Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Inspired by this thread.
However, let's have a real discussion and not simply assume that people are insane. The charge against communism is that it is simply a fantasy, and couldn't possibly work in real life.
Perhaps! I'm not a communist, and attempts at communism have fallen short of the ideal, I'd agree. However, I would argue that communism isn't dead, and it contains a lot of good ideas which fix the problems in the opposite extremist economic system.
Example: Capitalism in its purest form.
Firstly, let's get rid of our public school system. It redistributes private wealth and uses it to educate young people, who don't have to pay in order to get in. We can't have that, it isn't a capitalistic idea. Capitalism would be pay-for-learning. If your parents can afford it, they can pay to get you into school. If you're an orphan, that's a shame.
We also will get rid of public roads. They will all be owned by private entities, and we will let the free market decide which road is the better value. Instead of one or two main routes to get to where you're going, we can have 25, competing to be the road which handles traffic the best and has the lowest toll. Of course, they would all be toll roads, because its all about profit. Perhaps some roads would lead directly to businesses and shopping centers, and if you shop there, the businesses will rebate you the cost of your toll, in 6-8 weeks. Wouldn't that be kind of them? And of course, if you're unemployed, you can't use the roads because you have no money. Walking will be good enough for you.
Instead of a publicly funded military and police network, each corporation can hire paramilitary forces and mercenaries to guard their assets. It won't be very profitable to waste resources protecting the poor neighborhoods, so they'll have to deal with gang violence on their own. Eventually the poor will just kill each other off or die in the crossfire, so that helps with overpopulation and poverty and reduces crime in the long run. Not bad, not bad.
If your employer fires you, and replaces you with folks from third world countries who are willing to work 12 hours a day for a bowl of rice, and you have no money, then you'll be out of luck if you break your leg and need to see a doctor. Maybe some nice gang member can ease your suffering by putting you out of your misery with a bullet to the head. Just pay him with your shoes, and you'll be all set.
No unions, of course. Unions are the first step toward socialism and communism. You'll be able to argue that you need a raise to your employer on even ground... you versus the hordes of the unemployed versus the ownership society monopoly. If you're a really good employee, maybe they'll let you take bathroom breaks during your 12 hour shift. Say good-bye to weekends, because if you want to have a job and therefore eat and see a doctor, you'll need to work 7 days a week. That's the only way you can compete.
If you manage to not collapse from exhaustion, perhaps you will advance in the company you work for, and be responsible for firing anyone who gets sick, shows up late once, or needs time off to take their child to the doctor. We don't have room for such deadbeats in our company.
Now wait a second, you say.... these are all strawmen arguments. Capitalism as we know it is much more moderate than the extreme I'm painting. Therefore it's all nonsense.
I would counter that before unions, the two-day weekend was not the rule. Safety concerns for workers did not exist in factories, coal mines, and any other dangerous job. It simply wasn't profitable to worry about those things. If workers died, you just replaced them with healthy ones. The middle class expanded greatly under collective bargaining, it allowed people to have jobs that actually paid well and had benefits.
All these systems we take for granted come from a collective bargaining or single-payer system, which form the backbone of our society and allow for a thriving middle class and barely tolerable but better living conditions for the poor. These systems would not exist without ideas which are at their very core socialist or communist in nature.
Pure capitalism is abhorrent to humanity, I would argue much more so than pure collectivism at its worst.
Let me give an example of something I find particularly galling. Does anyone remember when Sarah Palin infamously condemned aspects of healthcare reform as setting up "Death panels" where people would be judged by bureaucrats based on the relative value of a person to society, and medical care would be rationed out based on such judgments?
You know what that is?
That's called capitalism.
That's where you're judged by your relative value to society. You have no money, that means you're not a valuable worker. No money, you can't get a life saving operation which is expensive but commonplace. If you have insurance, your insurance company can drop you at any time for basically no reason, because they have lawyers and you don't, and they have money, and you don't, and they own senators, and you don't.
