So it's a chilly Thursday morning in Brno, and everybody's in line to buy meat. They're waiting and waiting, and the line's not moving at all.
Eventually a Party official comes out and says "Due to the conspiracy of wreckers, there isn't enough meat. All the Jews need to get off the line".
So the Jews all get off the line and go home, but still everyone's waiting and there's no meat. Hours pass, and eventually the Party official comes back: "I'm sorry to report that there's still not enough meat. Everyone who's not a Party member needs to get off the line."
So all the non-party members get off the line and go home. But still all the Party members are waiting and waiting, no meat. After another two hours waiting in the cold the official comes back and says, "We're sorry but there's no meat today. Everybody get off the line."
As they're walking away from the line, one of the people who was waiting turns to the other and says: "You see? The Jews always have it the best!"
There is a board game called Kolejka [1] from a non-profit in Poland that simulates the adventure of waiting in line for staples. It’s actually quite fun, and you get a taste of life under such a regime.
EDIT: I misread the punchline of the joke. Ignore this.
That's amusing, but at the same time it is horrifically anti-semitic. Especially given what the Jewish people went through in the years leading up the the Russian Revolution (One toddler was torn apart by a fascist mob, in another town a number of months later Jewish people were forced into a church and then the church and people burned alive).
The punch line is that the anti-Semitic bigotry had the accidental effect of benefiting the Jews, who didn't have to stand in the pointless line as long.
Today, the joke would be accompanied with the "congratulations, you played yourself" meme.
Right. If anything, it's the minorities and the common people who are the long suffering heroes in the story. It's the party insiders who are portrayed as the anti-semitic and comically dim villains.
Do you think that fascism was created by the Nazis? Just because the manifesto was not written, does not mean that there were people without fascist beliefs, even if they couldn't call themselves fascists yet.
The same thing happened in Venezuela in the early 2000s when they initiated price controls to make food more "affordable" for the poor. The variety of products was the first thing that dropped to only the necessities. Then even the necessities started to drop in supply:
> Further yet, price controls, expropriation of numerous farmlands and various industries, among other disputable government policies including a near-total freeze on any access to foreign currency at reasonable "official" exchange rates, have resulted in severe shortages in Venezuela and steep price rises of all common goods, including food, water, household products, spare parts, tools and medical supplies; forcing many manufacturers to either cut production or close down, with many ultimately abandoning the country as has been the case with several technological firms and most automobile makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela#1999–2013
My wife was a student in the eastern part of Germany in the early aughts, when life in pre-unification eastern Germany was still fresh in peoples’ minds. One thing that people would say is that “before the wall fell, we had plenty of money, there just was never anything to buy.”
When I hear people say “X shouldn’t be subject to the market” I want to bang my head on the desk. You can’t just decide that, e.g. food won’t be subject to market forces by, e.g., imposing price controls. If you push on the balloon on one side, it will expand on the other side.
Based on my understanding they were simply better managed and benefited from some cross border stuff that exposed them to other markets that weren't readily available to everyone in Russia.
Similar to other states that had some association with the west where in the end they could sell products and goods outside the planned economy and that helped keep things going.
I think the GDR was just a more effective country, just like Czechoslovakia and Hungary were. In the case of the GDR, despite being led by a very small-minded clown basically sanctioned by the USSR. Russia has never had it good in hundreds of years and it kept the tradition under communism.
It's basically people with good intentions volunteering themselves into poverty during the greatest time of abundance of food in human history.
Of course it comes with plenty of western/foreign capitalist sabotage conspiracies thrown in to justify why their grand economic experiment didn't work. Then it devolves into basically purposefully underfeeding your population because of a giant lingering sunk-cost fallacy and, most importantly, an ideology to defend - on which the current power structures were built on.
Most top Communist Party leaders didn't really care about ideology. That was just a lie they fed to the masses. All they really defended was their own power and privilege.
> Of course it comes with plenty of western/foreign capitalist sabotage conspiracies thrown in to justify why their grand economic experiment didn't work.
An economy cannot work without foreign trade, being blocked from that by a major player essentially does that.
If you look at communist countries that are small enough to be self-sufficient, it tells a different story. Take Cuba, it is blocked from trade with the US and a fair chunk of other countries, however, Cuba is self-sufficient enough that it has not only survived but it has flourished, with a ridiculously high literacy rate, and a universal public health system that puts much of the world to shame.
I have but two observations left to make.
1. If the communist system was inherently a fail-state, then the US would have to do nothing but sit back and wait until it collapses. Instead of that they try relentlessly to sabotage any form of it. They tried, for example, over 600 times to assasinate the leader of Cuba. It's a real shame because it forces the communist parties to be anti-free-press, and anti-free-speech because of the risk of foreign countries abusing that to seed a revolution (Indeed, it was admitted on record that the only reason the CIA hasn't done that in Cuba is because it lacks resources, and Cuba doesn't allow full internet access (as I understand it)).
2. It took over 800 years to establish a stable republic. That doesn't mean that it could not be done, or that the republic was an inherently broken system, but it took a number of 'failures' to make a success, and the right political and societal advancements to be made.
Cuba isn't flourishing, they're entering the first stages of food deprivation right now. They've required large state sponsorship, previously by the USSR, and more recently by Venezuela, to keep from system collapse. The average income in Cuba is still close to $20 per month.
May 2019 "Cuba launches widespread rationing in face of crisis"
Cuba's history of colonization included deforestation and overuse of its agricultural
land. Before the crisis, Cuba used more pesticides than the U.S. Lack of fertiliser
and agricultural machinery caused a shift towards organic farming and urban farming.
Cuba still has food rationing for basic staples. Approximately 69% of these rationed
basic staples (wheat, vegetable oils, rice, etc.) are imported.[18] Overall,
however, approximately 16% of food is imported from abroad.[18]
and
Diaz said importing food from U.S. producers had become more complicated under
Trump, forcing Cuba to search for products that were more expensive and difficult to
import.
it is pretty obvious that the US allowing Cuba to trade with the rest of the world would more or less 'solve' those problems.
As of 2018, the embargo, which limits American
businesses from conducting trade with Cuban interests,
remains in effect and is the most enduring trade embargo
in modern history
and
The UN General Assembly has, since 1992, passed a
resolution every year condemning the ongoing impact of
the embargo and declaring it in violation of the Charter
of the United Nations and of international law. In 2014,
out of the 193-nation assembly, 188 countries voted for
the nonbinding resolution, the United States and Israel
voted against and the Pacific Island nations Palau,
Marshall Islands and Micronesia abstained. Human-rights
groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch, and the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights have also been critical of the embargo.
Critics of the embargo say that the embargo laws are too
harsh, citing the fact that violations can result in up
to 10 years in prison.
and
In a 2005 interview, George P. Shultz, who served as
Secretary of State under Reagan, called the embargo
"insane". Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato
Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, criticized
the embargo in a June 2009 article:
The embargo has been a failure by every measure. It has
not changed the course or nature of the Cuban
government. It has not liberated a single Cuban citizen.
In fact, the embargo has made the Cuban people a bit
more impoverished, without making them one bit more
free. At the same time, it has deprived Americans of
their freedom to travel and has cost US farmers and
other producers billions of dollars of potential exports.
>it is pretty obvious that the US allowing Cuba to trade with the rest of the world would more or less 'solve' those problems.
As you pointed out the US embargo prevents Americans from trading with Cuba. It affects no one else. Virtually the entire world apart from the US is against the embargo. They are all free to trade with Cuba. At the margins, the US embargo hurts Cubans, but the bulk of their economic woes are self inflicted.
I wasn't aware that state healthcare and state education works well.
A few examples of state healthcare systems in Soviet Union / Russia, UK, Hong Kong or Thailand seem to show that state healthcare is a miserable failure and those who are able to get access to private healthcare will always prefer it.
Similar with schools, it appears that people strongly prefer private schools to government schools, even in places where private schools are quite ordinary, not just for the elites, and don't require expensive tuition - competing with government schools for the same kids.
> seem to show that state healthcare is a miserable failure and those who are able to get access to private healthcare will always prefer it.
The reason why the healthcare system in the UK is failing, is because of a multi-fold problem that is too numerous to describe here, but boils down to political sabotage. Two other main reasons come to my mind:
One, privatization and outsourcing has caused mismanagement that expanded healthcare delays to an untenable point. Two, to 'repair' the 'failing' NHS, a 'target' system was set up. Hospitals that fail to meet targets have money taken from them, which causes a vicious circle whereby underperforming hospitals do not have the resources to perform better.
Also, as I understand it, the privatization of the USSR's state healthcare system made things _worse_.
The OECD reported[28] that unfortunately, none of this has worked out as planned and the
reforms have in many respects made the system worse. The population’s health has
deteriorated on virtually every measure. Though this is by no means all due to the
changes in health care structures, the reforms have proven to be woefully inadequate at
meeting the needs of the nation. Private health care delivery has not managed to make
many inroads and public provision of health care still predominates.
If someone is earnestly posting incorrect information, you should reply with a counter-argument, or upvote one that exists. Otherwise what you're doing is the exact opposite of being conductive to a dialogue, which is the entire point of the hacker news comment section. Sure, downvote people who are being disingenuous, or not being honest.
Also:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
So far, everyone has responded to my talking about Cuba, an example I picked off the top of my head as a simple demonstration (It's a shame that America cannot boast such scores in education and health, to be honest). The example was illustrative, something mentioned off-hand to solidify and strengthen a point. Nobody responded to the core of my argument, which was the more meatier part and harder to disagree with.
My central point, however "An economy cannot work without foreign trade, being blocked from that by a major player essentially does that" is supported by economists literally everywhere. In fact, it's one of the major reasons why a trade embargo is created in the first place, to suffocate a country and cause a regime change:
"By far, regime change is the most frequent foreign
policy objective of economic sanctions, accounting for
80 out of the 204 observations."
- Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (3 ed.) -- Hufbauer, Schott, Elliott, Oegg
> when life in pre-unification eastern Germany was still fresh in peoples’ minds. One thing that people would say is that “before the wall fell, we had plenty of money, there just was never anything to buy.”
This is a pretty striking echo of Kipling's verse commentary:
In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance for all
by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul
But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy
and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Just curious as to how you think fire fighting services should be priced by the market?
I'm generally very conservative and against regulation, so no need to preach Adam smith to me (I actually read Wealth of Nations... not the synopsis). Though I will say, by ycombinator standards, I'm a centrist (way too left for the right, way too right for the left).
Well, the state pays the market price, but people who use firefighting services ("consumers") typically don't pay anything. Just like health care should be, I suppose.
However, it is fruitful to point out that not all markets are created equal. Even if an exchange of money takes place in return for goods and services, the market that exists is not necessarily a free market. Sometimes this is true even in the most idealized of cases.
For example, healthcare isn’t composed of one market, but several between different operators operating under different market forces and regulatory rules. As it’s too complicated to go into each, I’ll go into one that’s most apparent; the market between patients and healthcare providers (not insurance companies!).
Assuming the most idealized of cases that exist without external constraints and regulations, this market would never be a free market. Because the buyer will never be in the position to make the decision to not buy the good. Even a rational free agent would not be in a position to disagree from making a purchase. The value each sentient lifeform places on their life is for all intents and purposes infinity in the healthcare context. No sane suicidal individual or hero would sign up for a purposeless, slow and painful death. This removes the essential mechanism that free markets have to regulate themselves; the freedom to not participate.
In most markets, if a good or service is too expensive then the business selling them will go bankrupt or remain small due to a lack of buyers. This creates an incentive for a cheaper mousetrap to exist. But healthcare isn’t like that. Your choice is severely limited. At best, you can choose between providers (though for serious, and sadly incredibly routine, issues the immediacy of needing treatment trumps this) and at worst you’re unconscious and unable to make any decisions yourself. So the element of choice isn’t present making it axiomatically not a free market.
Please note that I am not going into ancillary factors like the difficulties patients face in making informed decisions, the viral component that exists for certain classes of disease (you choosing not to do X in the case of a serious enough pathogen could lead to a sick household or an epidemic. See: the return of measles), the difficulty of rationing care (Americans spend more partly because they see their doctors less by design and are discouraged from accessing preventative care), and overall incentive misalignment between doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital staff, insurers, HMOs etc that creates runaway effects.
We treat all markets in the same way, but they aren’t all the same. The market for healthcare is different from consumer electronics and the market for plastic surgery (a procedure where I must note there is an option to say no). Reductively put, you can choose not to buy a MacBook Pro. But you can’t choose not to treat sepsis. So why does our literature usually assume that both are the same?
>>this market would never be a free market. Because the buyer will never be in the position to make the decision to not buy the good.
A free market does not mean a market where a buyer has a choice of not buying something. It only means one where the market choices of agents are not constrained by coercive intervention of other agents.
We need to buy food, but the market for food is still quite free, and consequently, very efficient.
> A free market does not mean a market where a buyer has a choice of not buying something. It only means one where the market choices of agents are not constrained by coercive intervention of other agents.
That's not how I was taught this concept. I know, Wikipedia is a bad source, but I would like to point out how widespread my specific interpetation is amongst the economics textbooks I've read;
In a free market, individuals and firms taking part in these transactions have the liberty to enter, leave and participate in the market as they so choose. Prices and quantities are allowed to adjust according to economic conditions in order to reach equilibrium and properly allocate resources.
