A purely hypothetical question:
If you are the government of a country of 11 people, 1 rich 10 starving. If you don't do anything, the 10 starving people will die.
Or you can kill the rich person and distribute the wealth to the 10 people (so they won't die). Is that ethical?
Is killing by doing nothing killing, too?
Here you see the difference between communism and democracy. Communists would kill the rich guy (who probably earned his wealth) and distribute it among the 10 starving people. In democracy the government would set a tax which makes the rich guy pay a lot more, and then distributes the money between the 10 people as a living allowance. The only difference is that the communists would have murdered an innocent person.Originally Posted by cyberfish
"The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore
Nonsense!
Communism is an ideology, democracy is a political system, they are not comparable in that sense! If you want to compare communism, compare it to capitalism, where the rich guy gets to keep the money and the other 10 dies from starvation, or, as some like to call it, "free market economy".
Besides, what you describe here is not what Karl Marx envisioned.
How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
I'm sorry. I just forgot to mention that what I described is a side effect of using the good-in-theory communism in real life. And don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, Estonia was occupied by the USSR for 50 years. And what we learned during that period is that communism doesn't work with democracy. Therefore communism can be opposed to democracy.
Last edited by maxorator; 11-04-2009 at 07:14 AM.
"The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore
The ideas of communism have little or nothing to do with the fascist rule of the USSR and Stalin.
fixed.Therefore stalinism can be opposed to democracy.
How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
Problem is that communism is based around the principle that everybody WANTS to chip in and do what is good for everybody. Problem is this only works in fluffy-duffy-wonderland. In reality there will always be people that will always do what they gain the most from, no matter what. And that especially goes for people with power, they want more power. So marxisism is a fluffy-duffy-theory on how to run a country but it can never work and will never work because in the end people are egoistical bastards whose only goal is to gain as much as possible.
And people wanting to gain as much as possible is also exactly what is wrong with capitalism. The ones with money make even more money by keeping the working classes in poverty, and they do that with their disgusting lobbyism. The only people in America with any real kind of influence are the ones with a big tank of money.
Neither system is perfect, but why not strive for perfection?
People usually argue that capitalism is necessary because otherwise there would be no real incentive to create better products and whatnot. Well i personally believe that equality is a million times more important than creating incentive (ie. profits) for companies to pursue. This profit-hunting is totally undermining democracy, the same democracy that the critics of communism is trying to defend.
Has anyone here seen the documentary, "The Union"? I realize that it is a completely unrelated matter, but still, the pharmaceutical lobbying described in that film is exactly what i'm talking about, lobby against change, to increase profits, it's disgusting!
How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
