Majority of people living in former Soviet states think that collapse of Soviet Union brought more h
61 replies, posted
[QUOTE=BCell;43296754]Great scott! that sounded like a Half-life 2 environment! Is it really true back in the past?[/QUOTE]
Ceausescu was an okay guy from what I understand, he actually wanted the best for his country. He wanted Romania to be independent and his countrymen to live proudly in a fully-industrialized country that would produce all it needed without needing foreign help. That's why he wanted to pay off ALL of Romania's debts, and that led to all of the restrictions to basic necessities (but that comes later after what I'm about to tell you).
He went to China and North Korea for a visit to fellow socialist leaders. What happened is that he found egomaniacs that made their subjects treat them like gods. He absolutely loved it and made the same in Romania. That made Romanians hate him since all the songs were supposed to be praising him, all the books/newspapers/etc. were supposed to be praising him, if you said something about him the secret police would come and take you, never to be seen again. Stuff like that.
Ever since those visits everything went to shit, he only cared about himself and developed his own egomaniacal regime and stopped caring that much about the population. He took all the sacrifices for basic necessities he could take to accomplish his 5 year plans.
And thus, eventually the population had enough of it, heard what happened in the rest of Eastern Europe, heard Ceausescu had no intention of stepping down. The revolution happened, and he got shot on Christmas Eve.
This visit changed him:
[media][URL]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9xbVr8qq5A[/URL][/media]
[QUOTE=catbarf;43295849]The stock market is gambling, where smarter and harder-working people have no advantage? Do you know anything at all about investing?[/quote]
Yes I have done a year in financial mathematics as part of my degree. You build a portfolio to minimise loss, at higher levels you research a company (richer companies will have more resources to spend on this so again money has more power) BUT they are modelled with stochastic differential equations, using brownian motion "random" movement to represent to changes. Do you know anything at all about investing?
[quote]
The assertion that capitalism only works because of rampant exploitation isn't even true from an economic standpoint. If capitalism can't provide a decent standard of living without exploitable labor, then communism sure as hell isn't going to either. You're dealing with the same labor availability and production, the only difference is who's managing division of labor.[/quote]
You are spewing the same arguement most do about "capitalism being more efficient".
The distribution of wealth is terrible and unfair, the employees having little to no power.
Anticompetative tactics like addictive ingredients, ridiculous length contracts, price fixing.
Regardless of the above in some areas I believe that capitalism is less efficient. Companies subsidised or selling products to nationalised services will bump the prices up as much as possible, make and claim for unnecessary expenses and take longer. An example of this is BAXTER healthcare, they sell medical supplies. They would ship stock to ireland from england then back extra from the government. There are lots more examples of this.
[quote] Historically isolationist countries like Japan have functioned fine with a capitalist economy for centuries.[/QUOTE]
Japan invaded and committed atrocities in a number of countries to feed that economy. Hardly the image of the "tame" capitalism you people are trying to push. I recommend you pick a less controversial example.
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