pudge's Journal: Happy International Communism Day

I celebrate International Communism Day by working to earn money that I might provide for my family.

Update: Hugo Chavez celebrates it by seizing private property.

Update: A protestor to legalize illegal immigration in the U.S. is celebrating it by flying a U.S. flag upside-down live on CNN.

May Day! May Day! We're going down! May Day!

[RailGunner]

I think there's probably a reason why International Commie Day shares a title with a well known distress call...

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[Talinom]

I wish I had mod points. Then, however, would be the dilemma of should it be funny, insightful, or informative.

Dude, you know

[buffer-overflowed]

This is now Loyalty day. The white house confirms it. I'm not kidding [whitehouse.gov].

Who the hell in the press office thought:
A. That calling something loyalty day was a good idea. Did they not run it by a stoned high school kid on 4/20 after a protracted history class on facism and communism?
B. Thought that May Day, with all of it's communistic connotations, was a good day for the afforementioned Loyalty Day.

I swear, they're just fucking with us now.

That press release was my WTF moment of the year. Seriously, why n

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[buffer-overflowed]

Damn, can't edit. Re-reading it, it may have been the congress that failed A and B. Whatever. Same stupid shit, different branch of government. Still worthy of derision.

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[pudge]

I had not heard of it before ... it was passed in the 50s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_Day [wikipedia.org]

So Bush is the one who decided to revive it.

You realize don't you

[NeMon'ess]

Under communism's value system, seizing private property for the ideal benefit of everyone is a good thing.

Venezuela increased control of the oil projects. For the workers, yesterday their boss was ultimately Chevron, today it's Chavez. They'll keep working, but in theory now the oil and profits will more directly benefit the State and the people in it. In theory it doesn't sound so bad.

There are successful Kibbutzim in Israel, despite being socialist communes.

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[pudge]

Under communism's value system, seizing private property for the ideal benefit of everyone is a good thing.

Of course. And I think that is nonsense, and borderline evil.

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[jdavidb]

They'll keep working, but in theory now the oil and profits will more directly benefit the State and the people in it. In theory it doesn't sound so bad.

Of course the theory was refuted in the early twentieth century. Socialism doesn't just "work on paper, but fail in practice." It doesn't even work on paper. You cannot solve the problem of efficiently allocating scarce resources with centralization.

Another huge problem here is conflating the state and the people, which you don't quite do, but come close. Of course, we do that, here.

Benefiting the government practically never benefits the people, at least not compared to the unseen results they wo

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[NeMon'ess]

You cannot solve the problem of efficiently allocating scarce resources with centralization.

Has anyone tried lately?

Consider that Walmart apparently has an excellent predictive inventory system. Computing power organizes data from thousands of stores and suppliers, then gets more product to the stores that need it most.

We can argue over how efficient centralization can be compared to the free market, but I bet we can agree Soviet Russia's Five Year Plans would have gone much better if they'd had Walmart's

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[pudge]

We can argue over how efficient centralization can be compared to the free market, but I bet we can agree Soviet Russia's Five Year Plans would have gone much better if they'd had Walmart's computing power, data gathering, organization, and inventory prediction capabilities.

Can we also agree that the cost to liberty, apart from being entirely anathema to the American way of life embodied in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, supercedes issues of efficiency?

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[NeMon'ess]

With respect to scenarios in which the state owns everything, yes I agree with that statement.

I don't necessarily agree with respect to socialized medicine, OSHA, and some regulations that interfere with efficiency and liberty, but are there for well meaning reasons.

In Venezuela, suppose the government had bought out the oil companies' investments. Paying them for the money sunk into the projects thus far. The companies would come out of this breaking even, except for the opportunity costs. Venezuela cou

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[pudge]

apart from being entirely anathema to the American way of life embodied in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence

Since basically all of the easily habitable land on Earth is spoken for by a country, where and how could a large group of socialists legitimately set up a national experiment?

You say that like it is my problem. :-)

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[NeMon'ess]

Well remind me, how does our Constitution allow for the People to scrap it? Pass an amendment declaring it null? Then a whole new one could be ratified?

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[pudge]

It is exceptionally odd to me that you would want to dissolve the Constitution in order to have less freedom.

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[NeMon'ess]

It would be exceptionally odd if I wanted to. I don't. It's simply a theoretical question.