He is kinda right.
If you have 3 guys digging coal at the top of their ability but the strongest one digs 100 kilos/hour the average guy does 50 and the new guy can only do 25... and they all get the same pay it's only a matter of time before efficiency starts droping as the top dog realizes that there is no reason to excel.
Because hey we get the same rations anyway.
I guess it depends a lot on how you define a "perfect" government. A perfect communism, for example, depends on everyone always excelling as hard as they can and finding pleasure in it, just as a "perfect" dictatorship would demand perfect obedience from everyone that is under it.
This. Most people who like to shit-talk communism blatantly don't understand it. Marx's vision is impossible for the same reasons that anarchism, libertarianism, and every other ideology or philosophy that advocates for a totally stateless existence is: power abhors a vacuum, and there will always be
someone willing to fill it; the Tragedy of the Commons, as a total lack of regulation and oversight leads to destructive abuse of public goods; and modern society is impossible because so much of it depends on highly organized allocation of training, skilled workers, goods, and capital.
That sort of vision
at best is possible for a small (<200-300 people) pre- or sub-industrial community which produces most or all necessary goods within the immediate area and is willing to retain the inaccuracies of a barter system. Moreover, you'd probably need it to be a heavily interrelated set of family-groups--a clan, basically--in order to foster proper emotional attachments throughout. However, that would necessitate inter-community relationships, which would generate conflict one way or another. Communities such as these in open contact with each other would come into conflict over all the things people have always warred over, which would require near-total isolation. But in order to prevent genetic dead-ending from inbreeding, you'd need regular infusions of fresh genes into the community (but in order to avoid having that lead to the aforementioned regular inter-group contact, it'd have to be some fucked up sort of arranged copulation to avoid the problems of inter-community relationships or in-group out-group shunning of spouses). That would require government, even if of a primitive sort, but you'd also need extreme control to keep each individual clan group isolated.
That's the sort of shit you come to when you closely examine the ideal of perfect end-game communism, or any other idealistic vision of a world without government. If you just want to go the "local only" route, you end up with fucking feudalism all over again because things ain't gonna stay in stasis, dumbass. Also no modern technology. If you go the Randian route of pure mentally-disturbed selfishness, you end up with a dead species or a few tens/hundreds of thousands of primitive hunter-gatherers who abhor prolonged interpersonal contact.
States, cultures, societies, social contracts, laws, customs, &c. aren't always nice things. They quite often fuck stuff up. But as I've said before, the alternative is humanity as another failed race. Our ability to work together, to form and operate within social hierarchies with established bodies of tacit knowledge and explicit rules, is a large part of what allowed us to branch off from our simian cousins into what we are today. Other apes use tools. Other apes form social groups. Other apes display critical-thinking skills.
Homo sapiens sapiens is the only species to develop complex social contracts and have most individuals demonstrate an ability and willingness to abide by them for the good of a group larger than the self or immediate family.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14864374 times)