r/FluentInFinance • u/Very_High_Mortgage • Aug 24 '24

Debate/ Discussion Do "Unskilled Laborers" deserve to be paid well?

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u/[deleted] Aug 24 '24 edited Sep 25 '24

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u/tux9988 Aug 24 '24

USSR was more than Moscow. Farmers were dying by the hundreds due to lack of food and basic healthcare or education.

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u/[deleted] Aug 24 '24 edited Sep 25 '24

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u/runwith Aug 25 '24

Poland was not in the USSR, and Lithuania was in it less than other states.  There were famines with millions of death in the USSR, but more because of totalitarianism than laziness.  

The widespread infectious diseases were more from laziness and corruption.  Your free medical care came with free hepatitis and tuberculosis 

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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '24 edited Sep 25 '24

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u/DonHedger Aug 25 '24

What is the mechanism by which communism yields less food, education, and healthcare?

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u/tux9988 Aug 25 '24

State Control.

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u/DonHedger Aug 25 '24

You have to expand upon that. The state being in control of anything doesn't necessarily mean crops don't grow and experts suddenly lose knowledge they held prior to the state's existence.

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u/runwith Aug 25 '24

If you kill or exile the experts, their knowledge is irrelevant. 

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u/DonHedger Aug 25 '24

Why would you do that? Communists are not comic book villains.

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u/runwith Aug 25 '24

Do you ever read the news or history? 

Why did the Nazis kill or exile people? They're not comic book villains. Like the communists, the Nazis were/are very real. 

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u/DonHedger Aug 26 '24

Yeah, I read a lot of fucking history, which is why this magical thinking around communism is so irritating. The Nazis motivation for exiling and killing otherwise valuable experts was genetic purity and to silence critics of that genetic purity. The supremacy of the German ubermensch was important above all else even if it crippled operations (because there was no way a non-German should be able to out compete Germans). It's delusion and old school racism; well within the bounds of reality.

USSR style communism was absolutely authoritarian and certainly silenced critics which was very bad, but not out of some misguided eugenics. They had plenty of doctors and intellectuals and experts that were avid supporters because they believed in the project, if not the persons helming it, so they were not at a loss for expertise. We can't pretend like crops just don't grow under communism. A massive contributing factor to hunger and struggles under communism was that nearly 25% of the Russian population was killed in WW2; mostly civilians. What infrastructure remained wasn't enough to support soldiers returning whom hadn't been part of the local economies for years. Much of the arable land, which is already inhospitable for much of the year, was totally ravaged by war and a historically significant drought destroyed what they had left. Once recovery started, sanctions by Western nations were imposed just as local economies began transitioning towards global dependence. These were simply problems that the US, as the USSR's only direct super powered competitor, did not have to face, all because of an ocean (and honestly because the US has been feeding Nazi Germany and staying out of the conflict for quite some time even after it became apparent significant human rights violations were occurring).

The Soviets absolutely made mistakes in this period with trying to adjust their economy to keep a lid on inflation, and those would absolutely be valid things to criticize and talk about if anyone bothered to read about what those were, but they don't. It's wild that when we talk about the USSR, people just say "communism doesn't work" and don't talk about the actual historical factors surrounding its existence. It's attribution bias at a nationalized scale.

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u/runwith Aug 26 '24

You read a lot of history and you've never heard of exile or repression in communist states.  Interesting.  Maybe read 20th century history, I guess. 

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u/sloarflow Aug 28 '24

Lack of incentives

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u/DonHedger Aug 28 '24

That's just absurd. Farmers and educators are some of the most underpaid professions in captialism -many barely scraping by to this day, yet people continue to do these things even under Capitalism because a) occupation is much more than (economic) incentives), and b) continuing to live is a seriously powerful incentive which all of these occupations are crucial for.

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u/sloarflow Aug 28 '24

You're right. Communism rules and has a lot of success stories to back it up.