Note, enter and leave. This means both as a producer and a consumer, without this we cannot have efficient allocation.
> We need to buy food, but the market for food is still quite free, and consequently, very efficient.
The food market is a really good counter-argument to mine, but when I was first making my observations, I found that food is a very different market that was originally constrained in similar ways but isn't. First is that it's a "market" that's nearing globalized post-scarcity (this doesn't preclude localized scarcity). We produce enough food that we can feed the global population twice over https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person (3k+ per capita for developed nations and 2k+ for underdeveloped ones).
Humans have reached this state due to government-sponsored research and sponsored application of revolutionary new technologies.
Second, our ability to process food has also led to a surplus in stored calories. We can feed ourselves even during catastrophes (though distribution will remain a challenge).
And third, historically (as I am not certain about this particular point, but it is consistent with my reading of history), prior to the green revolution, the food market was never this free - it has always been state managed to a varying degrees. From feudal lords and chieftains to the Roman grain dole, food has been a carefully managed resources until our time.
Due to its oversupply and heterogeneity, the food market has a very different structure and dynamics that are inherent to it. But, taking my argument at face value, I would argue that it is indeed possible to exit the food market - we can grow our own food! Even a small-ish farm with good practices can feed a family for a year or more using wild seeds, natural compost and herbicides alone.
I could be wrong about the definition of a free market, but the main one on Wikipedia seems to align with my perception of it:
>>In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and by consumers. In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.
Note "are free from any intervention by a government or other authority" which conforms with my argument that it's a market where the market choices of agents are not constrained by the coercive intervention of other agents. Other agents being the "government or other authority" referred to, and the "authority" alluding to an agent which exercises coercive power over others.
>>Humans have reached this state due to government-sponsored research and sponsored application of revolutionary new technologies.
In the US, since the founding of the country, it has been a very market-based sector, with government's most fruitful contributions being in basic research, as opposed to market inhibiting interventions like regulations.
That would be like the government funding basic research in healthcare, and leaving everything else mostly to people's free choices in the market.
The first places in the world where famine was vanquished were ones with heavily private agricultural sectors with strong contract and private property rights, in Western Europe and North America.
>>I would argue that it is indeed possible to exit the food market - we can grow our own food! Even a small-ish farm with good practices can feed a family for a year or more using wild seeds, natural compost and herbicides alone.
Most people cannot grow enough food to feed themselves. Saying we can exit the food market because we can grow our own food is like saying we can exit the healthcare sector because we can provide our own medical products/services. We can technically, but practically the vast majority would have a much lower quality of care if they did so.
Thanks! I have done my best to study about this topic as much as I can :)
I decided a long time ago that if I was going to be an entrepreneur; I was going to figure out how the whole stack works. And that definitely includes economics.
I’m doing my best to learn how to see things clearly and insightfully. :)
The market for food is different from the market for essential (=life-saving) medicine in that foodstuffs are largely fungible. Consumers can choose from a large variety of roughly equivalent products (e.g., substituting chicken for beef, potatoes for rice, etc.), whereas a diabetic patient cannot switch to a blood pressure medicine. Markets for many common foods can be about the same size as the national population. But markets for drugs will always be a fraction, often a tiny fraction, of the population. Price is also a consideration. While the USDA estimates it is possible to feed a family of four for around $10,000/year, many new drugs cost ten times that amount (well beyond the ability of many individuals, even insured individuals, to pay.)
> We treat all markets in the same way, but they aren’t all the same.
This is completely inaccurate. The US healthcare market (much like finance, pharmaceuticals, construction, most of the largest farming industries, etc, right down to the expensive licensing required to be a hair stylist or interior designer) are some of the most heavily regulated markets in the world.
The US health insurance market has been the farthest thing from a free market for some time. Whether health insurance would benefit from total centralization is one thing (one of the few markets I personally believe in being gov controlled).
Agencies like the FAA and FDA are some of the largest and most thorough of all regulatory agencies in the world. One that other foreign governments with allegedly "big government" administrative agencies look up to as a model replicate or simply take their findings as policy instead of testing their own.
Pretending the US economy is some capitalist free-for-all is one of the biggest global misconceptions.
The rising cost of the US health care market vs the world [1] has little to do with lack of gov intervention but the result of a centuries worth of half-baked compromises between two different worldviews, often featuring the worst of both worlds.
I feel that you are responding a different comment than mine. I have not said that it is a hyper-capitalistic free-for-all. Quite the opposite, from my comment;
> healthcare isn’t composed of one market, but several between different operators operating under different market forces and regulatory rules. As it’s too complicated to go into each, I’ll go into one that’s most apparent
The market that exists between Hospitals and Suppliers is different than Health Insurance and Consumers (and businesses) which is different from Insurance and Independent Providers... There isn’t one big “healthcare” market but several interacting with one another in removed ways.
My definition of a market is,
The term market refers to a situation where buyers (consumers) and sellers (producers) interact (directly or through intermediaries) to trade goods and services. It is a situation where forces of demand and supply interact to determine prices of goods and services being exchanged. Therefore, a market includes mechanism for: determining prices and quantities of the traded item, communicating information about prices, and for the distribution of the goods and services.
This can be argued to a certain degree for any modern commodity, but healthcare is a unique beast in how different forces for each market is and how interrelated they seem to be. However, I can be wrong about this part.
I have also said that I am proving my point in the context of an idealized free market. My goal is to show from first principles what pop literature seems to miss;
> Assuming the most idealized of cases that exist without external constraints and regulations, this market would never be a free market.
I have specified my definition of free markets elsewhere.
That's the ultimate goal of socialism: let poor be even poorer, as long as rich are less rich. Envious morons like Bernie with true believing Goolag employees as their helpers and níggêrs as their pets are accomplishing this now in the United States.
> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
It's awe-inspiring to imagine that not too long ago the societal order of multiple countries depended on their millions of residents being ignorant of such a simple fact. What really gets my mind going is the next thought: what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?
What I found crazy about this is that the leader of such a large country had no clue how western countries operate. The Soviets and their allies had plenty of spies in the West and yet their senior leadership didn't even understand the basics of everyday life for the citizens of the countries they were prepared to launch nuclear missiles at. The west was likewise ignorant of much of the details of life behind the Iron Curtain though that's a bit more understandable given the secretive nature of the Soviets.
What struck me is that we don't know if the Soviets are being accurately quoted in this article. They could write a lot of exaggerations and not be called on them.
You assume that I hadn't seen the video before writing that.
Look at the quotes. They are over the top. You don't think it's possible that a 1989 reporter could have taken some liberties and not been called on it?
It was 1989, Yeltsin was not a president of Russia. At the time he was a regional Communist Party leader just elected to the (kind of a) parliament of Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic - RSFSR, then still a member of USSR. He would be elected a President of RSFSR in 1990, and in 1991, after dissolution of USSR, Russia became an independent country. Unless one was a diplomat or KGB or shown a special interest in learning the way of life in "the West", there was not too much exposure even for people at his level.
From some family experiences, whatever intelligence services reported to Party bosses, if it did not agree with the Party dogma, it would be ignored.
Besides, they lived much better than the average Soviet citizen (degree of inequality was far greater than that between a ghetto dweller and Zuck), and that's what they wanted to preserve.
That's because it is genuine. Take it from a Canadian who has had to wait many months multiple times for MRIs. Right now I have a tear in my hip joint that needs an MRI, been waiting since November, still nothing. Meanwhile I'm yelping in pain when I try to stand up from sitting down.
Both times I needed an MRI in Japan I got it within hours of being referred to a major hospital. My out of pocket costs were ¥10,000 ($120 CAD). Japanese spend a bit less per capita on healthcare than Canada:
When will people understand the what works for one country won't magically work in another country with a vastly different economy, population, geography, and a million other things?
I mean, even ignoring advanced reasons and thinking about this logically, do you really think healthcare for a country with 348 people per square kilometer scales to a country with 4 people per square mile?
Yes, considering that per capita Canada has more money than Japan and spends more on healthcare? I think total population density is misleading when Canada’s population is very concentrated in a few cities.
I accept that Japan has the most MRI machines per capita in the entire world, but the question is why is that? It could be economy of scale, but that doesn’t explain why Japan is such an outlier globally
You think spending 2% more will result in comparable healthcare to a country with 870% higher population density?
> I think total population density is misleading when Canada’s population is very concentrated in a few cities.
Ah yes of course, because you can just abandon those who don't live in the few cities.
-
It's almost like this is a complex issue you can't simplify by examining one dimension at a time, but even if for a second you smoke test this idea by singling out population density, it's absurd to expect similar outcomes.
That's incredible. Which province are you from? I know that over the 6 years I spent in Alberta (I'm from BC), I was always shaking my head at how much worse their healthcare was than it was back home in BC. It really is a crying shame how the stark difference is between provinces and the quality of care provided.
These situations are rare despite what the occasional outrage-inducing news story would have you believe. Here in Ontario for example, the average wait time for urgent patients is 1 day, for high-priority (target 10 days) it's 15 days, and for low priority (target 28 days) it was 58 days. Detailed, up-to-date stats for this are available at https://www.hqontario.ca/System-Performance/Wait-Times-for-D...
As bad as it is in the US, I can get seen the same day or next day.
I had a thrombosed hemroid, I called and got an apointment the next day with a specialist. He confirmed my diagnosis and I got surgery to drain and remove it the following day. Only cost me less than 200 dollars after insurance.
I had a bump on my testicle. I was concerned about cancer, so I see my regular doctor. $20 copay and he said it was just a blood something. I wanted to be sure, so he refered me and I got an ultrasound the same day at another facility. That only cost me a $100-something dollars after insurance. (It wasn't cancer.)
Thrombosed hemroid where 95% of people treat it by soaking it in water daily? Probably low-priority, 58 days. Waiting 58 days for an ultrasound to see if you have cancer?
Yeah, I'll keep the coverage/insurance that I have. I still understand the vast majority doesn't have it as good as I do and we still need to fix the system. I think we can bring people's standards up to what I experience, not down to what Canada experiences.
I don't know about Canada but in most countries with socialized health care you can always opt in for private care, on a case by case basis, at very reasonable prices (since private care has to compete with public care).
Canada is one of the few (the only?) countries where it is specifically illegal to offer privately a service that is covered by public insurance. For the most part, there is no option to opt in for private care as an alternative.
>The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
I think it depends on the area. I have Kaiser now, in the Silicon Valley, and I've never waited more than a day for a specialist. Oftentimes I can even go in the same visit as my GP after he refers me.
I think it's the same in Canada. In some areas there are no waits and in other areas there are long waits. I think they need to look at percentiles to get a more accurate measure.
This says that, Going by referral to consultation (not treatment, that takes another 10 weeks), the shortest waits for specialist consultations are 6.7 weeks in Ontario and longest are in New Brunswick (26.6 weeks)
Including treatment times, the variation is 15.4 weeks to 41.7 weeks.
Just as an FYI, the Fraser institute is one of those organizations where you know the conclusion of their report just by seeing the subject in the title. I would be gobsmacked if I read an article by them that had anything positive to say about Canadian healthcare.
First, understand that there isn't really a Canadian federal health care system. The Canadian government (federal) transfers funds to the provinces, which operate health plans for provincial residents. The provincial health plans control the number of available specialists. A health care provider can only bill the provincial plan if they have a billing number, and the provincial plans manage billing numbers to limit/encourage specialists and to make sure doctors provide services in less populous areas. I don't know if it's still the case, but historically there was no private alternative available (so doctors couldn't operate a private practice that didn't need a billing number from the provincial plan). If provinces chose to allow private practices, the federal government threatened to withhold funds from the plan.
As with most western democracies, Canadian doctors are well compensated in comparison to the rest of society. But it is generally understood that they can make more money in the US if they qualify for immigration (and many can because of rules allowing people with specialist skills to get immigrant visas). This also contributes to reduced supply of specialists, and longer waiting times.
To get to see one of the available specialists in Canada, you have to have a referral from a primary care provider. Here in the US (in my experience) a referral is as simple as saying to your GP, "I want to see a cardiologist." Then your GP says "Oh, sure, this one's very good. I'll refer you." In Canada, your GP has to follow plan guidelines for referrals, and confirm that it is warranted. Then you get on the waiting list for the specialist. You'll wait for a consultation. At the consultation the specialist will determine whether or not you need treatment, and the urgency. Then you go on the waiting list for treatment.
Of course, Canadians with the financial resources are free to travel to other countries to obtain medical treatment more quickly. The provincial medical plans do not pay for treatments obtained outside of Canada. Medical "tourism" is not that unusual, including travel to the US and other countries.
Where are you? A friend of our’s has some heart issues. It was probably a couple of weeks between when his doctor in Iowa referred him and when specialists in Minnesota were seeing him.
Maybe that’s another reason folks in the different sides are basically talking past each other. If you’re not in a major urban area, seeing a doctor is very fast in the US. When I lived in DC it could take a month or more to get a routine pediatrician’s appointment (something like a physical for school enrollment). In exurban Maryland I can often get them the next day, rarely more than a few days.
The reason people are talking past each other is because they’re basing their opinions on personal experience and anecdotes. If you look at the data we pay more for worse outcomes.
