It’s a nice idea, and makes for interesting conversations like this one.
Some did. I think they are the minority. The ‘thieves’ aren’t the majority either, although it must be pointed out that theft is a tricky concept to people wealthy enough to rewrite the laws in their favor. Most wealth is inheritied. Always has been, likely always will be. As for earning it, I am frankly mystified by the compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars for CEOs who have been by all conceivable standards, dismal failures, costing their companies billions in mismanagment and frequently destroying the jobs and pensions of their lower paid employees. Is that earning it? Smells a little more like stealing to me.
“Profit is the difference between what an employee earns and what the company pays him.”
- somebody
Behind every great fortune there is a crime. Honore de Balzac.
That’s a fairly ignorant as well as factually incorrect statement.
more money, I can see the apeal.
Please don’t be obtuse. Of course some wealthy people come by their money honestly, but as has been pointed out, what is theft can be a problematical concept when the people doing the stealing have a lot to say about what laws get written.
Currently we have a lot of corps and wealthy people who are paying no, nada, zip taxes (see the book “Perfectly Legal” for a complete explanation). CEOs make millions while their companies fail. Stockbrokers offer favored companies sweetheart deals on lucrative IPOs while the average investor gets no chance to get in on them.
Oh, there’s a lotta shit going on, and your “So everybody who is wealthy is a thief?” line cuts no ice with me.
An almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
We do have a communistic system in the USA-it is the federal bureaucracy. It employs millions of people who produce almost nothing, and get rewarded with high salaries. It “allocates” resources (see Federal Dept. of Education) with often disastrous results. It is neither accountable or responsible, and cannot be gotten rid of. It adheres to to marxist doctrines (“to each according to his needs”), and causes an overall reduction in wealth. State governments are a lot like it too.
I got news for you.
Corporations Do Not Pay Taxes. Period.
They may file a return, and they may right a check, but ALL COSTS of business is passed along to individuals, in the form of increased prices, reduced salaries, or reduced dividends to shareholders. So this windfall profit tax they wanted to pass to fine the oil companies would have done nothing to hurt the oil companies.
Sorry, most wealth in America is not inherited, it is earned. And don’t show me Paris Hilton. She’s the exception.
It’s a bit of a cliche to say that communisim works in theory. I have seen no proof that it does.
Communism can work in some situations. It even works here in America.
Consider the average family; what’s their economic model? Is the amount spent on individual family members based on how much they produce for the family? No, family members are given according to their needs and produce according to their abilities. And other than the occasional “It’s not fair that I always have to wash the dishes. Why can’t Billy do it?” and “How come Jessie gets a cell phone just because she’s older?” and “You kids have to learn to pick up for yourself. I’m not the maid.” the system works.
The problem is you can’t scale the policy up to a larger level.
Really? Watch this: Communism works. There, that’s a theory and, while it’s a little thin on details, it clearly shows communism works.
The question isn’t whether communism works in theory, it’s whether it works in reality.
I’ve seen it work on a slightly larger scale, but only in communities where people are free to leave when it doesn’t work for them, and where people can be asked to leave if they aren’t pulling their weight. On a larger, closed scale where you have to take the bad with the good, I don’t see how it’s practical.
Okay, now we have to define wealth. I was looking for some statistics on this and ran across some cock and bull essay on how a single mother barely able to feed her children is officially part of the top 20% of ‘wealthy’ in this country if she has her mortgage mostly paid off. I am talking about WEALTH, to the tune of ‘could never spend it all in a single lifetime, one year allowance for a Saudi prince’ type wealth.
Assume we have one individual earn a billion dollars. Even with a generous philanthropic bent, it’s likely he will be leaving most of that to his kids. Say ten-twenty million apiece. That kind of money is self-perpetuating. It actually makes more money just sitting around, so it’s a safe bet that at least three or four generations later, this family will still be what I consider rich. So even if the original ‘earner’ of this fortune only had one child, and their child only had one child, who had one child, that’s three people who inherited a fortune rather than earning it. And before you ask if someone can’t earn their fortune after inheriting millions in the first place, my answer would be NO.
I agree. I don’t think many people actually use the word “theory” which communism the way that the word is used scientifically. Naive, delusional brain-spark is a more accurate term. Communism isn’t much of a theory if you a have to suspend the laws of human nature, economics, and information theory just to get started with it. Count me as one who is thankful that communism does not work. Let’s say that it did and their was a thriving communal enclave right down the road from where you live. Would you want to move there even if it was prosperous? I know I wouldn’t.
Karl Marx is second only perhaps to Frank Lloyd Wright in the amount of carnage that one person can produce with a pen and paper.
From what I’ve read, one of the few charming aspects of communist societies (esp. the former USSR & its buffer states) would have to have been their dissident-intelligentsia subculture, with its tightly-knit circles of friends and confidants (a few of which may have been informants), regaling each other with an endless supply of subversive political jokes, sharing samizdat texts and other, imported “forbidden fruit” consumer goods (such as Levi’s blue jeans, records and tapes of rock music, lowbrow Hollywood movies on VHS tapes), and pooling their precious foods and drinks for dinner parties. Two obvious caveats apply: this subculture was in reaction to the authoritarian governments in question and was not an intended feature of any communist regime; and the private satisfactions of the samizdat subculture in no way justify or mitigate the general odiousness of communism.