So, bureaucrats will deny you medical care based on your value in society, which in this case means how much money you presently have.
Those are your death panels. Those are real. That's reality. That's capitalism.
"I want to be able to CHOOSE my doctor. And the poor want to as well. These systems will ration medical care and people will wait in line to see a doctor."
Yeah, they'll wait in line to see a doctor. You know, like they do now, even when you're paying to see one. Or, if they have no money, they don't even get to wait in line to see a doctor, because no doctor is going to work for free, they have bills to pay.
That's capitalism. The only thing keeping this system from being truly barbaric is that the poor can see a doctor by going to the emergency room, where they can't be turned away. But, they can be made to wait, and wait, and wait, and since they can't pay, the hospital has to charge either the state, or increase the cost of everyone else's bills so they can stay in business. You know what that is? It's a tax. You can call it what you like, but it is still a fee levied onto people with money that supports the basic medical care of those who cannot afford it.
So the only thing keeping our capitalistic system from being completely soulless is what happens automatically, through capitalism, to keep hospitals afloat. It's called socialism.
What happens when shoplifters take money or items from stores? Well, businesses stay in business when they make money. So, if they take a loss, they can either lower costs or they can raise more money. They've already tried to lower costs to save themselves money to make a bigger profit, so now they have price-raising. So, everyone pays slightly more for their goods, and the business stays in business. So, each customer is taxed just a little bit more, to pay for the loss.
You can call it a price increase if you don't like the word tax. But it is an automatic thing that happens in capitalism when a business needs to make more money. Somewhere along the line, someone's wages get cut, or someone pays more for the good or service. And that is exactly the same thing as a tax.
It's capitalism. It happens in capitalism. But when the state does it, all of a sudden it goes against free market principles or something.
The only thing that saves capitalism from being anarchy for all but those in heavily guarded ivory towers, is collectivism. It is how the unemployed see a doctor. It is how the poor get enough to eat. It is now we have roads that we don't have to stop and pay a toll for. It is how folks can live their lives on a meager minimum wage, because the alternative is an even lower minimum wage. Some people would be happy to work for 4 hours in exchange for a sandwich. That currently amounts to about 28 dollars worth of labor. When people are desperate, they will be willingly exploited to stay alive.
Capitalism is about raising capital by any legal means. Through capitalism, legal means become expanded and expanded, until anything is legal for the right price. Exploitation is what capitalism is all about.... it is about getting the very cheapest deal for extracting all the valuable minerals in a mountain, not about making sure the worker has enough to live comfortably. If they die, who cares? If they can't afford to see a doctor, who cares?
Capitalism in its purest form is a mirror image of that which some people conjure up to scare people away from socialism: long lines to get any kind of medical care, and they get horrible medical care, because the good doctors are reserved for the rich, and that's if they get any medical care at all. Capitalism is working long hours under an oppressive tyrannical administration in return for just enough to keep you alive. Capitalism is exactly what people fear in communism, it just has a different name.
Instead of tyranny of the state, it is tyranny of the corporation. And a corporation without care for its workers is exactly a state without care for its workers. You're owned by that corporation, your life belongs to it. You can try to flee, but often, you lack the means.
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" is true about a state, but it is also true about private bureaucracies. Private corporations, whose objective is to get rid of encumbering laws, regulations, and protections which make things safer and better for the workers, because that means more money for the owners, and that means more power.
Any concentration of power leads to corruption. That is the fear of communism, because a political party controlling the economy is concentration of power, and a form of monopoly. But what is a corporation except another kind of faction obsessed with concentrating power and wealth, and owning everything until it becomes a monopoly? That's what corporations do... they squeeze out or buy out the competition, they combine businesses together to lower costs, until a single entity owns everything it needs, and is powerful enough to dominate everything in its wake. And then, even though it is already enormously profitable, its objective is to seek out new markets to exploit, so it can control prices and depress wages and squeeze out greater and greater profit, and leverage that power into more political control.
