Bourgeois pigs kill suicidal 16 year old boy.

[Ashock]

Perhaps you should go debate with all the social democrats and Maoists on youtube - you might fare a bit better vs them. This is too easy for me

It's easy because you're answering the questions you'd prefer to answer, and fluffing the ones that I actually asked.

Parsing your rant, I picked out everything I could find that actually described a policy (what we would actually *do* under Communism) rather than an outcome (how super awesome things would be under Communism).

I got to 7:

1) Private property will be expropriated completely.
2) Goods and services will be produced for human needs.
3) Nation states will be abolished.
4) Workers will be paid in “labour credits” according to hours worked.
5) The work week will be reduced to 3-4 days.
6) People can choose to work as much extra as they want.
7) Workers would rotate among jobs.

The largest problem is, of course, "who decides"? And who watches the watchers?

Private property is expropriated - who says how it is distributed? To whom are they accountable? Goods and services are produced for human needs, but which needs? Who decides what I need? How do they know? How are the needs of people in the present reconciled with the needs of people in the future?

Who determines how many "labour credits" are assigned for each type of work? Or how many hours need to be worked in each job, or in total? Or how workers "rotate" from job to job? There are hundreds of thousands of jobs, some extremely specialized. Surely it makes no sense to have skilled physicists spend a month making shoes, then a month waiting tables, then a month tasting teas, then a month in outer space, then a month teaching swimming to 5 year olds. But if that's not what you mean by rotation, then what do you mean?

Who determines how much to save vs. spend? How to invest in new forms of production? Or even how to organize existing ones? Who manages factories, shops, farms? How is the quality of their work assessed? How to manage risky ventures, or insure against unlikely disasters? Who decides where people live, and at what cost? Who decides how many "labour credits" will be created each year, and how will this be squared with the number of goods and services produced? What happens to someone who saves labour credits, rather than consuming them?

These are each questions which economists have been thinking about since before Adam Smith. Not a one of them is trivial. Any alternative system that throws out the entire apparatus of market exchange must, somehow, solve them. So far, every attempt has been a miserable failure, and all have either degenerated into utter oppression and poverty (North Korea) or simply re-adopted a market exchange system (China).

These are the *functional* questions - or, rather, a tiny subset of them. Ranting and raving about how there will be world peace and an end to racism and a 3 day work week does not solve them. And without not only a good solution, but a better one than we have today, there will be no peace, there will be no end to racism, and there will certainly be no 3 day work week.

-Jester

Afterthought: Glad we could keep this gentlemanly, and not descend into arrogant declarations of how brilliant we each are, and how the other should go debate youtube commenters.

Add to it the simple fact that without big time incentives, human beings tend to do just enough to get by. We would go stagnant almost immediately. iPad 4? In 30 years. Maybe. When there's no real answer to "What's in it for me", there is no "What's in me for it". I just thought of that one, btw. But it's true.

It's been tried before. People just don't give a rat's ass and they do just enough to not be branded "enemy of the people". Often enough, they spend most of their work time just thinking of how to beat the system to not be branded "enemy of the people". This often involves pointing a finger at a REAL enemy of the people. Well, at least better them than us type of enemy of the people.

Jester, you and I pretty much never see eye to eye. However, while I do not agree with pretty much most if not all of your views, I do not think that you are a fool. So why do you argue with one?