Comment by hylaride
2 days ago
> Today we effectively have the means to ensure the goods of society are evenly distributed as a baseline and we also have the means to effect that distribution
We arguably had the means even back then, but it obviously still failed and would likely fail again. Even in the west, hyper-rationalists took various forms (Keynesian economics, urban planning, etc), but it mostly ended up in failure.
The main issue is that there was and is not a static distribution or demand of goods. We can't just decide to give everybody 4 apples/week, etc. Even if we could, demands will always shift in unexpected ways. New products can shift demand in ways planners can't possibly foresee. A new apple desert could come, or people could just plain get tired of apples.
Right now the best and most successful mechanism we have is price signals. When it is said that communism failed because there were bad incentives, people assume that it was because there was no incentive to work hard. While this is somewhat true, the main issue was actually that planners and the whole communist economy could never rationalize supply and demand because they ignored price signals, meaning they often actually induced demands with artificially cheap prices, often resorting to rationing (either formal or de-facto in the forms of long lines).
Even worse, people were rewarded for hitting planning targets, even if the results (successful or not) were often not their fault. The result was people lied, making actual planning nearly impossible. A shoe factory would get bad leather, but make the shoes anyways, even though they fell apart sooner and then (outside of the plan) induced demand for new shoes. There are even stories of cab drivers lifting their cars and running it in reverse to continue working because they otherwise hit the "max" driving they were expected to do.
So "human nature" does in fact play a role, but not in the "I'm to lazy to work in communism" that most people think it is. Amazon doesn't evenly distribute anything, they have a highly sophisticated planning system that at the end of the day responds to price signals, either via bringing in more revenue or reducing costs.
So how is the Amazon-economy a more moral choice than communism?
This question is a false equivalency. Amazon is not an economy. Comparing the two, morally or otherwise, is a fools errand. It's like comparing the morality of a TV network versus an actor.
Amazon is an organization/corporation that participates in a market economy (mostly - I won't get into a details rabbit hole over regulation, monopoly, etc) that ultimately responds to price signals in chase of a profit motive and cannot use violence to force people to live within it. Maybe Bezos would like to be able to, maybe he wouldn't, but he can't either way. You can only realistically (morally) compare it to other companies.
Communism (as practised on earth so far) is a centrally planned economy backed by a coercive, centralized state that has a monopoly on violence to competitors, mostly ignores price signals, and usually uses violence against those that try to leave or access alternatives. You can only realistically compare it to other economic and/or government models.
It's not literal and I have a hard time believing you couldn't figure that out when I used 'amazon-economy' and not just 'amazon'. No less so in the context of a thread comparing capitalism (which was represented by Amazon's existence, in the thread) and communism, which is of course, the question you didn't answer in your response to the previous poster.
Frankly, explaining communism in your response is just rude, even disregarding how pointed it is. But maybe there is a trend in your responses seeing as how you refuse to actually compare the results of capitalism against the results of communism, as was asked in the post you responded to yet didn't answer the central question thereof, so I put it to you again. I guess you could not answer the question a third time, but I would not expect a response from me if you continue with this obtuse path.
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