I look at extremism and I see it for what it truly is. The extreme left and the extreme right, who paint their opponents in the harshest of terms, are ultimately indistinguishable from one another. There's no difference, to a worker, of working under a corrupt single-party state that owns everything, or working under a corrupt monopolistic corporation that owns everything... except maybe, just maybe, because the single-party is made up of workers, they will demand that the workers not be fired for no reason, and demand bathroom breaks. But they're ultimately indistinguishable.
At the same time, these both seem to be caricatures. Most folks are less extreme, and do not want a capitalism which turns people into slave labor in oppressive conditions, but they don't want to go to school for 8 years to be a doctor and get paid the same as the cashier at the local Denny's.
Most people are moderates. They want to get paid what they're worth, but they don't want people to starve to death or go without seeing a doctor. You know it is possible to have both? It's called compromise.
That's what we currently have. We have a state that collects what is necessary to keep those who can't work from dying of starvation, and helps many get medical treatment they need. It's not perfect, but it is better than not having it. It can also be improved. We also have private systems which provide middle class jobs and raise the standard of living.
Both systems raise the standard of living. But neither are purely communist, or purely capitalist. Unions, regulations, legal protections, minimum wages, these keep the corporations honest. Profit motive and rewarding workers though better wages and bonuses and benefits drives the economy and gives us better educated and more effective workers.
Neither would work well without the other. A "communist" state that works would blend necessary capitalistic principles in with meeting the needs of all. People would get to keep a good portion of their own money. Profit and prosperity would be the incentive that drives the economy forward. But at the same time, education and health care would be paid for, and workers would be guaranteed bathroom breaks and weekends. They wouldn't be guaranteed a mansion.
Systems like this exist and thrive, and they often do a much better job than our current system. Universal healthcare and public education through college exists in first world nations that thrive and are not buried in debt. And, people are still able to live comfortably, profitably, and become wealthy. It's not a pipe dream, and although certain ideologues wish these examples didn't exist, they do. I'm afraid that the world isn't as black and white as people argue it is, and that saying communism is evil and capitalism is good is like saying water is evil and air is good. Simplistic minds will be swayed by such arguments, but they bear no resemblance to the truth.
Extremism of any kind is by its very nature unbalanced and intolerant. No matter what it pretends to be, invariably, it ends up looking like fascism and totalitarianism, with very few exceptions. (I can imagine militant pacifists, for example, but the inherent hypocrisy means that they wouldn't really be pacifists, now would they?)
But hypocrisy is actually rather widespread with extremist dogmatic viewpoints. That's what happens when your partisan vision for your nation turns into an Orwellian nightmare, where everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. Animal Farm could be viewed as being against unions, or robber baron capitalism, or communism, or socialism.... it doesn't matter what the message of the ideology is, when it gets taken to extremes, adherents attain absolute authority, and impose their radical views on others.
It's one of the reasons why organized religion has such a checkered history. The reason is, even when your message is peace on earth, love, brotherhood, and moral enlightenment, sometimes that message gets thrown out in favor of imposing your ideology on those with dissimilar ideas. So then you have holy wars, where folks impose their version of peace, love, and brotherhood on others through the use of witch burnings, inquisitions, crusades, jihads, torture, and death penalties for heresy and blasphemy.
Capitalism has extremes, just as collectivism does. It's easy for folks to turn a blind eye to the dangers of unchecked materialism, where money becomes more valuable than people. It's also easy to paint the idea of collectivism as something that is dangerous, when taken to extremes. But the purist ideologues for capitalism wish to take their own ideas to extremes. They are what they fear the most, and project it onto their opponents, and turn every debate into a war between radical extremes, and speak as if the end times are coming, if temporary tax cuts expire, or a debt ceiling is raised.