We pay a lot more for worse outcome in education too, don't we (and from what I heard, in infrastructure also), so by what reason can we believe that Healthcare would be totally different?
>This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
Why? Are there more sick people? Are there fewer doctors and resourced? I've seen many articles covering the issue, but nothing that provides a concrete explanation for why a system used to work but doesn't anymore.
Yes, mainly due to an ageing population and partly due to obesity. An increasingly old and obese population needs more healthcare and is more complicated and expensive to treat.
I don't think this is quite true. And if I were to accept it as a hypothetical, what you are saying is that if too many people need to see a specialist, many of them should outright not be able to because they do not have enough resources. Which is ethically horrific.
No I'm saying the supply is artificially constrained by the price of "free" so there is less incentive to go into medicine, hence shortages at the price demanded.
No, but they aren't compensated nearly as well due to the market prices being "set" lower than what they can command in another market. i.e. practicing medicine in the U.S. commands a higher wage than in Canada so doctors leave the Canadian system after completing their residency. Hence, the shortage of supply caused by a market distorted by socialism.
In the capitalist paradise of the United States, as I sit here, covered by top-of-the-line health insurance...
My wife needed 3 months to schedule a sleep doctor appointment, 3 months to schedule a minimally-invasive surgery (That manages to bill her, and the insurer wrong), and every time she needs a re-fill of her prescriptions, it's a complete fucking crap-shoot of whether or not:
1. The manufacturer managed to produce enough pills to fill its orders.
2. The pharmacy bothers to call her, to notify that the prescriptions are in.
3. That the prescriptions are actually in, and that she didn't waste her time walking to the grocery store.
Meanwhile, on my side of things, I end up watching my insurance get billed $750 for 5 minutes of a doctor's (And 15 minutes of his assistant's) time. This is truly the most humanitarian, efficient, and accountable medical system on the face of the planet.
> Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner.
'Medically necessary' is an irrelevant qualifier. All treatment is medically necessary, if it weren't, the GP wouldn't prescribe it, and Canada wouldn't pay for it.
The term you're looking for is 'Non-life-threatening'.
That has been my experience. I've walked into an ER twice with heart palpitations. The first time I had an EKG, chest x-ray, and specialist consult and was in and out within 45 minutes. The second time was more serious and I was admitted, treated, seen by a cardiologist, and sent to a cardiac ward for overnight monitoring without being taken off the gurney. I know people who have walked in to their GP to investigate a lump in their breast and been under the knife a week later. They don't mess around with serious time-sensitive stuff.
But I have heard that the wait time for old people who need hip or knee replacements is quite excessive.
> 'Medically necessary' is an irrelevant qualifier. All treatment is medically necessary, if it weren't, the GP wouldn't prescribe it, and Canada wouldn't pay for it.
This is nowhere close to being true. Patients frequently demand treatment that the doctor, left to his own devices, wouldn't give.
My least favorite example of this comes from China, where people will go to the hospital to get intravenous saline solution for a common cold, but it's ubiquitous everywhere including the US.
From the point of view of the Canadian healthcare system, they can't tell that apart from actually necessary care. If a doctor prescribed it, and it's a covered procedure, it is considered necessary, and a hospital will do it.
Hence, medical care is either life threatening (which will get you seen ASAP), medically necessary (which may take some time to get to, depending on the procedure), or medically unnecessary (which is not covered by the healthcare system, and your wait time will be until the heat death of the universe.)
There is no 'a doctor said that we should do this, but we think he's full of shit, so we are scheduling you X months in the future' tier of medical care in Canada. You either need it now, need it, or don't.
If the hospitals can't tell the difference between necessary and unnecessary care apart, then the study authors sure as shit can't. That's why the quantifier of 'necessary medical procedure' is a weasel word. If the procedure is covered, it is by definition, necessary.
The average wait to see a specialist across the US is closer to 24 days, the longest it's ever been - the average in Canada is 21 weeks, also the longest recorded.
since you seem to have the data handy, could you check what's the average number of people filing for bankruptcy for medical reasons in Canada vs. the US per year?
It's true. I needed to get an MRI in Canada. The doctor said it wasn't necessary and even if I was put on the queue, it would be 9 months. I asked to see a neurologist. The wait? At least 6 months, absolute minimum.
I moved to the US. When the doctor told me the wait would be a couple weeks and to call back if I was having issues, I laughed. I was amazed. And the MRI was absolutely necessary.
You don't need coverage for MRI, as Canadian there is whole industry near border dedicated to servicing Canadian on wait lists. You drive over border, get MRI done(tomorrow), then get a dvd with results. Done. Cost is less then a $1000cdn vs waiting for 3 month
Same for some kinds of surgeries. Friend was bounced around in TO for a year he needed some knee reconstruction. He could walk but nothing else but it was not a priority.. So drove over border, had consultation, drove week later and had it done. I am not sure what it cost, but he is not rich, typical sysadmin job
Poor people with free healthcare in the US can get MRIs and CT scans almost on command. All you need to do is have a normal reason and go see a physician. Your wait time will be less than two weeks typically.
How do I know? I grew up exclusively utilizing free healthcare for the poor. I never had any other kind until I was an adult. I still know a lot of poor people from where I grew up that rely on programs like Medicaid. They have no problem expeditiously accessing normal things like MRIs and CTs.
Here in the UK, I have to wait about three weeks for a GP appointment. The NHS target for routine appointments with a specialist is 18 weeks, but that target is habitually missed. Routine surgeries are frequently postponed due to a lack of capacity. Many treatments are unavailable due to a lack of funding.
We do spend less than half as much on healthcare per capita than the US and we have better health outcomes by most measures, but it's very much a no-frills system.
It's a tricky issue, the NHS is probably understaffed and underfunded but also extremely expensive already. Massively gutted isn't really true: Spending ( % GDP) has decreased but levels are still at record absolute spending
Nurses are to the UK what Soldiers are to the US, any criticism of the NHS is effectively shot down as Capitalist propaganda. There are some serious questions to be asked about the NHS, which arguably cannot be answered (Even if the result is staying with the status quo) due to an extremely sceptical and anti-capitalist left wing.
In Alabama and Georgia I've never waited more than a week to see an ENT and sometimes have even gotten a same day appointment. These things seem to vary quite a bit by region.
I’ll believe in socialized medicine in the US when they fix Indian Health Service. Until that day, if the politicians cannot come up with a decent system for a small part of the population then they cannot for everyone.
Heck, it only took three operations to fix a botched root canal, and I considered myself lucky.
But we actually do as long is it's not a life treatning disease.
As an example, I am now waiting 2 months to see my family doctor (I just need prescriptions for simple anti histamines, since it's cheaper that way), and 3 years to see a dermatologist for a routine check.
On the other side, a member of my family unfortunately was diagnosed cancer about 3 weeks ago, and she had several medical appointments every week since then.
I had a super weird one. I worked for a startup with a British CTO who was very Republican and would constantly rail against poor people and talk about how the NHS killed people and made them wait months.
I was like, wait, you lived there, experienced the opposite of what you're saying and STILL manage to make up lies to make it sound bad? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!
> what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known
One example I would suggest is how incredibly simplified (very often to the point of being objectively not true) the various hot button topics of the world are described in the media (official and social), if they are reported on at all.
One of the main reasons "fake" news is so successful is that it's so easy to find untruths to exploit in the official or status quo descriptions of reality.
This. The level of discourse in mainstream news is gobsmacking in its simplicity. This recent "capitalism v socialism" debate revolves around a limited set of widely accepted aphorisms, happily tossed back and forth like handfuls of sand on a playground. No one bothers to disaggregate these words, examine their premises, or fit together different components to see what shakes out. Or, god forbid, ask whether they are even useful abstractions.
That's true, but I don't think any other state of affairs is possible. Compare this selection from SPQR:
> The first word of the second book of Livy's History, which begins the story of Rome after the monarchy, is 'free'; and the words 'free' and 'freedom' are together repeated eight times in the first few lines alone. The idea that the Republic was founded on libertas rings loudly throughout Roman literature, and it has echoed through radical movements in later centuries, in Europe and America. It is no coincidence that the slogan of the French Revolution -- Liberté, égalité, fraternité -- puts 'liberty' in pride of place; nor that George Washington spoke of restoring 'the sacred fire of liberty' to the West; nor that the drafters of the United States Constitution defended it under the pseudonym of 'Publius', taken from the name of Publius Valerius Publicola, another of the earliest consuls of the Republic. But how was Roman liberty to be defined?
> That was a controversial question in Roman political culture for the next 800 years, through the Republic and into the one-man rule of the Roman Empire, when political debate often turned on how far libertas could ever be compatible with autocracy. Whose liberty was at stake? How was it most effectively defended? How could conflicting versions of the freedom of the Roman citizen be resolved? All, or most, Romans would have counted themselves as upholders of libertas, just as today most of us uphold 'democracy'. But there were repeated and intense conflicts over what that meant.
> That's true, but I don't think any other state of affairs is possible.
As a proof of this, you point out one of many ways that words can be used to muddy the waters. I would argue a "different state of affairs" (an improvement at least) could be achieved via a concerted effort by multiple influential people or organizations to point out that contrary to the simplistic perspectives and "facts" we're fed by the media, the world is actually extremely complex and we usually only have an approximate idea of what's really going on.
I'd argue that we have the opposite problem today - there are too many simple facts unacknowledged, too many truths unspoken, too much information, so much that our reaction is to shut down and look for simplicity and easy answers where there are none. To quote Nietzsche (albeit from a different context):
You trip over truths. You even crush some to death, there are too many of them.
Yes, but I mean income. Real Estate is pretty conspicuous by its nature.
The fact that this is so down voted supports my premise that this makes people uncomfortable. I don't have an agenda, I just think this is something people try very hard to hide.
Yeltsin by that time hadn't bought any groceries for close to 30 years as was (and still is) common for the ruling elite in Russia. He probably didn't even fully understand the extent of the scarcity his people were experiencing while he was letting his oligarch friends pillage and burn the remains of the USSR. This is kind of like when Ellen DeGeneres asked Bill Gates how much a banana costs, and his guess was $10.
So the extent of Yeltsin being "amazed" is likely vastly exaggerated here. He was a charismatic hick from the boonies, and being treated as a semi-equal by his peers in the US went to his head quite quickly and hard. He was eager to please. But no one in the West was ever confused about what he was.
That was a scene from the fictional TV show Arrested Development.
> Lucille: Don’t you judge me. You’re the selfish one. You’re the one who charged his own brother for a Bluth frozen banana. I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars?
I take umbrage to his guesses being reasonable. It's obvious Gates has no idea the cost of things. He isn't even in the right ballpark on most of them, with the floss being the only thing he got. It's pretty sad in my opinion
> what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?
I don't know about revolution, but most Americans tend to be pretty shocked about the rapid development of China. Even those who have some understanding get surprised seeing it for themselves.
I offer you a contra thought. We have unparalleled access to information, we have Wikipedia, free online courses, video documentaries, books, you name it. Yet 1/10 people believe the earth is flat, 1/5 does not understand that homeopathy is a fraud, 1/3 believes different races have different levels of intelligence, 1/2 believe in some religion, 3/4 are proud to be born in the given nation and 4/5 never heard of the law of comparative advantages (aka why import taxes hurt economy).
My point is society has already gained all value that can be extracted from free knowledge and information. What we see today is the base level of human dumbness.
> My point is society has already gained all value that can be extracted from free knowledge and information.
This doesn't really follow. Just because the information is available doesn't necessarily mean society will instantly absorb it or trust it.
Right now we're in the early stages of the information boom, where there's a lot of information floating around, but it's difficult to validate that information and determine whether or not it's accurate. Hopefully in the coming decades we as a society will figure out better means of such validation and start to actually address the problems around "fake news" and other sources of misinformation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much.
And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.
Lots of us are unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of soviet communism. Were people paid for their labor? Was everyone given ration cards? Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
Yes. Different jobs paid different amounts, and people were paid for overtime. (With a bunch of malarkey about what exactly qualifies as overtime.) Some jobs had a harder time attracting workers, because of relatively poor conditions + poor pay, compared to others.
Most prices for essential goods (Basic food, housing) was set by the government to be very low. Many well-paid people had money, that they couldn't really spend in the official system.
> Was everyone given ration cards?
Yes. There were a large number of consumer goods (meat, vodka, butter) that were rationed. Other goods, of which there were no real shortages of (In the post-war period), were bought at regular stores. If you weren't a drinker, you would often trade your vodka ration to someone who was.
For yet other goods, of which there were shortages of (Fresh vegetables, for instance), the government encouraged private production of them. Some Russians had plots of personal land.
You could have a plot of personal land in one of two ways. You could either be a collectivized farmer, and, after you met your annual slave-like obligations to the collective, you could work on farming your small personal plots. Alternatively, you could be a well-off city resident, owning a datcha (A small summer home, often with a small plot of land.)
You could then grow produce on your personal plot of land, and sell it at farmer's markets. Due to shortages, and artificially low prices in the official system, food at farmer's markets cost many times what it would cost at a grocery.
> Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
Official government prices for food were very cheap, and if you weren't picky, there was no shortage of cheap calories that you could buy. So, people weren't starving to death, but if you wanted more then your 500g of sausage, and 90g of butter/month, you needed to spend money in the private markets.
