communication? Pravda, anyone?

How can there be a free and independent press when corporations own the tools and distribution mechanisms?

I am not so fond of imposed order. Indeed, I celebrate the glory of disorder — the immense power of creativity unleashed by millions of different people doing different things in different ways, just because they want to.

Interestingly, one thing that the UBI experiments showed was that removing economic anxiety led to people pursuing a lot more creative things.
Similarly, not having mountains of student or medical debt does wonders for people's ability to try things.

The discoveries and achievements made by people who had an idea and persevered despite everybody telling them they were wrong. Sometimes they are wrong. Their ideas fail, and we all learn something. Sometimes they are right, and we all benefit.

Why are you so afraid that I might be even partially right, then?

If some crackpot wants the government to spend time and money developing an idea that ‘everybody just knows’ is crazy, it ain’t gonna happen. In a capitalist society the crackpots can spend their own time and money, or convince people to voluntarily invest their money, and find out if, just maybe, that idea is not so crazy after all, and something amazing comes out of it.

Except, no, they can't. Because people need to work to get the basic necessities for life. If you have the time to pursue some wild dream, that means that you have the money to do so.

Capitalism allows us to try many more possibilities than collectivism. We discard the failures, and benefit from the successful ideas. It’s dynamic stability through diversity, rather than static stability imposed by fiat.

You're again making a lot of assumptions.

When something goes wrong in a capitalist society, it can be corrected. One corporation, one rich and powerful individual, is only a small part of society and can only do limited damage before they are stopped.

Oh, is that what happened in the Great Depression?
Is that what happened in the recent crash?

In engineering terms, it’s a much more robust system than a collectivist society that concentrates everything into a single point of failure.

Only if the control mechanisms are kept clean and functional. Do yourself a favour and investigate the term "regulatory capture", would you?

When a collectivist society’s one and only almighty government abuses its power, that society is in deep, deep shit. When they abolished private ownership, there went every counter-force capable of resisting an abusive government. There is no recourse, because nothing remains to oppose them. If any resistance does arise, those committing the abuse will act to eliminate any perceived threat to their power. As we have seen, over and over.

People will always be people. You don’t trust them to run those corporations you hate so much; WHY would you trust them to run a government with far more power? The same greedy sociopaths will seek that power, and being in the government will not make them better people. Indeed, it will afford them greater scope to exercise their greed.

Now I'm curious how you are going to stop the greedy sociopaths?

Corporate executives do not have the legal authority to confiscate their employees’ money and property, deprive them of their rights, imprison them, or put them to death. Government officials have all those powers, and more. Many of them seem to believe that also gives them the moral right to impose their will on the serfs they rule.

If you don’t like your employer, you can quit and find another job. If you don’t like your landlord, you can move. If you live in a capitalist society, you can buy your own house, start your own business, and never have to deal with employers or landlords again.

Oh, so there's no way to fail under capitalism? Just buy a house, start a business, and you're done?

The government gives you no choice. If you don’t like your government, tough shit. You can’t quit, and you can’t move out.

I am genuinely curious why you think elections can't be a thing.

I find it interesting that the failure mode of communism, labor without prosperity, is an essential feature of capitalism.

I loved an anonymous quote from the old East Germany.
"We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

noblehunter wrote:I find it interesting that the failure mode of communism, labor without prosperity, is an essential feature of capitalism.

Moderation in all things.
The E has an impressive command of the English language for a German citizen, but I believe that he is missing a nuance here. To most English speakers the term "Communist" has totalitarian overtones, in that to make a truly collective system work you need strong government control over citizen's lives.
From what he has written my take is that he is talking about a Democratic Socialist system which is arguably the most effective system to date. The Scandinavian countries are the strongest along these lines, but Canada, New Zealand, the Western Europeans, and Australia are also examples.
International agencies like the IMF, Unesco, OECD, World Bank, and others play a game where each puts out a list of the most desirable countries in the world to live in. They use categories like - life expectancy, male/female equality, health and education services, crime levels, individual wealth and income, wealth equality, infant mortality, freedom of speech, safety, and quite a few more.
Because they all weight such items differently, the order changes between them, but the countries above are all high in the order. Being partisan I note that it is common for Australia and Denmark to battle for the top spot.
The US is usually around 25 to 30 on the list.
My take on the US is that it is the currently most powerful country in both economic and military terms. It is far preferable to most of the 190 countries, and its people are generally great people. From afar I wouldn't like its dog eat dog economy, limited health and education opportunities for the poor, gun culture, religious approach, or jingoism. But each to their own.

Please pass the gun oil because I have got to oil my gun! Daryl, he's upset because their are billionaire's out in the real world and he's poor.(His own words) Let's not pamper this snowflake too much! One problem, he is scared to go out and prove that his system of Communism will work. He plays the role of a victim rather than a man of action. Your right, he does have impressive English skills. (I wish I had those English skills!) Daryl, God Bless and have a nice day!

Daryl wrote:Moderation in all things.
The E has an impressive command of the English language for a German citizen, but I believe that he is missing a nuance here. To most English speakers the term "Communist" has totalitarian overtones, in that to make a truly collective system work you need strong government control over citizen's lives.
From what he has written my take is that he is talking about a Democratic Socialist system which is arguably the most effective system to date. The Scandinavian countries are the strongest along these lines, but Canada, New Zealand, the Western Europeans, and Australia are also examples.
International agencies like the IMF, Unesco, OECD, World Bank, and others play a game where each puts out a list of the most desirable countries in the world to live in. They use categories like - life expectancy, male/female equality, health and education services, crime levels, individual wealth and income, wealth equality, infant mortality, freedom of speech, safety, and quite a few more.
Because they all weight such items differently, the order changes between them, but the countries above are all high in the order. Being partisan I note that it is common for Australia and Denmark to battle for the top spot.
The US is usually around 25 to 30 on the list.
My take on the US is that it is the currently most powerful country in both economic and military terms. It is far preferable to most of the 190 countries, and its people are generally great people. From afar I wouldn't like its dog eat dog economy, limited health and education opportunities for the poor, gun culture, religious approach, or jingoism. But each to their own.