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[Lightningfalcon]

Please.  You are ALL sick.  With your constant talk of day care and cats...

[WillowLuman]

In about half an hour I'll have to go back to my apartment, away from family.

[Tack]

That's not a problem, I pity everyone who isn't as awesome as me.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I'm sad about the amount of distain Americans have towards communism.
I have one or two friends who agree with it, several that are ok with it, and several others who think I'm a dirty commie because of it.
All because a few communist country's leaders abused their power....

[Bauglir]

To be fair, there are also practical problems with communism (but you're almost certainly right that the reaction against it is purely an emotional one based on the misdeeds of a few maniacs). Mostly, economies are chaotic systems, so centralized advance planning is doomed to fail without a good luck streak so wide you could fit any economic system into it, including Vermin Supreme's pony-based economy. Basically, you can make it work if you can develop a system that accurately predicts a capitalist stock market (and if you could do that, you should quickly be able to gather the money to gather the political clout necessary to start making it happen, and also you would have a magnificent beard and ride to work on a unicorn every day because you're some kind of wizard).

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Doesn't it also work better for smaller countries/populaces?

[Orange Wizard]

Something the size of a village, perhaps.

[Tack]

Digital Socialism!

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I mean doesn't it become easier as the size of the populace it governs decreases?

[Bauglir]

Almost certainly, since the smaller you get it the simpler the system becomes. You could sensibly manage a small village this way with just a few honest people running it, but it doesn't scale well. You could break the world's population into small groups that function well with communism, but then you have no mechanism for handling inter-village trade (unless you create meta-communes that gradually accumulate the same problems as trying to work with any large system), and without that you wreck the potential for any economy-of-scale or other endeavors that are simply impossible without a large enough critical mass of participants.

EDIT: The fact is that, on some level, a global economy has to run without anybody involved needing to understand anything more than their local part of the system.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

But don't other government systems have their own flaws that pop up when populations aren't within their ideal scale?

[Bauglir]

Oh, absolutely. Nothing's perfect. Lots of other systems work well at this one particular thing, though.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Now what if we had computers run a communistic system and have honest people keep checks on the systems to make sure it's keeping within reason?
Would that at least make small interconnected trading towns being communistic, feasible?

[Tack]

'Power corrupts- Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely'

The pigs were honest once too.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

No one person has to be given absolute power, if it were set up as a checks and balance system of different branches no one would have absolute power


And I don't think power always corrupts, there have been good leaders that didn't screw up on a major scale