Is communism bad?

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Someone changed the poll's question from "Is communism bad?" to this "Has communism harmed people"

wow....this thread now reeks of fecal matter.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Billions of years of evolution.

TheMachine1 wrote -

'Billions of years of evolution.'

Well Kropotkin heartily disagreed with Darwin's assumptions there.
As for this 'poll' well, lol... another ridiculous question replaces another, of course communism has harmed people in any practical terms as far as the experiment has been attempted thus far, however capitalism surely has caused more harm?
peace j

Iamnotaparakeet - ? no you're a god damn friggin' parrot...lol

the biggest harm of capitalism has been in the medical sector. an area where coming up with true results yields only negative return. if you only treat part of a disease/virus or only treat the symptoms, you make much more money than curing anyone...which is why we don't have real cures yet and haven't had a real cure for anything since the 1950s.

it's easier to make money in the medical business when your customers never get better and have to keep buying your faulty medicine.

I disagree there, capitalism and progress have been very closely tied together, and if we consider progress to be a very high and important good(which is not an unwarranted assumption), then I think that on balance we must say that capitalism has caused net benefit, it still cannot be forgotten that Marx lauded the progress that capitalism made. Historically capitalism has been a freeing system if only by removing the traditional ties of paternalism and deference and replacing them with individualism, something that I think many would regard as being good. I think that the real problem with most analyses of capitalism is conflating it with conservatism and fascism, as well as assuming an incomplete, and flawed Marxian model.

I am not sure I agree. The fact of the matter is that collusion would likely have to be assumed in order for this model to work, as a drug company can profit by undercutting another's attempt to create a bad product. Really, the real argument to me seems that consumers are irrational, as rationally, you would get more money selling a solid cure than a crappy one because you can charge a much higher price and likely spend less on production costs in the long run. I think that the real reason for a lack of new cures is that the market for products such as viagra or herpes meds are more profitable than fixing more deadly diseases as viagra and herpes affect a broader market and are likely easier to deal with than something such as AIDS, which is incredibly difficult to cure due to its changing nature. Frankly, I think that the real problem with the medical sector isn't capitalism but overregulation, the FDA is forced to be too risk-averse due to fears, and wasteful regulations in various other aspects of medicine cost billions of dollars not even mentioning the institutional factors such as tax deductable health-insurance which caused insurance to do a job it should never have taken on, insulation from costs.

The fact that we as social animals will tend to social loafing if we do not have some pressure to be better, and that without different groups taking disparate paths, we have difficulty finding out new processes and trying new methods. Competition is incredibly vital, without it there would be a tendency towards stagnancy and away from dynamism and progress.

Money of some form is necessary in all systems if only as a unit of account as to perform the economic calculations necessary for progress. Because of all of the subjective valuations necessary to do accounting with, the use of money as a medium of exchange for what you did for what you want seems almost necessary, at least if we speak of a large society with many different goods and different people.

There is propaganda, but mostly there is a horrible lack of information on the subject, children are not taught the economic or political problems within a communist system but rather that it is icky. Communism as we have seen it practiced was not good but horribly flawed and basically went down the route that its greatest detractors claimed that it would.

Communism in itself isn't bad. Communism is bad when people do it because people are bad. It doesn't take very many bad people to ruin a communist state.

I assume you define a real cure as a process that can be used
to treat a condition short term with no long term need for farther treatment. Such as some antibiotics can cure a some bacteria infections. In the case of new antibiotics your logic holds as
there is no real incentive to developed such drugs that might
have a short life span due to drug resistance bacteria evolving
and no long term need for maintenance doses.

I think where your logic break down is you do not understand
the realities of most medication conditions. For example in sickle cell anemia the hemoglobin in red blood cells is modified slightly and has lower solubility in water. So it deforms the cell in to a
sickle shape. There is a cure available though. A bone marrow transplant. Which could also be used to treat a lot different blood related cancers to. But available matches for most people is very low. So your telling me no one at the largest biotechnology companies are trying to developed a universal bone marrow because it would be bad for business? The answer
is they are trying its just hard.

In the case of most conditions the underlying mechanism is
not even well enough understood to know what the hard to
make cure might even be. There is no equivalent "universal
bone marrow" research target for most conditions.

The reality is for most conditions the economic disincentive arguments that applies to anti-biotic does not apply to them.
A "cure" based product could make money the entire life of the patent. For a novel solution to a problem the pharmaceuticals companies could charge what the market would bare. So if a single pill did the work of $30,000 worth of pills over ten years a company
could charge $10,000 for it easily. You can pay that a month for some limited market sized patented drugs today.

Its an economic truism that bad systems fail in the long run. USSR no longer exists. QED

QED only if systems always fail for one reason (that they are bad). Historically, it isn't just bad systems that collapse or fail in the long run ... they all do.

But I do think that the Soviet System failed because it was overly centralized, which is bad. People don't want the government deciding how many hats are needed and in what style - a market system is much better equipped to deal with questions like that. And the social aspect mentioned earlier - if there are incentives to do a better job, people will do better. Otherwise, you end up with a system where the proles pretend to work, and the government pretends to pay them.

QED? Did you get what I said? I was basically saying that communism can't possibly work. It's an idealistic system that would only work in a place like Heaven, which is more of an authoritarian system anyway. That doesn't make it a bad system, it's just a bad system for people because people in general are defective.

^^^ Heaven? That would be a theocracy wouldn't it - lol

And can't possible work? It works, but badly in lots of countries. A bad system works badly, and fails in the long run.

USSR never managed communism.
Probably isn't even possible though.