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Originally Posted by highthief
Capitalism or communism?
I know we've all been patting ourselves on the back the last 15 years or so with the fall of the USSR and the increasing free market system in China, but didn't communism achieve a great deal in some ways?
You know, when Lenin (and more importantly Stalin) took over Russia, it was literally a nation of peasants. That whole "industrial revolution" thing bypassed 95% of the nation. Yet in 25-30 years, the Soviet Union became one of the 2 most powerful nations on earth, whipped Hitler, and became technologically advanced.
China has made similar strides and is now probably the #2 nation on earth in terms of power.
I am not advocating living in a communist system nor denying the attrocities committed by Stalin or Mao or others, but could a capitalist system have lifted these 2 nations so quickly to the heights of power they achieved?
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The fundamental problem with communism from an economic perspective is that it is not possible to have a centrally-planned economy in this day and age because of the unbelievable complexity of a nation-wide economy. The Soviet Union's economy had become so unmanagable and inefficient by the 1980's that the whole edifice came crashing down. If you suppress market forces too vigorously, very bad things start to happy, as we have seen in communist countries around the world.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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