Actually Pretty Funny: I mean, damn it, you only want everyone to be dirt poor. You only care for the dirt poor, and treat everyone the same like you treat the dirt poor. Affluent Soviet citizens need ten years to afford a car, with all the paperwork. And crappy cars indeed. Your homeless man doesn’t even have the patience to wait in a line without drinking, why do you force Soviet people who can afford cars to wait 10 years?
And since the Soviets gave undesirable people too much money and power and installed them in position of power and management, the people who could efficiently ran the country secretly quit.
Your Communism only works in very homogeneous and secluded societies or else it would fail hilariously. Belarus is landlocked and the people are mostly Belorussians, so it couldn’t break free away from Russia and indeed now depends partly on military/ intelligence/ security know-how and support from Russia. And the dictator there routinely puts people into jail because he needs to keep people homogeneous in their thinking. But Ukraine isn’t homogeneous, so they fled. They have their own seaports to export their goods.
One good attribute of the Socialist Man is that he doesn’t complain or protest much. So you don’t hear much about the problems of countries like that.
In this day and age, no one really starves to death anymore. Obesity is now an epidemic. All thanks to tech from the capitalistic West. The Chinese literally sold Chinese made Iphones at 100 USD, so I am not surprised that Belarussians could afford Belorussian cars. Those are cheaper than, say, German imported cars, but they work anyway so why not. But the technology for those cars were imported directly from Italy or Germany, and those cars were older models.
Rich Belarussians of course drive Germans and Italians imported from abroad. A Rolls-Royce model 2000 is a Rolls Royce too, just feels a bit weird. People in America begin to run Tesla electric cars already. Back to Belarus, they of course produce some machinery of all sort, good and bad. Just like China. But the most advanced technology always comes from the West. Belarus has lower cost.
Before China opened up to the world(the West), a Chinese household needed 800 USD to 1000 USD and political connection to set up a home telephone line, the same for North Korea for example. I bet the price in North Korea is much lower now. Mobile service providers now beg me to buy the newest(older) tech from America, I love that.
Ever wonder why Putin has been trying so hard to get sanctions lifted off? He needed tech from the West. Communism = sclerosis. And by the way, Sweden is the role model the Chinese want for themselves. Funny to see you bash it that much. You can’t have it all. Choose 2: Prosperity, Diversity, Free Speech.
Surveys across Eastern Europe repeatedly show that high percentages, often majorities, of people say that life was better under Communism that it is today under capitalism. I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds like a lot of people like Communism and even prefer it over capitalism.
Almost no one can afford to buy a car in the US. They’re too expensive, and the number of people having $20,000 sitting around to buy a new car is very low. So they borrow the money at high interest to buy the car. You miss a few payments, and they come take car away. I suppose if you want to make cars so that everyone can buy one, maybe people do have to wait in line. I mean could the US produce 230 million cars to sell them to every US adult at a price they could easily afford such as say $300-400? That’s what the USSR was doing. No wonder you had to stand in line.
I don’t agree the Communists always produce junk products.
Cubans have made many dramatic innovations in the nickel and sugar industries on their very own. Cuban cigars produced in state firms are still of excellent quality and are sought after all over the world. Cuba has a world-class biotechnology industry that must compete with capitalist firms in the international market. Hence their stuff has to be good, or it won’t be able to compete at all. Their biotech products are purchased all over the world, and they compete well with capitalist companies.
If you force state enterprises to compete in world markets, it’s sink or swim. If they produce crap, they go out. They will have to compete with capitalist firms, and that means making good stuff for competitive prices. Hence I like the idea of state firms being forced to compete on the world markets. That way they cannot produce junk.
It’s not true that Communist countries produced nothing but crap. A friend of mine has a radio made in Czechoslovakia in the 1970’s. It is of fine quality, and it still works to this very day 50 years later. It’s never broken. Chinese fans made 30 years ago still work to this very day.
The Communist attitude was that they did not want to produce crap that broke right away because that way they would spend all their time re-manufacturing the same products over and over. So with a lot of products, the attitude was “built to last.” The quality may not have been superb, but it was generally adequate. So they produced average quality products that were built to last decades.
I don’t bash Sweden. I’m not sure if Sweden is really the Chinese model.
After all, the Chinese are doing State Capitalism. 45% of the economy is made up of state firms. How is the Chinese economy booming if half the economy is state firms? Shouldn’t it be sclerotic? Shouldn’t every Chinese person be dirt poor? Shouldn’t all Chinese products be junk? The commenter says that Communism makes everyone poor, is sclerotic, and creates nothing but junk products. How come that’s not true in China?
I have a friend in Slovakia. His father told him that when Slovakia went from Communism to capitalism in the 1990’s, many of the father’s friends committed suicide in the first 10 years of capitalism. Now why was that? Did they do it too fast? How can the commenter support something that caused so many suicides? Is he happy when people die? The commenter is willing to more or less kill lots of people just so you can get he can get his cool stuff?
My friend also showed me Google Earth photo of his small town in Slovakia. It was very nice. The architecture, design and general layout was very nice, with this sort of quaint European style. I told my friend that, and he said, “Yes, and all of that layout, design and architecture was built under Communism. The capitalists are not building anything good here.”
In Slovakia, housing tracts were built consisting of family homes with small yards. They somewhat resembled a stripped down suburban tract in the US. I have seen photos of these homes. The homes and yards aren’t fantastic, but they are perfectly adequate. You probably had to wait in line, but the houses were priced at a low rate. In addition, there was really no way whatsoever that a family could lose its house. It wasn’t possible. Wouldn’t that be great to have a house where the monthly payments were quite affordable and not only that but you were guaranteed never to lose the house no matter what?