Party members in good standing had access to party-only stores, which sold more limited items.
> I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
No. You see, the Soviet Union never actually reached communism - for its entire history, it claimed to be in a transitional period, from capitalism to communism. Once communism would be reached, there would be plenty for all, and money would, obviously, be irrelevant! (Or not. The powers that be weren't super-clear as to how exactly that would work, and none of the citizens really gave a shit, because it was clear to everyone with a room-temperature-or-higher IQ that communism would not ever be reached in their lifetimes, and that it's better for your mental and physical health to not ask too many questions about it.)
But, in the meantime, as people were working their way towards communism, money was still necessary as an incentive for good work. State-ran businesses did financial accounting, they would purchase raw goods from other state-ran businesses, would sell their products through state-ran stores. For consumer goods, there would be multiple competing brands, with different quality, and pricing.
The difference between the USSR and the USA, in this sense, is where the profits would go, and how much of the accounting was 'real'. The government would often place economic orders that it wouldn't need to pay for (If the army needs to move a 50 soldiers from Moscow to Vladivostok, it doesn't pay the transportation department the price of 50 train tickets.) It would also do financial malarkey with the profits of state enterprises (To subsidize things like staple foods, housing, education, medical care, etc, which were provided to the citizenry at below-cost prices.)
PS: Bonus point:
You may ask: Well, what did people who had extra money/vodka/etc do with it?
There were a few things you could spend it on - there were some non-essential consumer goods that had vastly inflated sticker prices. Luxury goods (Which you might buy second-hand from a party member, who bought theirs from an official, party-only store), and domestic appliances were one example. Cars, were another - they would cost multiple years of wages - and also came with a multi-year, sometimes decade-long waiting period.
Bribes were a third one - with a large bribe, you could often shave a few years off your waiting period for a car.
The black market was a fourth one - a lot of people in the Soviet Union stole from their workplaces. And I do mean a lot. There weren't department stores, you couldn't go into a Lowe's, and buy a bunch of new roof shingles for your datcha. Yet, everyone who cared about the roof of their datcha had new roof shingles. How was this possible?
The answer is, of course, elementary. What you would do, is get in touch with an alcoholic who works at the roof shingle factory, he will arrange for a pallet of shingles to fall off the back of the delivery truck, and you will arrange for him to get fifty rubles, and four bottles of vodka. He will be drunk for two days, the truck driver will buy a radio for his girlfriend, his workplace will do some accounting bullshit to try to avoid blame, the government construction site that expects these shingles will have to delay work for a week, and the Regional Minister of Construction Supplies will give a radio speech about how if we only worked really hard, to produce enough roof shingles, in a few decades, we will finally attain communism, and we might have department stores, where private citizens could go to, and purchase shingles for their datchas.
It's all insane, of course, but I've yet to live in a country which wasn't.
Only during the very tail end of it. But I have asked all of these questions to my parents, and all four of my grandparents.
Between all of us, we had two cars, one datcha, one relative who was an agricultural auditor (and, therefore, recipient of food-related bribes), one black and white television, one vacuum cleaner, a few people with the status of 'victims of political repression' (awarded post-1991), one four-room apartment with a solarium (for six people), and one three-room apartment (for five people).
So, all-in all, we were quite well-to do. (Thanks to my grandparents, who were factory workers. My parents, who were physics professors, were not making very much.)
My earliest memories include standing in bread lines during the transition period in the early 90s, reading through textbooks with pro-communist pages crossed out, and listening to TV news announce a higher and higher dollar to ruble exchange rate on a day-over-day basis.
It depends who you're talking to. If you're talking about what the founders of modern Communist theory thought Communism is then you're incorrect; Marx sets out in Capital specifically what he considers to be wrong with money and wage labour in general - its genesis in commodity exchange, as Engels said, money is contained "in embryo" in the fact of commodity exchange.
The USSR, as a matter of fact, operated under mostly capitalist conditions, capitalism distinguished by:
* The predominance of wage labour in the economy
* The goal of economic activity as the accumulation of capital
* Private ownership of means of production (this is the "mostly" part - the USSR did not have much private ownership, which sets it apart from other capitalisms, but Marx was careful to point out that even under simple "public ownership", society becomes a "general capitalist")
In short: if there is wage labour, it is most definitely not "Communist". Money in its function as money in the circuit of capital, that is, C-M-C', remains money, not merely a symbolic "voucher". Socialists have proposed the idea of non-exchangable labour vouchers, but this is a far cry from real money which was what the USSR had. The ruble was just as much money as the dollar.
Nit - the goal of economic activity in the USSR was not entirely the accumulation of capital - it was production of what were considered necessary goods. Televisions, automobiles, bombs, tanks, that sort of thing.
This is, in some ways different from economic activity for the purpose of making more money (Which, in addition to producing things like television, automobiles, bombs, and tanks, also ends up producing things like advertising.)
That's a good point, but according to my knowledge this was a matter of degree rather than quality - almost all countries have or have had such production in whole or in part, implemented through subsidies and especially during wartime or other hardships. It's also to be expected when production is at least nominally democratic and central, it's not all about simple appearances. But what distinguishes a socialist society from any other is that goods would no longer be produced as commodities - i.e they are not imbued with the form of labour which tailors for exchange over use. Capital tends to totalize all labour into that which works for exchange over use, e.g. it has subsumed artwork and non-tangible goods from things of use into things with exchange value and a use-value. But exchange value tends to prevail and even changes the concrete form of labour, e.g. advertising as you suggested, and also, for instance, music sold on platforms like Spotify to maximize revenue, such as shorter, highly-replayable and segmented songs. Capital exists no less for the state, which will tend to share the same motivations as other capitalists, especially since it must buy and sell to other states or private individuals abroad.
Ruble wasn't quite as much money as a dollar -- it's value, both relative to other currencies, and relative to goods, was completely artificial.
Also, that value was different for different people. I.e., if you were an average citizen, you could spend on bread, maybe meat, and vodka. Once a year you might get a "zakaz" (literally, it means an order, as in mail-order, but in practice a way of distributing some scarce goods to people deemed worthy; you'd still have to pay for it, of course) with maybe a piece of imported salami or a can of pineapple. If you were, say, a driver for Central Committee member, you could get into a different store, which at least had all the staples all the time. And if you were a Central Committee member, you would just shop in a store that had some pretty nice stuff, at a prices that werre set in 1930s and haven't changed since then. Obviously, your ruble would go much further in that case.
That obviously depends on the communist you ask. I don't think many would support privately owned real estate – that is, land you own but don't use it yourself but rent it out or use wage labor to do something with it. Personal property – property you use yourself like a house you live in – is a different matter.
A transition state towards communism. That's what the government officially called it. The country spent 74 years in that 'transition' state.
It had little in common with the socialist democracies of Europe, nothing in common with the communist proscriptions of Marx, and some in common with the much maligned state capitalism of today's China.
When Ivan was a boy, he asked a Party Man, "How will we know when true communism has been acheived?"
The Party Man thought for a little bit, and said, "The shops will be full of goods, and there will be no money."
Decades later, in the early 1990s, Ivan is now an old man. He looks through the windows of the department stores, and sticks his hands in pickets. He smiles to himself, and whispers, "At last, true communism!"
My grandfather visited Moscow after chernobyl on invitation by some radiation chemistry prof he knew. You had to stand in line to buy a weight quantity of bread and other basic necessitys like cheese, butter oder meat. There was only one type of bread. They ate their eveninglunch in a park. I can not tell how the food was for official delegations but this was what a privat dinner with a relative well off friend looked like.
I'm not saying there aren't any reasons. But since the people nominally owned the Soviet economy, it's odd to assume by default that the people is charging itself.
They got away from that idiocy once they starved 10mil+ people to death. Money was there and barter(vodka as premium item that could get you anything, like seeing good doctor, getting car fixed, getting caviar). Also those stores also sold from the back to their friends
Well I think a certain amount of food should be free, and only really communists talk about that kind of thing historically. I was curious if that had been implemented there. For example in present day japan individuals do not pay for medical care. I wondered if the soviets ever tried to do that with food.
I’d like to see free food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and internet access made available to all people. I just wondered if the soviets tried any of that.
It’s interesting the notion of waiting in lines. Yesterday at Home Depot I needed a four foot length of hose cut from their hose area. Most employees, even a pair standing and talking right near the hose, said they couldn’t help me, we needed someone from plumbing. They called three separate times for someone from plumbing and after 10 minutes or so someone arrived. But another man had been waiting since just before me, so he was helped first. That took an additional 20 minutes. Even once he came to me, it took maybe 10 minutes because the hose didn’t have the right SKU and he didn’t know what to put on the ticket.
So I had to wait more than 30 minutes for a single piece of hose.
I bet that’s not as bad as lines were sometimes in the Soviet system, but it’s not fantastic on its own. Imagine if Boris Yeltsin had to wait 30 plus minutes for a four foot length of hose that none of the employees standing around were able or willing to help him with...
I’ve been remembering to go to the small Ace Hardware store in town lately. They are much smaller but still seem to have stock of the right items, and I can get a person or two to help me immediately.
Capitalism as we know it played a big role in the abundance we’ve had here, but it has also left the US with the most expensive medical care and alienated individuals. Our system may be better than the Soviet system in many ways, but is it the best we can do?
I was just thinking about this myself, having recently had to spend exorbitant times waiting in line at both my local Sprint store and a Best Buy. It does seem like this is a problem that isn't specific to Home Depot (where I've had to wait in long lines as well); it's more a problem that seems to be metastasizing across all sorts of big retail.
My suspicion is that it has something to do with the jobs these companies offer being increasingly precarious, poorly trained and ill-paid. Corporate America has spent decades striving to get to a point where workers can be treated as interchangeable widgets, swapped around at will and just discarded when they wear out. Well, they got there, and now we discover that when you build an entire culture around treating people without respect they don't have a lot of respect for you or the job you're asking them to do either.
Workers in the old Soviet Union supposedly had a joke: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." It's not hard to imagine someone working first-line customer support at a big box store saying the same thing.
Only if you've got alternatives. Where I am, your choices are Home Depot or ten-foot-wide hardware stores where you can find any bolt you want but can't get a sheet of plywood.
Sure... but you're living in a rural area! What do you expect? I also live 20+ minutes from big box stores. Being away from civilization is kinda the point of being in the country, no?
Watch the 1990s era video linked in the original article (and mentioned elsewhere in the commentary here). Those 90s Muscovites were living in the most urban part of the Soviet Union. Just imagine trying to get a grade 8 bolt in the countryside.
I live in Somerville, Massachusetts. It is the sixth most densely populated city in the United States that isn't part of the NYC metro area. That's why the hardware stores are the size of closets. If I lived in a rural area--well, I grew up in Maine, surrounded by large hardware stores that frequently did have that sort of thing, like the Aubuchon Hardware chain. Home Depot is the only store in the city, and the only one within quick-trip distance outside of the city, that has a broad selection and services like rough-cutting.
(I do like Tags in Porter Square, but their selection is lacking. Great people though.)
In the outskirts of San Francisco (where I moved from), it's easy to find massive hardware and fixture stores that aren't Home Depot. The East Bay is full of them too. In LA and Sacramento there are literally giant industrial parks full of retail stores dedicated to specific home improvement niches. I once spent nearly a whole day walking door-to-door looking at flooring.
Of course, it might take you an hour to get across town if you time traffic badly...
The rich cities (basically just the ones around Boston) in MA basically don't have anyone who does things themselves so there's minimal need for hardware stores. All the nuts and bolts get driven in from the suburbs in the back of tradesmen's vans as they go to work for the day. Basically everything in the Boston area is optimized for white collar professionals and college students. There's only the bare minimum of everything else.
Meanwhile I live in a "blighted shithole" in MA and anything I could possibly want to buy is likely within a 20min drive. Like, I needed a CV shaft for a (not obscure but not common) 25yo car last week and four(!) different stores had it in stock, two stores had multiple different options. If I lived in the Boston area I would have been dragging my ass to the massive Autozone in Framingham
Most of the tradesmen who work for our property management business live in Somerville, Medford, or Malden, I think. I haven't done an exhaustive poll, though.
(They all spend half their lives at thay same Home Depot, too.)
The nearest one of comparable size is a Lowe's, which is probably 45 minutes away in favorable traffic. Too far for a lunch errand for sure, especially with Home Depot literally three stoplights from my house. I'm not aware of anything between a Home Depot/Lowe's and an Ace Hardware in my area.
There are a lot of smaller stores, don't get me wrong. But figuring out which has inventory, which can cut something so it fits in my car, etc. - functionally, Home Depot just wins. Which is a bummer, 'cause their service can be really bad. I try to know exactly what I need before I even go in, and try to minimize the need for stuff like cut-to-size services even though my hatchback isn't huge.
Do you realize those videos are from after the Soviet economy crashed, right? I'm not trying to apologize for the terrible economic system employed by the Soviets, but to call that video representative of 40 years is just wrong.
ah... Home Depot dysfunction. yesterday, at Home Depot a fellow customer told me about his experience buying bags of gravel. he paid for the materials and the HD workers told him they'd bring it out to the loading area so he could put it in his vehicle.
he waited there for forty minutes. no gravel. his patience ran out and he decided to ask for a refund. they sent him to the refund desk, which, naturally, required him to return the gravel before they could give back his money.