But the intelligentsia’s excitement and hunger for the forbidden could yield the most febrile, fervent pleasure. By way of example, I’ve read that when Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago started to circulate covertly through the Soviet intelligentsia, the recipient of a rare copy (smuggled in from the West, 'natch) would heroically stay up all night to devour it in one monumental effort, fueled no doubt by several packs of cigarettes and endless cups of coffee. The next day, the precious book would be relayed to another trusted member of the circle. Sometimes a large text would be broken up into halves or sections for more efficient distribution. Likewise, inaccessible or forbidden films and music was also covertly shared amongst friends. In this way, a relatively few copies of a cultural artifact could be known by many.
In such a system, the ever-present dangers of betrayal and discovery lent an extra edge of intensity to many of the things we tend to take for granted. What emigres from authoritarian regimes often discovered was that life in the West could in some ways feel curiously flat and disappointing. In London or New York, where stores try to entice you into buying more than what you need and the only limiting factor to what you may consume is your finances, bringing a nice round of French cheese (which in Kiev was perhaps obtainable only with U.S. dollars, and through a black-market connection) to a party no longer represents beating the system or stealing a taste of the elite apparatchik lifestyle.
An aspect of this unexpected sense of letdown was featured in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (although I’m remembering mostly the Philip Kaufman film, not the novel). After Soviet tanks rolled in to squelch the liberalizing “Prague Spring” of 1968, a young Czech couple emigrate to, IIRC, Switzerland… only to find that the oppressiveness of communism had lent their drab lives with greater meaning and joy than they had perhaps realized at the time. The young woman, who had gotten into trouble with the authorities for taking photographs of the Soviet invasion, now struggled to be content working as a commercial photographer for glossy consumer magazines and ad agencies. And the community of intellectual Czech emigres found themselves foundering as they struggled to maintain some sense of unity and find some purposeful anti-Soviet, pro-Czech expression or activity that wasn’t utterly futile or banal…
I wouldn’t get too overwhelmingly happy about the defeat of communism. The fundamental inequity of laissez-faire capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. As long as it creates economic winners and losers the winners will always try to game the system to make the winner/loser situation perpetual, and will always succed to some extent. Laissez fair capitalism promises a meritocracy, but it’s a false promise, and always will be.
Scrivener, you write with delightful energy and flair. That movie perplexed me when I saw it; now I’d like to see it again. Didn’t Meryl Streep’s Plenty aim to make a similar point?
How very kind of you, fessie… no, I haven’t seen Plenty, but based on what IMDB has to say about it it sounds interesting.
That story is of a heroic young woman who was in the French Resistance during WWII, then emigrated to the U.K. and slowly circled the drain in 1950’s and '60’s, emotionally and professionally. (I bet she particularly deplored English cuisine!) That makes a lot of intuitive sense; a lot of WWII vets say that their war years, though difficult and horrible in many ways, were also the best years of their life.
I dunno if Plenty makes any mention of this, but the French government didn’t do very well by many members of the Resistance in the postwar period, in two distinct ways to my knowledge. Broadly speaking, De Gaulle and his ilk promulgated a grossly distorted myth of a virtuous, heroic Resistance France, even though the nation was profoundly divided in its loyalties during the war. This propaganda, arguably the foundational fiction for the rebuilding of the French nation-state in the postwar years, implicitly cheapened the genuine heroism and sacrifice of the small minority of French who actively participated in the Resistance.
But the postwar French government also failed to extend due honors, compensation, and even official recognition to a great portion of the French of were active in the Resistance. De Gaulle in particular had a real hang-up over the institutional, regular-army formalities, like rank and was loathe to recognize, let alone award, Resistance members whose persons (and activities) defied such institutional categorization. Since most Resistance units were organized very informally [Maquinards, I think they were called – basically just small terrorist/commando squads], and consisted mostly of civilians with no formal military experience, they got the shaft when it came to matters of official recognition of their heroism after the war. Women in particular got short-shrifted, since many female Resistance workers filled crucial supporting roles (courier, intel, and all the humble drudgery), and, as with their male colleagues, even those who participated in paramilitary Resistance actions in the field rarely had a formal military ranking. This lack of official recognition is all the more galling [no pun intended] considering that these heroines ran the same risks of getting shot by the authorities following a betrayal or encirclement. The stats reveal an institutional sexism that was arguably as profound under “De Gaulism” as it was under Petain’s socially conservative National Revolution; IIRC, almost half of all Resistance members were women, but these women received less than 10% (it might have been 2%) of the [pensions? some sort of award or stipend] granted after the war.
Actually we do have communism in this country- depending upon your precise definition of the word of course. If we take communism to mean state supported, we have communist hiways and communist schools. I certainly don’t think we would be better off with private roads and no public education. Also despite what many people claim we do have a socialized health care system. Hospitals -mainly the E.R. - are required to treat people regardless of their ability to pay. In a truly capitalist society people who could not afford to pay for care would be left to die. So while a totally communist society may be unworkable, some communist programs are very good.