You are a typical brainwashed Western idiot. There was much more to life in the Soviet Union than dictatorship. As a matter of fact, you had more freedom there as you did not need the money to get decent education, unlike the U.S. Poor but talented kids from the countryside would routinely come to big cities and enroll in major universities to have great careers.

Before someone jumps up with "counterexample," I am sure you could dig up a few such cases in the U.S. These cases are few and far between, and require a great amount of planning ahead or dumb luck. In the Soviet Union, it happened much more often; they actually had large quotes for children of workers as opposed to privileged classes.

Source: Grew up there.

>>In the U.S. the "right" actually proposes reducing government power and, to the extent it actually does so, thus opens greater opportunities for those who are not yet wealthy.

>>As government power increases and it regulates ever more minutely the opportunities for those who do not have wealth and/or political connections are diminished.

Both statements are non sequitur. Your logic is faulty.

Indeed, I always forget that I have the FREEDOM to be homeless, live under the stars with my wife and children, enjoy the nature, you know. Republican dream for working people.

>> I WORK for that agency

So, you are a repuglican saboteur troll that takes public money and then badmouths the hand that feeds them.

The government needs to fire repuglicans that don't believe in the system, and hire more democrats who cares and gets things done.

The problem with the government isn't intrinsic, it's the scum that saboteurs the system on a daily basis and then walks around screaming how "it's not working". Get rid of the scum, hire decent people that believe in public good, and things work marvelously.

>> Capitalism is very effective in what it does

Pumping the money from the poor to the rich.

You are mixing things up, and you are incorrect. The plan was to take the Caucasus oil fields [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Caucasus], not Ural. There was no way Germans could take Ural in 1943, and there was no oil there anyway.

The real story is that Hitler needed to take Caucasus oil to keep his war machine running. He had to take Stalingrad to keep his flanks safe. Look at the map [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Eastern_Front_1942-05_to_1942-11.png]. It wasn't a detour, Hitler had to take Stalingrad to keep the front stable, and he failed. He failed due to his underestimation of Russian heroism and overestimation of Wehrmacht.

What you call "Central Planning" is also known as top-down design. It's a valid design method, it certainly works and is used regularly. Done properly, it produces cleaner designs than bottom-up alternative. You seem to argue for the bottom-up design to be the single correct method because it fits your right-wing ideology.

Amen to that.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

That's an empty soundbite. Just because something was done before in no way implies that a quite different thing can be done in the future. Society has advanced dramatically since crossing the Atlantic, and nobody will tolerate hundreds of lost ships and thousands of missing crew members. As far as expenses, surely, the private enterprise will spare no expense after governments around the worlds sink trillions in funding for fundamental science in technology for 50-100 years. Then the proud private entrepreneurs will bravely step forward, take all the risks (of which most have been already taken at society's expense), skim off all profits, and lecture the rest of us how "private enterprise" solves all problems.

>> Staying hungry by eating only about 70% of the calories you should normally eat, is currently the only method known that will increase your lifespan

That theory has been debunked. It appears to work for simpler animals like rats. However, a recent comprehensive study of monkeys showed that calorie restriction produced no meaningful difference in lifespan. Since humans are genetically closer to monkeys than rats, that's how it would likely work for us too. Healthier diet, on the other hand, did seem to make a difference.

The article has more info: http://www.myhealthwire.com/news/diet-nutrition/64
A link to actual study: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7415/full/nature11432.html

>>No one can predict exactly how long any given procedure will take on any specific patient.

Welcome to the real world. Guess what, doctors are not exclusive, many occupations are exactly like that. I used to do Tech Support and now software development. Both have huge variations in how long it takes to actually fix seemingly similar problems. In tech support, I got a couple easy calls which could be fixed in 2-3 minutes, but then a 30-60 minutes hell-call from an old lady with a screwed-up computer. Yet, management fully expected average phone call time to be under 10, preferably 5 minutes.

Same with software development. Some bug fixes can take 5 minutes, some 3 days. Adding a feature has the same variation, from minutes (when all data is available, and you just need to add display field) to days and weeks when the feature is entirely new to the system.

The other occupations manage with the average times set by bean counters. Doctors must as well.

"Informative" up your greedy overpaid "dentist" ass.

>> (Hint: It doesn't get fixed by bureaucracies like this and it doesn't get fixed by doing socialized medicine.)

You pulled your "hints" out of your ass; you should check if you have hemorrhoids there as well.
The fact is that most developed European countries as well as Canada have single-payer (a.k.a. by conservative dipshits as "socialized medicine") for decades. It's quite successful; most patients are happy, and, most importantly, the patients are utterly horrified when they hear about "free-market" pricing in the U.S.

Pfff, my soon-to-be-released Assembly program will put his slow ruby ass to shame, thus starting HFR (high frequency reservation) era and trading in reservation futures.

Submarine aircraft carrier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_aircraft_carrier