Ace barely scratches the surface if you need to do anything beyond what a normal homeowner would do by themselves. It's the training wheels of hardware stores but the selection (and quality) of tools is a lot lower because for higher priced, more specialized stuff nobody goes there.
I agree, but Home Depot has been piling a lot of junk on their shelves lately. Think the $5 keychain package with strap when a $0.50 loop will do. Do they stock the $0.50 loop? Good luck finding them or anyone that will know where they are! But you'll surely have no problem finding the big stand of trinkets next to the terrible key cutting machine.
Ace will just have a bin of loops and you pick the ones you want, done.
This pattern, over and over. Yes, you CAN get great stuff at Home Depot for a decent price, but good luck getting out of there with all your bits at a reasonable price. It just seems to me that they're losing sight of what makes a big box store useful.
Of course if I want a stack of PVC or conduit or pressure treated lumber I'm probably going to Home Depot (or a local lumber supplier.)
This guy was looking for cuts of hose. That's an Ace visit.
My not particularly large community has a Menard's and a decent lumber yard (that also sells nice hardware items) and a place ~10 miles away that you can order whatever from.
I sort of hate Menard's, but they do charge a lot less than the better builder stores.
Another small town I've lived in had a Home Depot and a higher end builder store right across the street.
Yesterday at Home Depot I needed a four foot length of hose cut from their hose area. Most employees, even a pair standing and talking right near the hose, said they couldn’t help me, we needed someone from plumbing. They called three separate times for someone from plumbing and after 10 minutes or so someone arrived.
I was at Home Depot to get some roller blinds, which they advertised they could cut to measurements. I got the blinds and went to the machine, which basically had a thing to spin the blinds around and cutting blade screw-clamped to a ruler-like fixture, which allowed adjustment to measurements. (The point being, that you could align the blade to any measurement shown on the ruler.)
A store clerk finally comes after a long time, and I give her the measurements. Her response: "The machine doesn't do fractions." This was clearly a lie. The machine did fractions. The clerk didn't.
Not even in the same ballpark, imagine having to queue up for 5-6h to be able to buy your monthly ration of 1kg of sugar in the only shop in town without knowing if it will run out by the time you get there or not.
30m waiting time with the option of coming back or going somewhere else is a breeze.
A singular example of 'having to wait for a few minutes' in Home Depot doesn't really help make your case.
Whatever we might not like about the 'Big Box' nature of it ... 'Home Depot' is actually an excruciatingly example of that which is articulated in the article.
HD is this massive place where you can buy a gazillion different types of products (and services); there is an amazing degree of variety and specialization in every little aspect of it all.
Home Depot is in many ways a luxury store of the suburban middle class, a blatant example of the massive surpluses inherent in the modern economy. It's a testament to a lot of things. It's a kind of 'bourgeois for the masses'.
Consider for a moment that such a thing doesn't even exist in Europe! Now, most of this is cultural, in that, for a variety of historical reasons, they don't have that 'DOY' kind of culture; but make no mistake, it's also economic. People generally don't have the garage space (or a garage/shed) in which to store all of the semi useful bounty they collect from such a place. And neither the income to support it.
If HD were a place wherein it was impossible to get service, where staff 'knew nothing' and it was a desperately terrible business, then I think there'd be a point to be made but as it stands ... 'having to wait in line once for something' is almost crossing the line into entitlement.
And of course, the reason lines existed in the Soviet Union is something else entirely, and so the comparison is problematic to begin with.
Education and Health Services are 'problem areas' for capitalism, at least in the American sense, but I suggest with some meaningful reforms, it could work out. A handful of European nations have 'somewhat/mostly private' though still 'socialized' systems that work well.
"He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution.". This is really a historical statement. If we can move past issues of national pride and the 'we are better / I told you so' jingoisms, there's a lot to be learned from this. In fact, so few statements communicate so much.
In what sense does such a thing as Home Depot not exist in Europe? In Ireland we have two chains of big warehouse-style DIY stores: Woodies and B&Q, sized around 50,000 sq ft. In both of them you can get power tools, timber, bathroom and plumbing supplies, garden furniture, paint, flooring, doors...
I've never been in a Home Depot but they sound pretty similar. Are they just so much bigger?
I always imagined most things in Ireland and UK in general as being smaller than the US. A quick search and yes, HDs are typically 100,000 sq/ft. Average grocery stores here are 50k and Walmart & Costco around 100k - 150k.
The new Ikea down the road is 344,445 sq ft in floor space over two floors - so about 170k in size - and it has a B&Q next door that's about two-thirds that size, although only one floor. That's within a few miles of the centre of London, there are bigger stores outside of towns and cities across the UK.
Supermarkets here can range up to 100k for the very largest, although they're apparently moving away from absolutely huge stores to stores in the 30k - 50k size. So
I don't know Ireland, but Home Depot is almost like the Costco of such stores. The most popular car in Europe is VW Golf, the most popular 'car' in America is Ford F1 truck. Consider what people are using such things for :). 'Mr Bricolage' in France is 1B Euros sales, Home Depot is 100B USD in 2018. Though Woodies is apparently large relative to Ireland's population.
The new Ikea down the road is 344,445 sq ft in size, it has a B&Q next door that's about two-thirds that size and there are at least three other shops selling DIY supplies within ten minutes walk. Plus a couple of large specialist trade-shops for builders. And this is within a few miles of the centre of London - there are bigger versions all over the country. What is unique about Home Depot?
>I’ve been remembering to go to the small Ace Hardware store in town lately.
I never made a conscious decision to avoid the big box stores, but living in downtown Boston forced that decision on me, so I got used to going to a small, local store for just about everything. I've since moved to a suburb, but still go to the small stores, even when it's less convenient.
I’ve felt a general decrease in retail experience in the past year or so. Maybe Amazon is eating everybody's lunch. But labor is tight, and employee quality is down.
NYT reported yesterday that we are well past full employment -- because employers are willing to hire anyone, including felons, and will overlook things that used to be firing offenses.
At the same time, I can preshop Home Depot online and it will tell me the row and bin that I need to go to for just about every item in the store. IKEA is the only other store I've ever actually been able to do that.
>Imagine if Boris Yeltsin had to wait 30 plus minutes for a four foot length of hose
You have rubber hose!?!?! What do you mean its not rationed? I can buy whole 4 feet at once? Are you sure I dont need my ration stamps? and someone will actually cut it for me? :o no signup lists? I only have to wait 30 minutes? so quick I dont even have to hire someone to stand for me!
>>Capitalism as we know it played a big role in the abundance we’ve had here, but it has also left the US with the most expensive medical care and alienated individuals.
Healthcare is one of the least capitalistic parts of the economy, in the US and the rest of the Western world, and consequently, suffering from increasing costs.
In contrast to the increasingly regulated and subsidized major medical fields, the most capitalistic fields of medicine, like cosmetic procedures, have actually seen prices increase at below the rate of inflation over the last several decades.
The more regulations you have, the less market freedom you have, so it is either or. Of course it's on a spectrum, from total government control, to total market freedom, but that doesn't change the fact that these are mutually exclusive properties, that exist in inverse proportion of each other.
Supermarkets and the food supply chain are far less regulated than hospitals and the healthcare supply chain. That's why they've seen far greater gains in efficiency.
Claiming that "free" markets improve healthcare is just ignorant of the facts. These things are pretty much uncorrelated.
Many countries make regulated healthcare markets work. Many countries make non-market healthcare work. The quality of a country's healthcare system is predicted by 1. how much it spends 2. if it's the USA.
The evidence we have, of medical fields where market forces are more dominant, compared to medical fields where market forces are less prominent, suggests market forces reduce prices in medicine.
In the US, the increase in healthcare costs is directly the inverse of the percentage of the population covered by insurance. Insurance removes the market force of consumer price consciousness and bargain-hunting. Government regulations encourage the provision of healthcare through insurance. The increase in insurance coverage is an artificial outcome of government intervention.
>>Many countries make regulated healthcare markets work. Many countries make non-market healthcare work
No, they don't. The healthcare systems of all developed countries I've seen have severe problems. Case in point, Canada:
The problems with the US healthcare system originate in regulations. There was a 3,200 percent increase in the number of healthcare administrators between 1975 and 2010, compared to a 150 percent increase in physicians, due to an increasing number of regulations:
I think you're calling cosmetic procedures a "capitalistic sector" of the medical industry because insurance companies won't cover these elective procedures, so folks have to pay for them out of pocket, so the providers have to price the service at a level that people are willing to pay for. That all seems like a good example of companies that are competing on price, classic capitalism, fair enough.
But if we pick any other particular area of medicine where prices are out of whack -- say drug companies that raise prices by exorbitant amounts, or hospitals charging hundreds of dollars for an aspirin -- isn't that still classic, unchecked capitalism in action? Aren't these just ordinary companies, working to optimize their profits by cornering a market on certain products or services and charging the maximal value they can extract from their customers?
I don't think anyone is arguing that the market for health care is functioning well. The question is - why is it broken?
Prior to consumer protection laws, you would take your car in to an auto mechanic, they'd "fix it", and then they'd charge you whatever they felt like. Now we have laws requiring written estimates in advance. How about we start with that?
Capitalism also funded the research and development of that medical care you're complaining about being too expensive. Better that it exists and is expensive rather than that medical care not existing at all.
I think arriving at a hard percentage would be difficult, but I don't see how it is controversial that US government funded research has been well supported by capitalism and contributed much medical knowledge, or that there has been lots of private research and development work in the medical field in the United States (I guess lots and lots of development has been privately funded).
Of course, that history played out that way is a different argument than claiming that we could only arrive at our current level of medical knowledge by that path.
Plenty of medical science has been done with less greedy motives, such as eliminating suffering. For that reason, medical science can easily survive the capitalists abandoning it.
Hmmm, I always thought it was me, but there really is a natural reaction of dismay, to witness what seems to be a bottomless pit of goods always on standby on store shelves.
In particular, with perishables, I look at the things that won't possibly sell before being removed for lack of freshness, and I've always considered it to be an absurd waste.
The other night, I walked by a Dunkin Donuts, and a garbage bag of donuts and bagels had spilled across the sidewalk. It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods. But the line out the door at eight in the morning meant that profits had more than cleared that margin of disposable food. How to reconcile that with the bums panhandling and playing doorman all day?
That stores display perishable products for the sake of advertising to foot traffic has always freaked me out on visceral level. To waste a quantity of human activity for purely ostentatious purposes doesn't sit well with one's primal conscience.
> It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods.
100$ at their prices or 100$ of flour and sugar? I think what they mostly were throwing out was peoples work but that's exactly same thing as with any form of advertisement.
It is an inherent problem in capitalism. We're throwing away perfectly good food and other products, for no reason other than they aren't profitable enough, and giving them away would cut into sales of competing or newer products.
Meanwhile millions die each year, from starvation, disease and lack of access to clean drinking water. Because it is not profitable enough to help them.
Recent Werner Herzog interview talking about interviewing Gorbachev. He discusses a little about the Yeltsin years following and puts Putin's popularity in context of how bad things were during Yeltsin's term. Worth a listen if you have 20 minutes.
> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
The link in the article: "By contrast, this is what a Russian grocery store looked like at the same time."
I remember going back to my hometown to visit my parents, who live in a somewhat rural part of a "Red State." By the Walmart out by the run-down local mall, there's this depressing discount food store, which, as far as I can tell, exists for the people who are too poor to shop at the Walmart. Most of it contained boxes and bins like the Soviet store. Most of it was dry and canned goods.
There is great wealth and opportunity in the US. There is still something left to do, however. The solution isn't to emulate Venezuela or the Soviet Union, obviously. Yet, there is disaffection here in the US as well, and there is a reason for it. The solution isn't to punish and blame the disaffected.
"In 1989 Russian president Boris Yeltsin's wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to the downfall of communism."
It didn't led to the downfall of communism but it helped tremendously in Yeltsin's understanding what communism really was and is: just another form of human exploitation by a small group of elitists (or aristocrats).
Noteworthy is the following description of events which happened while travelling in the US:
""For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. 'What have they done to our poor people?' he [Yeltsin] said after a long silence." He added, "On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the 'pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments'." He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, "I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans." An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed" inside his boss."
I remember this, but I wasn't sure if it was real or not. It seems like Yeltsin really did want to abandon communism after he visited a grocery store. Crazy.
Actually Canada has a stronger claim to speeding the fall of Communism given that Gorbachev had a similar revelation when he visited Canadian supermarkets in 1983: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15129713
supposedly something similar happened when Kruschev visited Los Angeles decades ago and thought that all the cars/trucks he saw jamming up roads and freeways were put there to impress him.
we tell ourselves these stories to make ourselves feel good about our misshapen consumer-oriented economy. and it doesn't quite work as well now because they more or less have the same stuff in China. also, we're buying a lot of that stuff from China, so it makes even less sense.
supposedly something similar happened when Kruschev visited Los Angeles decades ago
Anatoly Dobrynin, the USSRs ambassador to the US from 1962 to 1986, wrote that when he arrived in New York, he was amazed to see traffic jams were real. In the USSR, they were claimed to be American propaganda.
