Yes, you need a free market with competing organizations if you want your economy to keep developing. Breaking up private monopolies is an important role for the government.
The world is full of authoritarian assholes. Studies have shown they score high on narcissistic, sociopathic, and psychopathic scales. Unfortunately they also score high in values like charisma, leadership, and likeability. People follow them willingly and keep up their admiration long after most outsiders would have fled. On the other side, psychologists have identified people with authoritarian personalities.
The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by a disposition to treat the voice of authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect.
Neither side is the majority of most populations, fortunately. However, the presence of even large minorities of such people in the world makes any attempt to scale up societies dependence upon the good will of all not virtually impossible but literally so since no examples are known.
Most of us here have seen this catastrophic global failure in our lifetimes. It once was called the world wide web and was built on the notion that it would grant individuals the ability to speak their minds and communicate openly even with people who they would never meet and whose identities might never be known. Few or no guardrails were built in against malware, or malpeople. Remember when web proselytizers argued that with the ability to rate others for services, products, and ideas the truth would emerge without the need for official overseers?
Some people want to watch the world burn. Even the SDMB was infested with them. Only massive doses of DDT enabled its survival. Large communities cannot do that. When it is tried - as the MAGA movement is doing - the result is destruction of morality at the most basic level.
You can’t eliminate people from the world. Regulation irritates almost everyone. That’s the dilemma that makes the path forward so impossible to conceptualize.
To what degree did American interference, up to and including an invasion and blockades, lead to the authoritarianism of Cuba?
The current stock market is less a matter of investing in order to fund companies and more a matter of gambling. The question for many investors isn’t ‘is this company doing something useful or likely to become useful?’ or ‘is this company profitable or likely to become profitable?’ It’s only ‘do I think that someone will pay more for these shares next year (or next week, or even next minute) than I’ll have to pay for them right now?’
Yeah; I once heard the USSR described as “what you would get if IBM merged with the Pentagon and took over a country”.
“State capitalism” is a good term for it, that kind of nation works more like a single giant corporation than anything else.
Stalin’s version of communism didn’t work because it couldn’t provide it’s own people with what they needed never mind what they wanted. Stalin died in 1953, and even decades after his death the Soviets never figured out how to get their economy to function. For the Soviet economy to even exist, they had to rely on a robust black market that may have comprised up to 1/5th of their total economy by the end of the 1980s. Soviet authorities were certainly aware of the black market but knew they couldn’t end it for fear of crashing the whole system.
What about China? Decades ago they made the decision to allow capitalism to take root even if the party maintained a lot of control. i.e. They abandoned Mao’s vision of how the economy should work.
Why would the American blockade have any impact on Cuba? Wasn’t trade with the Soviet Union enough? Are you saying that communist countries need to be able to trade with capitalist countries in order to be free and prosperous?
Short answer: Because most people can’t spot a psychopath or a narcissist, and we tend to put them in charge of things when they say they want the job.