In my view, sane folks can disagree on where the middle is. Sane folks can favor the state or the private enterprise, without doing away with the other. Sane folks can even be a little selfish, because the only person that's really going to look out for you as their top priority is you. But at the same time, our politics has become downright religious to some, and the rhetoric used is genuinely insane. When you live in a nation where the government already collects a fair amount of taxes and uses it to provide single-payer services for the poorest among us, and some of the richest corporations ever to exist function quite well within its jurisdiction, you have already blended capitalism and socialism. It's already mixed. It's already quite moderate. It is not pure. And, it works pretty darned well, until some folks do one of the following:
1) Insist on huge amounts of spending without generating the revenue to cover it
2) Insist on huge amounts of revenue cuts without decreasing spending
And suddenly the grand compromise gets compromised, because people are not compromising. Idealists, ideologues, and extremists will insist on extreme measures without compromising. They will say:
1) You must simply raise revenue! Cutting funding is not up for debate! That's evil!
2) You must simply cut funding! Raising revenue is not up for debate! That's evil!
Funny, no one seemed to mind when we got our cake and ate it too, and raised spending while cutting revenue. I guess that's because the idealists who live in fantasy land both got their way. They had their socialist paradise and didn't have to raise taxes to pay for it.
I guess living in a fantasy world isn't a great way to run a nation.
So, folks have said communism (rightly, collectivism) is a fantasy. Some others can rightly suggest that pure capitalism is also a fantasy. But I know of something that's an even bigger fantasy, which is clinging to our idealism and being unwilling to compromise, when both sides have gotten what they want, but weren't willing to pay for it. That's not sustainable.
So, the challenge for you is twofold: Demonstrate how a purely capitalist system could work, since no such enterprise has ever existed (much like a pure and truly communist system has never existed), and show how purist ideology will move our country forward.
If you cannot meet this challenge, then I would humbly suggest that picking on pure communism as being a pipe dream is ludicrous. Just as ludicrous as the religion that is free market "pure" capitalism.
TL/DR- Communism is crazy and cannot work, pure capitalism is the exact same way. The above explains why.
However, let's have a real discussion and not simply assume that people are insane. The charge against communism is that it is simply a fantasy, and couldn't possibly work in real life.
Perhaps! I'm not a communist, and attempts at communism have fallen short of the ideal, I'd agree. However, I would argue that communism isn't dead, and it contains a lot of good ideas which fix the problems in the opposite extremist economic system.
Example: Capitalism in its purest form.
Firstly, let's get rid of our public school system. It redistributes private wealth and uses it to educate young people, who don't have to pay in order to get in. We can't have that, it isn't a capitalistic idea. Capitalism would be pay-for-learning. If your parents can afford it, they can pay to get you into school. If you're an orphan, that's a shame.
We also will get rid of public roads. They will all be owned by private entities, and we will let the free market decide which road is the better value. Instead of one or two main routes to get to where you're going, we can have 25, competing to be the road which handles traffic the best and has the lowest toll. Of course, they would all be toll roads, because its all about profit. Perhaps some roads would lead directly to businesses and shopping centers, and if you shop there, the businesses will rebate you the cost of your toll, in 6-8 weeks. Wouldn't that be kind of them? And of course, if you're unemployed, you can't use the roads because you have no money. Walking will be good enough for you.
Instead of a publicly funded military and police network, each corporation can hire paramilitary forces and mercenaries to guard their assets. It won't be very profitable to waste resources protecting the poor neighborhoods, so they'll have to deal with gang violence on their own. Eventually the poor will just kill each other off or die in the crossfire, so that helps with overpopulation and poverty and reduces crime in the long run. Not bad, not bad.
If your employer fires you, and replaces you with folks from third world countries who are willing to work 12 hours a day for a bowl of rice, and you have no money, then you'll be out of luck if you break your leg and need to see a doctor. Maybe some nice gang member can ease your suffering by putting you out of your misery with a bullet to the head. Just pay him with your shoes, and you'll be all set.