The world has advanced a lot since then. The third world now has much worse traffic jams than the US.
(Dobrynin's autobiography describes how he became a diplomat. One day, Stalin was grumbling about the old diplomats around him, and said that the USSR needed New Soviet Men, like aircraft designers, as diplomats. The next day, Dobrynin, aircraft designer, was essentially arrested at his drafting table at work and sent to the Higher Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.)
My understanding is that the party controls all land, has controlling interests in many if not most critical companies--as of 2016 the Chinese government owned three percent of all companies in China and up to thirty percent of industrial output[0]--and even theoretically independent companies have former Party officials or relatives of those officials running the show.
So it's surely not your textbook Leninist system, but it has many aspects thereof; I suppose you might characterize it as a mixed-command economy. It isn't what we would describe in the vernacular as "socialist"--as that word today generally, outside of the fever swamps of the American right wing, refers to countries like the Nordic or other Western European countries that work within something of a mixed-market system; it's definitely more command-oriented than that, still. Leninist/Stalinist communism generally sports a number social factors that definitely still exist in China outside of the economic structure, such as strong informational control, a smorgasbord of human rights abuses, and a generally totalitarian mode of governance and operation.
So I guess the question becomes "well, what does 'communist' mean?" My own, inexpert answer would be "it's not 'communist', except insofar as 'communist' is defined to mean 'what China does'," and my own thinking is that today it maps more to an ethnonationalist--though this isn't a perfect description as many groups are accepted, but at the same time one can see see the routine oppression of Tibetans, Uighurs, etc.--totalitarian state with a largely centrally-controlled economy. That doesn't map to any historical definition of 'communist' that I know of, but reasonable minds can differ.
My own, inexpert answer would be "it's not 'communist', except insofar as 'communist' is defined to mean 'what China does'," and my own thinking is that today it maps more to an ethnonationalist--though this isn't a perfect description as many groups are accepted, but at the same time one can see see the routine oppression of Tibetans, Uighurs, etc.--totalitarian state with a largely centrally-controlled economy. That doesn't map to any historical definition of 'communist' that I know of, but reasonable minds can differ.
We've seen other centrally controlled ethno-nationalist governments in the past, particularly in the early to mid 20th century. The confusion we have in 2019 is that we label those historical examples as "right-wing." This is actually quite strange, since these historical examples had highly centrally controlled societies and economies. The government set prices, determined working conditions, and dictated who sold to whom. Centralized control extended to all aspects of society and culture. Those are hallmarks of far left and communist governments. As in present day China, human rights were nullified, and certain ethnic groups were vigorously oppressed. As in present day China, industry "worked closely with" the government, and while wealthy oligarchs were created, they were very much subject to the whims of the government. There was also very close control of the media and information access by the public.
The only real categorical differences I see amount to stated ideology, and thus lip service: Is ethnicity important, or is class important? I think that's 1) only relevant to how the ideology is propagandized and sold and 2) only orthogonal to the left-right axis. It might also have an affect on whether and how obviously rich oligarchs are allowed to exist. (Can't contradict the party narratives, too much.)
I think the "right wing" label being applied to such totalitarian governments with centrally controlled economies and many left-wing characteristics is itself a propaganda maneuver of convenience. It's really the degree of authoritarian control which is most important in 2019.
One of the ethno-nationalist governments you're talking about is obviously nazi Germany. Need I remind you that the nazis systematically privatized the entire German society? They also supplied prisoners to these companies, as slave labor.
Most of the corporate empires and fortunes exisiting in Germany today owe their legacy to the nazi party, a fact which they are obviously keen to hide.
Calling the nazi party "left wing" or "socialist" is blatant revisionism, which has become extremely common in conservative and alt-right circles.
Similarly, the USSR was a totalitarian state capitalist dictatorship. The state (ie. the party) owned everything, there was absolutely no collective ownership. There was still wage labor and a very clear hierarchy, not to mention absolutely massive amounts of corruption and grift. In that sense, nazi Germany and the USSR were surprisingly similar; a strong leader with all power consolidated at the top, concentrating ownership and power with a small wealthy elite.
The actual far left is composed primarily of socialism, communism and anarchism. All are defined by the collective ownership of the means of production. Not state ownership or party ownership, but collective ownership. Their main difference is whether a state exists (socialism) or has withered away (communism) or if all forms of hierarchy have been abolished (anarchism).
The actual far left is composed primarily of socialism, communism and anarchism. All are defined by the collective ownership of the means of production. Not state ownership or party ownership, but collective ownership.
This either exists only on small scales, or as a fiction. On the scale of national governments, it's always a fiction disguising state control. Whether it's a totalitarian state controlling corporations or a totalitarian state controlling "collectives," it all just amounts to a totalitarian state with some form of disguise.
The real revisionism is putting a fig leaf of one form or another on all forms of totalitarian governments with centrally controlled societies and economies, then saying they're vastly different because of these different fig leafs. It's more fundamental to observe how they behave historically with regards to human rights. The most important aspect is the authoritarianism.
I assume you propose capitalism as a better way? Unfortunately the free market is a utopian myth.
Personally I agree with anarchism that all hierarchies must be abolished, including monarchy, wage labor and even the concept of the nation state itself.
Greed and territorialism have only ever brought grief and misery. The people in power have succeeded in dividing us into easily-manageable tribes and set us against each other, and while we squabble they reap the rewards of our work.
You really should look into anarchism (or anarcho-communism). Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin are good places to start. I would also recommend Max Stirner, for a good introduction to individualist anarchism.
I assume you propose capitalism as a better way? Unfortunately the free market is a utopian myth.
No disagreement there.
Personally I agree with anarchism that all hierarchies must be abolished,
Such societies don't exist. Societies which are highly communal exist until they reach about 450 people. Even then, they develop hierarchies of personal power.
including monarchy, wage labor and even the concept of the nation state itself.
Arbitrary and corrupt hierarchies need to be reformed. It's an ongoing process. That's built into human nature. There are also good hierarchies which have done much good in human history.
Sure, but that also has never been practically the case in any communist nation of which I am aware. Getting into No True Communist discussions isn't meaningfully productive, but there might at least be something to be made from looking at other self-declared communist states and teasing out the differences.
And I don't want to start that discussion. I just think it's easier to call China a totalitarian capitalist state, without torturing other labels to make them fit. It's not unthinkable for a state to miss represent it self when it comes to names or labels.
I think people associate a "one party system" with communism. But really the system of government isn't strictly tied to how the economy is managed (see: monarchies, fascism).
You're right though. Economically China isn't communist. Especially in their "Special Administrative Regions" (Hong Kong, Macau).
While recounting anecdotes and making witty observations, let's not forget that this man was responsible for bringing incredible misery upon the people of Russia. Not he alone, but he was the main one.
Also a drunkard, a dictator and a darling of the West.
Alright I got one:
So it's a chilly Thursday morning in Brno, and everybody's in line to buy meat. They're waiting and waiting, and the line's not moving at all.
Eventually a Party official comes out and says "Due to the conspiracy of wreckers, there isn't enough meat. All the Jews need to get off the line".
So the Jews all get off the line and go home, but still everyone's waiting and there's no meat. Hours pass, and eventually the Party official comes back: "I'm sorry to report that there's still not enough meat. Everyone who's not a Party member needs to get off the line."
So all the non-party members get off the line and go home. But still all the Party members are waiting and waiting, no meat. After another two hours waiting in the cold the official comes back and says, "We're sorry but there's no meat today. Everybody get off the line."
As they're walking away from the line, one of the people who was waiting turns to the other and says: "You see? The Jews always have it the best!"
There is a board game called Kolejka [1] from a non-profit in Poland that simulates the adventure of waiting in line for staples. It’s actually quite fun, and you get a taste of life under such a regime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolejka_(game)
EDIT: I misread the punchline of the joke. Ignore this.
How's this anti-semitic? I doesn't portray jews in a negative way. If anything, it points out antisemitism.
Also as Jew born in Ukraine at the tail end of the Soviet Union I'm at least 90% sure this joke was created by a Jew
The punch-line of the joke is "the jews have it better, once again"
The punchline of the joke is that the Jews were treated the worst, and the antisemitic party members are going to resent them no matter what.
That's a fair reading, I guess.
That's the only reading.
They have it better because they got to leave first. Party members had to wait in line for hours. That was my reading of it
The punch line is that the anti-Semitic bigotry had the accidental effect of benefiting the Jews, who didn't have to stand in the pointless line as long.
Today, the joke would be accompanied with the "congratulations, you played yourself" meme.
I read the joke as making fun of anti-semites, not being anti-semitic.
Right. If anything, it's the minorities and the common people who are the long suffering heroes in the story. It's the party insiders who are portrayed as the anti-semitic and comically dim villains.
Did you read the joke before commenting?
If you did, did you think that you understood it fully?
If you didn't, what compelled you to comment? The way the punch-line was written?
A toddler being torn apart by fascists several years before fascism was first espoused is rather remarkable.
Do you think that fascism was created by the Nazis? Just because the manifesto was not written, does not mean that there were people without fascist beliefs, even if they couldn't call themselves fascists yet.
The same thing happened in Venezuela in the early 2000s when they initiated price controls to make food more "affordable" for the poor. The variety of products was the first thing that dropped to only the necessities. Then even the necessities started to drop in supply:
> Further yet, price controls, expropriation of numerous farmlands and various industries, among other disputable government policies including a near-total freeze on any access to foreign currency at reasonable "official" exchange rates, have resulted in severe shortages in Venezuela and steep price rises of all common goods, including food, water, household products, spare parts, tools and medical supplies; forcing many manufacturers to either cut production or close down, with many ultimately abandoning the country as has been the case with several technological firms and most automobile makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela#1999–2013
My wife was a student in the eastern part of Germany in the early aughts, when life in pre-unification eastern Germany was still fresh in peoples’ minds. One thing that people would say is that “before the wall fell, we had plenty of money, there just was never anything to buy.”
When I hear people say “X shouldn’t be subject to the market” I want to bang my head on the desk. You can’t just decide that, e.g. food won’t be subject to market forces by, e.g., imposing price controls. If you push on the balloon on one side, it will expand on the other side.
My understanding was that East Germany actually had a better standard of living generally than your average Russian at that time.
So their thoughts that they were doing alright compared to Russia at that time was probably right.
The government had an interest in making the areas close to the ‘free world’ look better so these were propped up using resources from farther away.
Based on my understanding they were simply better managed and benefited from some cross border stuff that exposed them to other markets that weren't readily available to everyone in Russia.
Similar to other states that had some association with the west where in the end they could sell products and goods outside the planned economy and that helped keep things going.
I think the GDR was just a more effective country, just like Czechoslovakia and Hungary were. In the case of the GDR, despite being led by a very small-minded clown basically sanctioned by the USSR. Russia has never had it good in hundreds of years and it kept the tradition under communism.
That cuts both ways. Eastern Germany was also the best capitalism can buy.
It's basically people with good intentions volunteering themselves into poverty during the greatest time of abundance of food in human history.
Of course it comes with plenty of western/foreign capitalist sabotage conspiracies thrown in to justify why their grand economic experiment didn't work. Then it devolves into basically purposefully underfeeding your population because of a giant lingering sunk-cost fallacy and, most importantly, an ideology to defend - on which the current power structures were built on.
Most top Communist Party leaders didn't really care about ideology. That was just a lie they fed to the masses. All they really defended was their own power and privilege.
Their power and privilege was based on and justified by the ideology, is what GP said.
> Of course it comes with plenty of western/foreign capitalist sabotage conspiracies thrown in to justify why their grand economic experiment didn't work.
An economy cannot work without foreign trade, being blocked from that by a major player essentially does that.
If you look at communist countries that are small enough to be self-sufficient, it tells a different story. Take Cuba, it is blocked from trade with the US and a fair chunk of other countries, however, Cuba is self-sufficient enough that it has not only survived but it has flourished, with a ridiculously high literacy rate, and a universal public health system that puts much of the world to shame.
I have but two observations left to make.
1. If the communist system was inherently a fail-state, then the US would have to do nothing but sit back and wait until it collapses. Instead of that they try relentlessly to sabotage any form of it. They tried, for example, over 600 times to assasinate the leader of Cuba. It's a real shame because it forces the communist parties to be anti-free-press, and anti-free-speech because of the risk of foreign countries abusing that to seed a revolution (Indeed, it was admitted on record that the only reason the CIA hasn't done that in Cuba is because it lacks resources, and Cuba doesn't allow full internet access (as I understand it)).
2. It took over 800 years to establish a stable republic. That doesn't mean that it could not be done, or that the republic was an inherently broken system, but it took a number of 'failures' to make a success, and the right political and societal advancements to be made.
Cuba isn't flourishing, they're entering the first stages of food deprivation right now. They've required large state sponsorship, previously by the USSR, and more recently by Venezuela, to keep from system collapse. The average income in Cuba is still close to $20 per month.
May 2019 "Cuba launches widespread rationing in face of crisis"
https://www.apnews.com/42b62f24be9b4e0d9f764f1a3fa9647a
This near starvation problem isn't anything new. The same thing happened when Cuba's last sponsor, the USSR, went under.
