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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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You're ignoring the hypothetical I posed. If the Soviets had solved the economic planning problem but retained the resolve and ability to disrespect property, then their economy would not have tanked. Between "incapable of efficient allocation of resources" and "taking people's stuff without consent", I think it makes much more sense to attribute their failure to the first, not the second.

People are more motivated to take care with resources that they conventionally own than resources that they steal. And if they're bad at it anyway, they run out of resources and are forced to stop.

Stealing property is directly related to why they didn't allocate resources properly. Your hypothetical amounts to "what if they could take things, without the downside of taking things".

"more motivated" is an argument about relatives, not absolutes. It is entirely possible to care about resources not belonging to you. You can care and still fuck up because you don't have a grasp on how to use those resources well.

If you're trying to say "they just respected property less, they didn't not respect property at all", sure, but I don't really think that's a devastating argument except from a very literal point of view.

You keep misunderstanding the point, and I suspect this is now intentional. At no point did I say that they respected property. My point is that it is inaccurate to say they failed directly because of it.

The Soviet Union certainly did not respect people's right to property, including their own labor. But it did not collapse because of that.

I don't see the word "directly" in there.

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