No unions, of course. Unions are the first step toward socialism and communism. You'll be able to argue that you need a raise to your employer on even ground... you versus the hordes of the unemployed versus the ownership society monopoly. If you're a really good employee, maybe they'll let you take bathroom breaks during your 12 hour shift. Say good-bye to weekends, because if you want to have a job and therefore eat and see a doctor, you'll need to work 7 days a week. That's the only way you can compete.
If you manage to not collapse from exhaustion, perhaps you will advance in the company you work for, and be responsible for firing anyone who gets sick, shows up late once, or needs time off to take their child to the doctor. We don't have room for such deadbeats in our company.
Now wait a second, you say.... these are all strawmen arguments. Capitalism as we know it is much more moderate than the extreme I'm painting. Therefore it's all nonsense.
I would counter that before unions, the two-day weekend was not the rule. Safety concerns for workers did not exist in factories, coal mines, and any other dangerous job. It simply wasn't profitable to worry about those things. If workers died, you just replaced them with healthy ones. The middle class expanded greatly under collective bargaining, it allowed people to have jobs that actually paid well and had benefits.
All these systems we take for granted come from a collective bargaining or single-payer system, which form the backbone of our society and allow for a thriving middle class and barely tolerable but better living conditions for the poor. These systems would not exist without ideas which are at their very core socialist or communist in nature.
Pure capitalism is abhorrent to humanity, I would argue much more so than pure collectivism at its worst.
Let me give an example of something I find particularly galling. Does anyone remember when Sarah Palin infamously condemned aspects of healthcare reform as setting up "Death panels" where people would be judged by bureaucrats based on the relative value of a person to society, and medical care would be rationed out based on such judgments?
You know what that is?
That's called capitalism.
That's where you're judged by your relative value to society. You have no money, that means you're not a valuable worker. No money, you can't get a life saving operation which is expensive but commonplace. If you have insurance, your insurance company can drop you at any time for basically no reason, because they have lawyers and you don't, and they have money, and you don't, and they own senators, and you don't.
So, bureaucrats will deny you medical care based on your value in society, which in this case means how much money you presently have.
Those are your death panels. Those are real. That's reality. That's capitalism.
"I want to be able to CHOOSE my doctor. And the poor want to as well. These systems will ration medical care and people will wait in line to see a doctor."
Yeah, they'll wait in line to see a doctor. You know, like they do now, even when you're paying to see one. Or, if they have no money, they don't even get to wait in line to see a doctor, because no doctor is going to work for free, they have bills to pay.
That's capitalism. The only thing keeping this system from being truly barbaric is that the poor can see a doctor by going to the emergency room, where they can't be turned away. But, they can be made to wait, and wait, and wait, and since they can't pay, the hospital has to charge either the state, or increase the cost of everyone else's bills so they can stay in business. You know what that is? It's a tax. You can call it what you like, but it is still a fee levied onto people with money that supports the basic medical care of those who cannot afford it.
So the only thing keeping our capitalistic system from being completely soulless is what happens automatically, through capitalism, to keep hospitals afloat. It's called socialism.
What happens when shoplifters take money or items from stores? Well, businesses stay in business when they make money. So, if they take a loss, they can either lower costs or they can raise more money. They've already tried to lower costs to save themselves money to make a bigger profit, so now they have price-raising. So, everyone pays slightly more for their goods, and the business stays in business. So, each customer is taxed just a little bit more, to pay for the loss.
You can call it a price increase if you don't like the word tax. But it is an automatic thing that happens in capitalism when a business needs to make more money. Somewhere along the line, someone's wages get cut, or someone pays more for the good or service. And that is exactly the same thing as a tax.
It's capitalism. It happens in capitalism. But when the state does it, all of a sudden it goes against free market principles or something.