1994 "Millions of Cubans facing starvation: Hunger is fuelling an exodus of desperate refugees, writes Phil Davison from Havana"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/millions-of-cubans-...
The Castro family seems to be doing ok.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...
You're referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period#Famine
From quotes like:
and it is pretty obvious that the US allowing Cuba to trade with the rest of the world would more or less 'solve' those problems.Who is the United States stopping from trading with Cuba?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sanctions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
and andYou said:
>it is pretty obvious that the US allowing Cuba to trade with the rest of the world would more or less 'solve' those problems.
As you pointed out the US embargo prevents Americans from trading with Cuba. It affects no one else. Virtually the entire world apart from the US is against the embargo. They are all free to trade with Cuba. At the margins, the US embargo hurts Cubans, but the bulk of their economic woes are self inflicted.
Has anyone considered that there are some things the state does well and others that it does poorly?
Health care and education are two areas where the public sector and public control does well.
Groceries are one where it does poorly.
I wasn't aware that state healthcare and state education works well.
A few examples of state healthcare systems in Soviet Union / Russia, UK, Hong Kong or Thailand seem to show that state healthcare is a miserable failure and those who are able to get access to private healthcare will always prefer it.
Similar with schools, it appears that people strongly prefer private schools to government schools, even in places where private schools are quite ordinary, not just for the elites, and don't require expensive tuition - competing with government schools for the same kids.
> seem to show that state healthcare is a miserable failure and those who are able to get access to private healthcare will always prefer it.
The reason why the healthcare system in the UK is failing, is because of a multi-fold problem that is too numerous to describe here, but boils down to political sabotage. Two other main reasons come to my mind:
One, privatization and outsourcing has caused mismanagement that expanded healthcare delays to an untenable point. Two, to 'repair' the 'failing' NHS, a 'target' system was set up. Hospitals that fail to meet targets have money taken from them, which causes a vicious circle whereby underperforming hospitals do not have the resources to perform better.
See: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families... and https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f1848.full
Also, as I understand it, the privatization of the USSR's state healthcare system made things _worse_.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Russia#Reform_in...)just because you don't agree with something shouldn't be a reason to downvote
True, but if people are posting erroneous information, you can understandably want to downvote.
If someone is earnestly posting incorrect information, you should reply with a counter-argument, or upvote one that exists. Otherwise what you're doing is the exact opposite of being conductive to a dialogue, which is the entire point of the hacker news comment section. Sure, downvote people who are being disingenuous, or not being honest.
Also:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
So far, everyone has responded to my talking about Cuba, an example I picked off the top of my head as a simple demonstration (It's a shame that America cannot boast such scores in education and health, to be honest). The example was illustrative, something mentioned off-hand to solidify and strengthen a point. Nobody responded to the core of my argument, which was the more meatier part and harder to disagree with.
My central point, however "An economy cannot work without foreign trade, being blocked from that by a major player essentially does that" is supported by economists literally everywhere. In fact, it's one of the major reasons why a trade embargo is created in the first place, to suffocate a country and cause a regime change:
please downvote this post too, to really teach me a lesson and defend democracy and freedom.
what erroneous information is he providing? That communism isn't necessarily destined to fail?
That's a matter of opinion.
I don't support cuba or leninism, but I just don't see anything controversial with what the parent has said, whether you are left or right wing.
> when life in pre-unification eastern Germany was still fresh in peoples’ minds. One thing that people would say is that “before the wall fell, we had plenty of money, there just was never anything to buy.”
This is a pretty striking echo of Kipling's verse commentary:
In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance for all
by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul
But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy
and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
(The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 1919)
Just curious as to how you think fire fighting services should be priced by the market?
I'm generally very conservative and against regulation, so no need to preach Adam smith to me (I actually read Wealth of Nations... not the synopsis). Though I will say, by ycombinator standards, I'm a centrist (way too left for the right, way too right for the left).
Market-priced firefighting is the norm, not the exception.
See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575359...
Well, the state pays the market price, but people who use firefighting services ("consumers") typically don't pay anything. Just like health care should be, I suppose.
However, it is fruitful to point out that not all markets are created equal. Even if an exchange of money takes place in return for goods and services, the market that exists is not necessarily a free market. Sometimes this is true even in the most idealized of cases.
For example, healthcare isn’t composed of one market, but several between different operators operating under different market forces and regulatory rules. As it’s too complicated to go into each, I’ll go into one that’s most apparent; the market between patients and healthcare providers (not insurance companies!).
Assuming the most idealized of cases that exist without external constraints and regulations, this market would never be a free market. Because the buyer will never be in the position to make the decision to not buy the good. Even a rational free agent would not be in a position to disagree from making a purchase. The value each sentient lifeform places on their life is for all intents and purposes infinity in the healthcare context. No sane suicidal individual or hero would sign up for a purposeless, slow and painful death. This removes the essential mechanism that free markets have to regulate themselves; the freedom to not participate.
In most markets, if a good or service is too expensive then the business selling them will go bankrupt or remain small due to a lack of buyers. This creates an incentive for a cheaper mousetrap to exist. But healthcare isn’t like that. Your choice is severely limited. At best, you can choose between providers (though for serious, and sadly incredibly routine, issues the immediacy of needing treatment trumps this) and at worst you’re unconscious and unable to make any decisions yourself. So the element of choice isn’t present making it axiomatically not a free market.
Please note that I am not going into ancillary factors like the difficulties patients face in making informed decisions, the viral component that exists for certain classes of disease (you choosing not to do X in the case of a serious enough pathogen could lead to a sick household or an epidemic. See: the return of measles), the difficulty of rationing care (Americans spend more partly because they see their doctors less by design and are discouraged from accessing preventative care), and overall incentive misalignment between doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital staff, insurers, HMOs etc that creates runaway effects.
We treat all markets in the same way, but they aren’t all the same. The market for healthcare is different from consumer electronics and the market for plastic surgery (a procedure where I must note there is an option to say no). Reductively put, you can choose not to buy a MacBook Pro. But you can’t choose not to treat sepsis. So why does our literature usually assume that both are the same?
>>this market would never be a free market. Because the buyer will never be in the position to make the decision to not buy the good.
A free market does not mean a market where a buyer has a choice of not buying something. It only means one where the market choices of agents are not constrained by coercive intervention of other agents.
We need to buy food, but the market for food is still quite free, and consequently, very efficient.
> A free market does not mean a market where a buyer has a choice of not buying something. It only means one where the market choices of agents are not constrained by coercive intervention of other agents.
That's not how I was taught this concept. I know, Wikipedia is a bad source, but I would like to point out how widespread my specific interpetation is amongst the economics textbooks I've read;
In a free market, individuals and firms taking part in these transactions have the liberty to enter, leave and participate in the market as they so choose. Prices and quantities are allowed to adjust according to economic conditions in order to reach equilibrium and properly allocate resources.
Note, enter and leave. This means both as a producer and a consumer, without this we cannot have efficient allocation.
> We need to buy food, but the market for food is still quite free, and consequently, very efficient.
The food market is a really good counter-argument to mine, but when I was first making my observations, I found that food is a very different market that was originally constrained in similar ways but isn't. First is that it's a "market" that's nearing globalized post-scarcity (this doesn't preclude localized scarcity). We produce enough food that we can feed the global population twice over https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person (3k+ per capita for developed nations and 2k+ for underdeveloped ones).
Humans have reached this state due to government-sponsored research and sponsored application of revolutionary new technologies.
Second, our ability to process food has also led to a surplus in stored calories. We can feed ourselves even during catastrophes (though distribution will remain a challenge).
And third, historically (as I am not certain about this particular point, but it is consistent with my reading of history), prior to the green revolution, the food market was never this free - it has always been state managed to a varying degrees. From feudal lords and chieftains to the Roman grain dole, food has been a carefully managed resources until our time.
Due to its oversupply and heterogeneity, the food market has a very different structure and dynamics that are inherent to it. But, taking my argument at face value, I would argue that it is indeed possible to exit the food market - we can grow our own food! Even a small-ish farm with good practices can feed a family for a year or more using wild seeds, natural compost and herbicides alone.
I could be wrong about the definition of a free market, but the main one on Wikipedia seems to align with my perception of it:
>>In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and by consumers. In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.
Note "are free from any intervention by a government or other authority" which conforms with my argument that it's a market where the market choices of agents are not constrained by the coercive intervention of other agents. Other agents being the "government or other authority" referred to, and the "authority" alluding to an agent which exercises coercive power over others.
>>Humans have reached this state due to government-sponsored research and sponsored application of revolutionary new technologies.
In the US, since the founding of the country, it has been a very market-based sector, with government's most fruitful contributions being in basic research, as opposed to market inhibiting interventions like regulations.
That would be like the government funding basic research in healthcare, and leaving everything else mostly to people's free choices in the market.
The first places in the world where famine was vanquished were ones with heavily private agricultural sectors with strong contract and private property rights, in Western Europe and North America.
>>I would argue that it is indeed possible to exit the food market - we can grow our own food! Even a small-ish farm with good practices can feed a family for a year or more using wild seeds, natural compost and herbicides alone.
Most people cannot grow enough food to feed themselves. Saying we can exit the food market because we can grow our own food is like saying we can exit the healthcare sector because we can provide our own medical products/services. We can technically, but practically the vast majority would have a much lower quality of care if they did so.
This is an interesting comment, thanks! (Writing instead of just upvoting because the comment is deep in the gray)
Thanks! I have done my best to study about this topic as much as I can :)
I decided a long time ago that if I was going to be an entrepreneur; I was going to figure out how the whole stack works. And that definitely includes economics.
I’m doing my best to learn how to see things clearly and insightfully. :)
The market for food is not strictly free due to heavy subsidies on the production side and varying taxes on consumption (e.g. SF tax on sweet drinks)
The market for food is different from the market for essential (=life-saving) medicine in that foodstuffs are largely fungible. Consumers can choose from a large variety of roughly equivalent products (e.g., substituting chicken for beef, potatoes for rice, etc.), whereas a diabetic patient cannot switch to a blood pressure medicine. Markets for many common foods can be about the same size as the national population. But markets for drugs will always be a fraction, often a tiny fraction, of the population. Price is also a consideration. While the USDA estimates it is possible to feed a family of four for around $10,000/year, many new drugs cost ten times that amount (well beyond the ability of many individuals, even insured individuals, to pay.)
> We treat all markets in the same way, but they aren’t all the same.
This is completely inaccurate. The US healthcare market (much like finance, pharmaceuticals, construction, most of the largest farming industries, etc, right down to the expensive licensing required to be a hair stylist or interior designer) are some of the most heavily regulated markets in the world.
The US health insurance market has been the farthest thing from a free market for some time. Whether health insurance would benefit from total centralization is one thing (one of the few markets I personally believe in being gov controlled).
Agencies like the FAA and FDA are some of the largest and most thorough of all regulatory agencies in the world. One that other foreign governments with allegedly "big government" administrative agencies look up to as a model replicate or simply take their findings as policy instead of testing their own.
Pretending the US economy is some capitalist free-for-all is one of the biggest global misconceptions.
The rising cost of the US health care market vs the world [1] has little to do with lack of gov intervention but the result of a centuries worth of half-baked compromises between two different worldviews, often featuring the worst of both worlds.
I feel that you are responding a different comment than mine. I have not said that it is a hyper-capitalistic free-for-all. Quite the opposite, from my comment;
> healthcare isn’t composed of one market, but several between different operators operating under different market forces and regulatory rules. As it’s too complicated to go into each, I’ll go into one that’s most apparent
The market that exists between Hospitals and Suppliers is different than Health Insurance and Consumers (and businesses) which is different from Insurance and Independent Providers... There isn’t one big “healthcare” market but several interacting with one another in removed ways.
My definition of a market is,
The term market refers to a situation where buyers (consumers) and sellers (producers) interact (directly or through intermediaries) to trade goods and services. It is a situation where forces of demand and supply interact to determine prices of goods and services being exchanged. Therefore, a market includes mechanism for: determining prices and quantities of the traded item, communicating information about prices, and for the distribution of the goods and services.
This can be argued to a certain degree for any modern commodity, but healthcare is a unique beast in how different forces for each market is and how interrelated they seem to be. However, I can be wrong about this part.
I have also said that I am proving my point in the context of an idealized free market. My goal is to show from first principles what pop literature seems to miss;
> Assuming the most idealized of cases that exist without external constraints and regulations, this market would never be a free market.
I have specified my definition of free markets elsewhere.
> But you can’t choose not to treat sepsis.
You can't choose not to eat food either.
> So why does our literature usually assume that both are the same?
What literature assumes they're the same?
That's the ultimate goal of socialism: let poor be even poorer, as long as rich are less rich. Envious morons like Bernie with true believing Goolag employees as their helpers and níggêrs as their pets are accomplishing this now in the United States.
Dang, please report my IP to Google!
> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
It's awe-inspiring to imagine that not too long ago the societal order of multiple countries depended on their millions of residents being ignorant of such a simple fact. What really gets my mind going is the next thought: what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?
What I found crazy about this is that the leader of such a large country had no clue how western countries operate. The Soviets and their allies had plenty of spies in the West and yet their senior leadership didn't even understand the basics of everyday life for the citizens of the countries they were prepared to launch nuclear missiles at. The west was likewise ignorant of much of the details of life behind the Iron Curtain though that's a bit more understandable given the secretive nature of the Soviets.
