David Lopez (nixtoshi)

It's a bad book, it doesn't account for commonly-seen economic behavior among humans, Marx and Engels believed that people can be shaped in mass into working a certain way and behaving a certain way even though human societies form more organically and with mutual consent rather than through force. Economics is also a problem that is so big and hard to solve that no single person, group of people, or political party can single handedly run society, instead it's a combination of everyone's combined intelligence that makes eating bread tomorrow a reality. Free trade places a big role in how economic production happens and how new products and services develop. Top-down government control wouldn't be resourceful or creative enough to come up with a job for everyone, nor would these set of jobs to choose from make people happy in my opinion, because a lot of people prefer to choose their own line of work and activities rather than having a government decide that for everyone. Meanwhile in a free market businesses pop up and die down according to the fluctuating demands and wants of people. In the countries where these ideas have been tried, communism has failed terribly, every time, usually creating a lot of poverty. Another book estimates that the communist ideology has caused around 100 million deaths, mainly related to hunger and disease, which are the lack of food and medicine, which are abundant in freer societies. Private property is also fundamental pillar to how societies work, and the communist manifesto proposes the elimination of private property as one of the first steps to achieving communism. That also doesn't make sense in practice, because ownership, and private property are a great motivator to many, a society without private property would hardly work, the fact that so many people avoid taxes, don't pay them, or work hard to pay less of it, shows that people would prefer to get as a much private property as they can instead of handing out the products of their labor for the construction of public goods. --- Communism must be fought every time, maybe at all times. As these ideas haven't been completely eradicated, so they find a way to resurge, and replicate among new young minds. I believe communism is a product of lazy minds trying to steal the merits of others. Basically grand theft at the society's scale, being presented with a populist flavor that tries to convince people that the communists would be better rulers and distributors of wealth, even though they lack the merits, it takes a lot of consistent merit and ability to run things, which not everyone possesses, specially not people that only have their shackles to lose... If a communist believes they would be better rulers and better at producing and distributing products for the welfare of their fellow men, they should first try to become producers, business people, or run a small non-profit or business, before wanting to run everyone's lives...