The only thing that saves capitalism from being anarchy for all but those in heavily guarded ivory towers, is collectivism. It is how the unemployed see a doctor. It is how the poor get enough to eat. It is now we have roads that we don't have to stop and pay a toll for. It is how folks can live their lives on a meager minimum wage, because the alternative is an even lower minimum wage. Some people would be happy to work for 4 hours in exchange for a sandwich. That currently amounts to about 28 dollars worth of labor. When people are desperate, they will be willingly exploited to stay alive.
Capitalism is about raising capital by any legal means. Through capitalism, legal means become expanded and expanded, until anything is legal for the right price. Exploitation is what capitalism is all about.... it is about getting the very cheapest deal for extracting all the valuable minerals in a mountain, not about making sure the worker has enough to live comfortably. If they die, who cares? If they can't afford to see a doctor, who cares?
Capitalism in its purest form is a mirror image of that which some people conjure up to scare people away from socialism: long lines to get any kind of medical care, and they get horrible medical care, because the good doctors are reserved for the rich, and that's if they get any medical care at all. Capitalism is working long hours under an oppressive tyrannical administration in return for just enough to keep you alive. Capitalism is exactly what people fear in communism, it just has a different name.
Instead of tyranny of the state, it is tyranny of the corporation. And a corporation without care for its workers is exactly a state without care for its workers. You're owned by that corporation, your life belongs to it. You can try to flee, but often, you lack the means.
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" is true about a state, but it is also true about private bureaucracies. Private corporations, whose objective is to get rid of encumbering laws, regulations, and protections which make things safer and better for the workers, because that means more money for the owners, and that means more power.
Any concentration of power leads to corruption. That is the fear of communism, because a political party controlling the economy is concentration of power, and a form of monopoly. But what is a corporation except another kind of faction obsessed with concentrating power and wealth, and owning everything until it becomes a monopoly? That's what corporations do... they squeeze out or buy out the competition, they combine businesses together to lower costs, until a single entity owns everything it needs, and is powerful enough to dominate everything in its wake. And then, even though it is already enormously profitable, its objective is to seek out new markets to exploit, so it can control prices and depress wages and squeeze out greater and greater profit, and leverage that power into more political control.
I look at extremism and I see it for what it truly is. The extreme left and the extreme right, who paint their opponents in the harshest of terms, are ultimately indistinguishable from one another. There's no difference, to a worker, of working under a corrupt single-party state that owns everything, or working under a corrupt monopolistic corporation that owns everything... except maybe, just maybe, because the single-party is made up of workers, they will demand that the workers not be fired for no reason, and demand bathroom breaks. But they're ultimately indistinguishable.
At the same time, these both seem to be caricatures. Most folks are less extreme, and do not want a capitalism which turns people into slave labor in oppressive conditions, but they don't want to go to school for 8 years to be a doctor and get paid the same as the cashier at the local Denny's.
Most people are moderates. They want to get paid what they're worth, but they don't want people to starve to death or go without seeing a doctor. You know it is possible to have both? It's called compromise.
That's what we currently have. We have a state that collects what is necessary to keep those who can't work from dying of starvation, and helps many get medical treatment they need. It's not perfect, but it is better than not having it. It can also be improved. We also have private systems which provide middle class jobs and raise the standard of living.
Both systems raise the standard of living. But neither are purely communist, or purely capitalist. Unions, regulations, legal protections, minimum wages, these keep the corporations honest. Profit motive and rewarding workers though better wages and bonuses and benefits drives the economy and gives us better educated and more effective workers.
Neither would work well without the other. A "communist" state that works would blend necessary capitalistic principles in with meeting the needs of all. People would get to keep a good portion of their own money. Profit and prosperity would be the incentive that drives the economy forward. But at the same time, education and health care would be paid for, and workers would be guaranteed bathroom breaks and weekends. They wouldn't be guaranteed a mansion.
Systems like this exist and thrive, and they often do a much better job than our current system. Universal healthcare and public education through college exists in first world nations that thrive and are not buried in debt. And, people are still able to live comfortably, profitably, and become wealthy. It's not a pipe dream, and although certain ideologues wish these examples didn't exist, they do. I'm afraid that the world isn't as black and white as people argue it is, and that saying communism is evil and capitalism is good is like saying water is evil and air is good. Simplistic minds will be swayed by such arguments, but they bear no resemblance to the truth.
