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[x2yzh9]

"The greatest inequality is trying to make two unequal things equal." -Aristotle

Just because he was a philosopher doesn't make him automatically correct. Also using quotes to make you look smarter really just work the opposite way. Put some 'meat' in your post instead of posting a useless quote. Aristotle did not know things that would emerge today.

[Sheb]

"Enlarge your penis two inches!!!!" -Some random pop-up on the Internet.

Is that better?

[Dwarf]

RealmFighter… why are your posts moronic.

[Realmfighter]

RealmFighter… why are your posts moronic.

Because I am.

[Zrk2]

Aristotle is widely viewed as one of the greatest thinkers in history, while that does not make him correct it doe lend credence to my position.

Also, I can back my position up with logic and facts. Scary.

Argument 1: You say humans are naturally greedy, this means they want the greatest benefit with the least labour exerted to achieve it. This means under a communist regime many would barely work because they would still receive the same amount of compensation, meaning the other would have to work harder to cover for them, nut they would also be slacking. This would lead to economic collapse seeing as no one would be producing the goods needed to support all these people who are not working. Do not claim this is not true, it is the express intent of communism.

Argument 2: Communism works to achieve material equality, yet it ignores moral equality. By asserting the right of the poor to take from the rich it states that the poor are more deserving of those goods, meaning they have a greater right to them, meaning they are more equal than those who are rich or merely less poor. Therefore communism promotes moral inequality, a much more grievous thing than material inequality as material inequality can be overcome by hard work from the individual experiencing it, yet moral inequality can never be overcome by those subjected to it alone because they have "less right" to voice there opinion, and because they are less deserving of what they already have, allowing them to have anymore wold be a crime against those with more "moral right" to the good or service.

[nbonaparte]

Appeal to authority is a fallacy of defective induction, where it is argued that a statement is correct because the statement is made by a person or source that is commonly regarded as authoritative. The most general structure of this argument is:
Source A says that p is true.
Source A is authoritative.
Therefore, p is true.

[SalmonGod]

Argument 2: Communism works to achieve material equality, yet it ignores moral equality. By asserting the right of the poor to take from the rich it states that the poor are more deserving of those goods, meaning they have a greater right to them, meaning they are more equal than those who are rich or merely less poor. Therefore communism promotes moral inequality, a much more grievous thing than material inequality as material inequality can be overcome by hard work from the individual experiencing it, yet moral inequality can never be overcome by those subjected to it alone because they have "less right" to voice there opinion, and because they are less deserving of what they already have, allowing them to have anymore wold be a crime against those with more "moral right" to the good or service.

I'm not defending communism, but I absolutely hate this position.  The founder & CEO of my company makes more than 320x my salary.  Input this data to your argument and that's some pretty damn insulting shit.  I absolutely do not believe that he is 320x as morally valuable a person as I am or that at any point in his life has worked 320x harder than I have at any point in my life.  I'm also pretty sure I could work 320x as hard as he does and still have very little chance of ever becoming as wealthy as he is.  In fact I am named after my grandfather who literally worked himself to death in his mid-30's.  I  never had the opportunity to meet him.  I'm pretty sure his hard work never payed off in the end, though, proving there is more to life and success in this world.

[ChairmanPoo]

"The greatest inequality is trying to make two unequal things equal." -Aristotle

A witty saying proves nothing.
-- Voltaire,

[Jackrabbit]

A witty saying proves nothing.
-- Voltaire,

Incidentally my favorite saying of all time and the most appropriate one to ever use, ever.

If you have a point to make, say it yourself. You can explain it much better the first time round and you don't look like a bellend.

[ed boy]

The founder & CEO of my company makes more than 320x my salary.

The board of directors considers them to be worth that. If you consider the salary divide to be wrong, the one of two things are possible:
-They are worth 320x your salary, and you are wrong
-They are not worth 320x your salary, and they are overpaid
If they are overpaid, then the error is in the board of directors, not in the system.

Also, I put it to you that being a CEO is bloody hard work. If it was easy and lots of people could do it, there would be no need to pay someone 320x your salary to do it, as they could hire someone else for much less. Leadership may look like a simple and easy task to someone who has not had the position (tell people what to do while sitting around and earning massive amounts of money?), but that is wrong. It's like a professional football (soccer to the yanks) player - someone who is not familiar with what goes on may simple see someone being paid £1000 a minute to kick a ball around, but they also have to deal with a grueling training regime and every single one of their errors making headlines in publications across the country.

[ChairmanPoo]

One problem is that all too often wage workers lack the initiative and drive to actually take a risk and become self-employed. My father offered a couple of workers he had aid to become self-employed (the idea  was that he would be hiring them afterwards as freelance workers). They refused, preferring to stay on wages.

These kind of matters are seldom simple to analyze.

[Muz]

It could very well be that your CEO really is worth 320x you are. For every worker there is like you, there's probably 320 times less people capable of the CEO position. It doesn't even matter if you literally work to death, if your hard work contributes less money, you're just going to be paid a lot less.

What gets more? A factory worker who assembles 10 thingies an hour, working 16 hours a day? Or an engineer who works half an hour a day, maintaining a machine that assembles 300 thingies an hour, 24 hours a day? The former works far harder, but is easily replaceable.

Is your CEO morally worth 320x more? Certainly not. But he's 320x more economically valuable to the company and is paid as such. Say what you will about the free market, but one thing is that the price of things is similar to what people are willing to pay for it.

The main flaw here could be that he is the one deciding on his own self worth. And that's pretty much where the whole economic weakness lies. In a communist system, you have an entity deciding on how much everyone is worth (and deciding that they're all worth the same). In a capitalist system, every group tries to trick everyone else into thinking that they're worth more than all the others. In a socialist system, it works the same way, but there's an authoritative entity putting hard limits on what something is worth.

[Eugenitor]

In theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat will lead to an equal and just society as the people are led to a glorious new age.

In reality, the dictatorship of the proletariat swiftly becomes an old-fashioned dictatorship.

In theory, the capitalist system is designed to punish failure and reward success, resulting in greater economic growth as people husband their own resources carefully, and encouraging people with wealth to develop new systems and make products as much as they can.

In reality, the few people running the companies decide that they and their friends are worth far more than anyone else, and pay themselves millions even if their companies are run into the ground by their mismanagement; if they were paid according to their value to the company, they'd be LOSING money. It doesn't matter, because everyone else is part of that great pool called 'labor', things to be used up and thrown away. Surprise of surprises!

[ed boy]

I would ask you to be more careful with how you link what a company does with the people involved. In almost every group of people, negative things are attributed to the one in charge, whereas good things are attributed to the individual compenents in the group. For example, if your favourite sports team has a bad season, people are quick to blame the manager, but when a team does good, people heap praise on the players.

As for the "people who run companies should have a negative income if their company loses money", I'm going to dispute that. It could be that the company stood to lost a hell of a lot of money, but those in charge were able to reduce that amount a lot. A patient in a hospital could die despite the best efforts of doctors, yet doctors still save a lot of people.

[Dwarf]

Although the "dictatorship of the proletariat" problem can be solved by having a dynamic, changing leadership, we're not even talking about Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Hoxhaism or God forbid Stalinism here, but about Anarchy or Anarcho-Communism.