Agreed, the whole reason I started out saying “The people who bitch communism or capitalism” is because it goes for any ideology.
For decades there’s been a push in the US to make people feel like any political ideology other than the one we exist under is evil, especially the dreaded “socialism” and “communism.” They point out many people have died living under those systems and many of those governments have failed and try to make us feel like those systems are destined to fail and not worth considering.
But for the most part it seems that the examples they like to use most aren’t examples of anything going wrong due to the ideologies, but entirely because people corrupted and warped and abused them for their own benefit.
It’s the difference between economic theory/ideology and political reality. It wasn’t the ideology of “communism” or “socialism” that led to death and downfall, it was the political reality than instead of common ownership among all members of society, those at the top and in control of those nations lived as those at the top of our own do. There was never actually common ownership in reality, only on paper.
If you give someone control of anything with the goal of them managing distribution of it fairly among everyone as needed, that gives them loads of ways to corrupt it for personal gain. Adding in more people and overseers doesn’t help, because loads of humans are super easy to corrupt.
Economic theories and ideologies have never been the problem. The problem is always the political reality that loads of humans are kind of shit, and the more power and control over anything any human or group of humans has the more likely they become to use that for personal gain.
Agreed, the whole reason I started out saying “The people who bitch communism or capitalism” is because it goes for any ideology.
For decades there’s been a push in the US to make people feel like any political ideology other than the one we exist under is evil, especially the dreaded “socialism” and “communism.” They point out many people have died living under those systems and many of those governments have failed and try to make us feel like those systems are destined to fail and not worth considering.
But for the most part it seems that the examples they like to use most aren’t examples of anything going wrong due to the ideologies, but entirely because people corrupted and warped and abused them for their own benefit.
It’s the difference between economic theory/ideology and political reality. It wasn’t the ideology of “communism” or “socialism” that led to death and downfall, it was the political reality than instead of common ownership among all members of society, those at the top and in control of those nations lived as those at the top of our own do. There was never actually common ownership in reality, only on paper.
If you give someone control of anything with the goal of them managing distribution of it fairly among everyone as needed, that gives them loads of ways to corrupt it for personal gain. Adding in more people and overseers doesn’t help, because loads of humans are super easy to corrupt.
Economic theories and ideologies have never been the problem. The problem is always the political reality that loads of humans are kind of shit, and the more power and control over anything any human or group of humans has the more likely they become to use that for personal gain.