Extremism of any kind is by its very nature unbalanced and intolerant. No matter what it pretends to be, invariably, it ends up looking like fascism and totalitarianism, with very few exceptions. (I can imagine militant pacifists, for example, but the inherent hypocrisy means that they wouldn't really be pacifists, now would they?)
But hypocrisy is actually rather widespread with extremist dogmatic viewpoints. That's what happens when your partisan vision for your nation turns into an Orwellian nightmare, where everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. Animal Farm could be viewed as being against unions, or robber baron capitalism, or communism, or socialism.... it doesn't matter what the message of the ideology is, when it gets taken to extremes, adherents attain absolute authority, and impose their radical views on others.
It's one of the reasons why organized religion has such a checkered history. The reason is, even when your message is peace on earth, love, brotherhood, and moral enlightenment, sometimes that message gets thrown out in favor of imposing your ideology on those with dissimilar ideas. So then you have holy wars, where folks impose their version of peace, love, and brotherhood on others through the use of witch burnings, inquisitions, crusades, jihads, torture, and death penalties for heresy and blasphemy.
Capitalism has extremes, just as collectivism does. It's easy for folks to turn a blind eye to the dangers of unchecked materialism, where money becomes more valuable than people. It's also easy to paint the idea of collectivism as something that is dangerous, when taken to extremes. But the purist ideologues for capitalism wish to take their own ideas to extremes. They are what they fear the most, and project it onto their opponents, and turn every debate into a war between radical extremes, and speak as if the end times are coming, if temporary tax cuts expire, or a debt ceiling is raised.
In my view, sane folks can disagree on where the middle is. Sane folks can favor the state or the private enterprise, without doing away with the other. Sane folks can even be a little selfish, because the only person that's really going to look out for you as their top priority is you. But at the same time, our politics has become downright religious to some, and the rhetoric used is genuinely insane. When you live in a nation where the government already collects a fair amount of taxes and uses it to provide single-payer services for the poorest among us, and some of the richest corporations ever to exist function quite well within its jurisdiction, you have already blended capitalism and socialism. It's already mixed. It's already quite moderate. It is not pure. And, it works pretty darned well, until some folks do one of the following:
1) Insist on huge amounts of spending without generating the revenue to cover it
2) Insist on huge amounts of revenue cuts without decreasing spending
And suddenly the grand compromise gets compromised, because people are not compromising. Idealists, ideologues, and extremists will insist on extreme measures without compromising. They will say:
1) You must simply raise revenue! Cutting funding is not up for debate! That's evil!
2) You must simply cut funding! Raising revenue is not up for debate! That's evil!
Funny, no one seemed to mind when we got our cake and ate it too, and raised spending while cutting revenue. I guess that's because the idealists who live in fantasy land both got their way. They had their socialist paradise and didn't have to raise taxes to pay for it.
I guess living in a fantasy world isn't a great way to run a nation.
So, folks have said communism (rightly, collectivism) is a fantasy. Some others can rightly suggest that pure capitalism is also a fantasy. But I know of something that's an even bigger fantasy, which is clinging to our idealism and being unwilling to compromise, when both sides have gotten what they want, but weren't willing to pay for it. That's not sustainable.
So, the challenge for you is twofold: Demonstrate how a purely capitalist system could work, since no such enterprise has ever existed (much like a pure and truly communist system has never existed), and show how purist ideology will move our country forward.
If you cannot meet this challenge, then I would humbly suggest that picking on pure communism as being a pipe dream is ludicrous. Just as ludicrous as the religion that is free market "pure" capitalism.
__________________________
TL/DR- Communism is crazy and cannot work, pure capitalism is the exact same way. The above explains why.