What I found crazy about this is that the leader of such a large country had no clue how western countries operate.
All large organizations are subject to the "Thermocline of Truth."
http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...
We ensure this won't be a problem again by educating all modern autocrats in the US or Britain. Or sometimes France. That way they all know.
What struck me is that we don't know if the Soviets are being accurately quoted in this article. They could write a lot of exaggerations and not be called on them.
given the video of a Moscow supermarket in 1990 (link in the article) it looks like it's pretty accurate
You assume that I hadn't seen the video before writing that.
Look at the quotes. They are over the top. You don't think it's possible that a 1989 reporter could have taken some liberties and not been called on it?
It was 1989, Yeltsin was not a president of Russia. At the time he was a regional Communist Party leader just elected to the (kind of a) parliament of Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic - RSFSR, then still a member of USSR. He would be elected a President of RSFSR in 1990, and in 1991, after dissolution of USSR, Russia became an independent country. Unless one was a diplomat or KGB or shown a special interest in learning the way of life in "the West", there was not too much exposure even for people at his level.
From some family experiences, whatever intelligence services reported to Party bosses, if it did not agree with the Party dogma, it would be ignored.
Besides, they lived much better than the average Soviet citizen (degree of inequality was far greater than that between a ghetto dweller and Zuck), and that's what they wanted to preserve.
I know people who genuinely believe that people in countries with socialized medicine have to wait months to see a doctor
That's because it is genuine. Take it from a Canadian who has had to wait many months multiple times for MRIs. Right now I have a tear in my hip joint that needs an MRI, been waiting since November, still nothing. Meanwhile I'm yelping in pain when I try to stand up from sitting down.
Here's a Canadian woman with cancer that went undiagnosed for 2 years because she couldn't access a family doctor: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/health-care-plea-...
Note that she also tried to get access to mental health services to cope, in January, and has to wait until the summer.
Health care access is one of the major issues in Canada right now.
Both times I needed an MRI in Japan I got it within hours of being referred to a major hospital. My out of pocket costs were ¥10,000 ($120 CAD). Japanese spend a bit less per capita on healthcare than Canada:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
When will people understand the what works for one country won't magically work in another country with a vastly different economy, population, geography, and a million other things?
I mean, even ignoring advanced reasons and thinking about this logically, do you really think healthcare for a country with 348 people per square kilometer scales to a country with 4 people per square mile?
Yes, considering that per capita Canada has more money than Japan and spends more on healthcare? I think total population density is misleading when Canada’s population is very concentrated in a few cities.
I accept that Japan has the most MRI machines per capita in the entire world, but the question is why is that? It could be economy of scale, but that doesn’t explain why Japan is such an outlier globally
>Yes, considering that per capita Canada has more money than Japan and spends more on healthcare?
Canada spends about 2% more, or 100$ more per capita: https://img.datawrapper.de/IzkJn/full.png
You think spending 2% more will result in comparable healthcare to a country with 870% higher population density?
> I think total population density is misleading when Canada’s population is very concentrated in a few cities.
Ah yes of course, because you can just abandon those who don't live in the few cities.
-
It's almost like this is a complex issue you can't simplify by examining one dimension at a time, but even if for a second you smoke test this idea by singling out population density, it's absurd to expect similar outcomes.
That's great, but what does that have to do with the Canadian healthcare system waits?
Long waits don't have to be an intrinsic feature of government-funded healthcare
That's incredible. Which province are you from? I know that over the 6 years I spent in Alberta (I'm from BC), I was always shaking my head at how much worse their healthcare was than it was back home in BC. It really is a crying shame how the stark difference is between provinces and the quality of care provided.
Of course it's possible to mismanage socialized healthcare a socialized healthcare system, that doesn't make socialized healthcare bad.
These situations are rare despite what the occasional outrage-inducing news story would have you believe. Here in Ontario for example, the average wait time for urgent patients is 1 day, for high-priority (target 10 days) it's 15 days, and for low priority (target 28 days) it was 58 days. Detailed, up-to-date stats for this are available at https://www.hqontario.ca/System-Performance/Wait-Times-for-D...
As bad as it is in the US, I can get seen the same day or next day.
I had a thrombosed hemroid, I called and got an apointment the next day with a specialist. He confirmed my diagnosis and I got surgery to drain and remove it the following day. Only cost me less than 200 dollars after insurance.
I had a bump on my testicle. I was concerned about cancer, so I see my regular doctor. $20 copay and he said it was just a blood something. I wanted to be sure, so he refered me and I got an ultrasound the same day at another facility. That only cost me a $100-something dollars after insurance. (It wasn't cancer.)
Thrombosed hemroid where 95% of people treat it by soaking it in water daily? Probably low-priority, 58 days. Waiting 58 days for an ultrasound to see if you have cancer?
Yeah, I'll keep the coverage/insurance that I have. I still understand the vast majority doesn't have it as good as I do and we still need to fix the system. I think we can bring people's standards up to what I experience, not down to what Canada experiences.
I don't know about Canada but in most countries with socialized health care you can always opt in for private care, on a case by case basis, at very reasonable prices (since private care has to compete with public care).
Canada is one of the few (the only?) countries where it is specifically illegal to offer privately a service that is covered by public insurance. For the most part, there is no option to opt in for private care as an alternative.
> I can get seen the same day or next day.
You must not live in a big city because it is difficult to get appointments in the bay area.
> You must not live in a big city
Houston
or in a rural area where the specialist you need only comes twice a year
Are the stats honest? In the US a large government healthcare system, the Veterans Administration, was faking their wait time stats.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/03/vete...
... Because that's true, depending on the situation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/06/13/if-uni...
>The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
I had Kaiser. A month-and-a-half to see a specialist. Any specialist appointment - Heart or Brain is easily 2- 3 months out.
I think it depends on the area. I have Kaiser now, in the Silicon Valley, and I've never waited more than a day for a specialist. Oftentimes I can even go in the same visit as my GP after he refers me.
I think it's the same in Canada. In some areas there are no waits and in other areas there are long waits. I think they need to look at percentiles to get a more accurate measure.
So to break it down a bit - https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa...
This says that, Going by referral to consultation (not treatment, that takes another 10 weeks), the shortest waits for specialist consultations are 6.7 weeks in Ontario and longest are in New Brunswick (26.6 weeks)
Including treatment times, the variation is 15.4 weeks to 41.7 weeks.
Just as an FYI, the Fraser institute is one of those organizations where you know the conclusion of their report just by seeing the subject in the title. I would be gobsmacked if I read an article by them that had anything positive to say about Canadian healthcare.
How does that work? Is the specialist sitting there with no patients, waiting for a call?
First, understand that there isn't really a Canadian federal health care system. The Canadian government (federal) transfers funds to the provinces, which operate health plans for provincial residents. The provincial health plans control the number of available specialists. A health care provider can only bill the provincial plan if they have a billing number, and the provincial plans manage billing numbers to limit/encourage specialists and to make sure doctors provide services in less populous areas. I don't know if it's still the case, but historically there was no private alternative available (so doctors couldn't operate a private practice that didn't need a billing number from the provincial plan). If provinces chose to allow private practices, the federal government threatened to withhold funds from the plan.
As with most western democracies, Canadian doctors are well compensated in comparison to the rest of society. But it is generally understood that they can make more money in the US if they qualify for immigration (and many can because of rules allowing people with specialist skills to get immigrant visas). This also contributes to reduced supply of specialists, and longer waiting times.
To get to see one of the available specialists in Canada, you have to have a referral from a primary care provider. Here in the US (in my experience) a referral is as simple as saying to your GP, "I want to see a cardiologist." Then your GP says "Oh, sure, this one's very good. I'll refer you." In Canada, your GP has to follow plan guidelines for referrals, and confirm that it is warranted. Then you get on the waiting list for the specialist. You'll wait for a consultation. At the consultation the specialist will determine whether or not you need treatment, and the urgency. Then you go on the waiting list for treatment.
Of course, Canadians with the financial resources are free to travel to other countries to obtain medical treatment more quickly. The provincial medical plans do not pay for treatments obtained outside of Canada. Medical "tourism" is not that unusual, including travel to the US and other countries.
It seems that way. When I use the online booking tool they tend to have gaps.
I'm in SoCal. Similar wait times for HMO.
Where are you? A friend of our’s has some heart issues. It was probably a couple of weeks between when his doctor in Iowa referred him and when specialists in Minnesota were seeing him.
Maybe that’s another reason folks in the different sides are basically talking past each other. If you’re not in a major urban area, seeing a doctor is very fast in the US. When I lived in DC it could take a month or more to get a routine pediatrician’s appointment (something like a physical for school enrollment). In exurban Maryland I can often get them the next day, rarely more than a few days.
The reason people are talking past each other is because they’re basing their opinions on personal experience and anecdotes. If you look at the data we pay more for worse outcomes.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08...
https://www.amazon.com/Healing-America-Global-Better-Cheaper...
And Canada isn’t the only alternative to the U.S. when it comes to health systems.
We pay a lot more for worse outcome in education too, don't we (and from what I heard, in infrastructure also), so by what reason can we believe that Healthcare would be totally different?
Edit: I just got an appointment for tomorrow morning for a minor ear infection, through an iOS app.
I'm in SoCal. Kaiser wait time was for Ortho in Denver CO.
We've moved to SoCal. Under HMO, specialist wait time is about a month now.
I have Kaiser right now. One week to see a specialist. (The particular specialists I had to see were an allergist and an ear-nose-throat surgeon.)
It's also true in the US, depending on the situation. And if you are lucky enough to have insurance and see a doctor at all.
>This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
Why? Are there more sick people? Are there fewer doctors and resourced? I've seen many articles covering the issue, but nothing that provides a concrete explanation for why a system used to work but doesn't anymore.
> Are there more sick people?
Yes, mainly due to an ageing population and partly due to obesity. An increasingly old and obese population needs more healthcare and is more complicated and expensive to treat.
Economic incentives (or lack there of) under socialism. There's too much demand for the supply at the price established ("free").
I don't think this is quite true. And if I were to accept it as a hypothetical, what you are saying is that if too many people need to see a specialist, many of them should outright not be able to because they do not have enough resources. Which is ethically horrific.
No I'm saying the supply is artificially constrained by the price of "free" so there is less incentive to go into medicine, hence shortages at the price demanded.
Are you insinuiating doctors work for free in these countries?
No, but they aren't compensated nearly as well due to the market prices being "set" lower than what they can command in another market. i.e. practicing medicine in the U.S. commands a higher wage than in Canada so doctors leave the Canadian system after completing their residency. Hence, the shortage of supply caused by a market distorted by socialism.
TANSTAAFL
I don't think anything is caused by the Canadian means of production being owned by the people.
In the capitalist paradise of the United States, as I sit here, covered by top-of-the-line health insurance...
My wife needed 3 months to schedule a sleep doctor appointment, 3 months to schedule a minimally-invasive surgery (That manages to bill her, and the insurer wrong), and every time she needs a re-fill of her prescriptions, it's a complete fucking crap-shoot of whether or not:
1. The manufacturer managed to produce enough pills to fill its orders.
2. The pharmacy bothers to call her, to notify that the prescriptions are in.
3. That the prescriptions are actually in, and that she didn't waste her time walking to the grocery store.
Meanwhile, on my side of things, I end up watching my insurance get billed $750 for 5 minutes of a doctor's (And 15 minutes of his assistant's) time. This is truly the most humanitarian, efficient, and accountable medical system on the face of the planet.
> Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner.
'Medically necessary' is an irrelevant qualifier. All treatment is medically necessary, if it weren't, the GP wouldn't prescribe it, and Canada wouldn't pay for it.
The term you're looking for is 'Non-life-threatening'.
That has been my experience. I've walked into an ER twice with heart palpitations. The first time I had an EKG, chest x-ray, and specialist consult and was in and out within 45 minutes. The second time was more serious and I was admitted, treated, seen by a cardiologist, and sent to a cardiac ward for overnight monitoring without being taken off the gurney. I know people who have walked in to their GP to investigate a lump in their breast and been under the knife a week later. They don't mess around with serious time-sensitive stuff.
But I have heard that the wait time for old people who need hip or knee replacements is quite excessive.
> 'Medically necessary' is an irrelevant qualifier. All treatment is medically necessary, if it weren't, the GP wouldn't prescribe it, and Canada wouldn't pay for it.
This is nowhere close to being true. Patients frequently demand treatment that the doctor, left to his own devices, wouldn't give.
My least favorite example of this comes from China, where people will go to the hospital to get intravenous saline solution for a common cold, but it's ubiquitous everywhere including the US.
From the point of view of the Canadian healthcare system, they can't tell that apart from actually necessary care. If a doctor prescribed it, and it's a covered procedure, it is considered necessary, and a hospital will do it.
Hence, medical care is either life threatening (which will get you seen ASAP), medically necessary (which may take some time to get to, depending on the procedure), or medically unnecessary (which is not covered by the healthcare system, and your wait time will be until the heat death of the universe.)
There is no 'a doctor said that we should do this, but we think he's full of shit, so we are scheduling you X months in the future' tier of medical care in Canada. You either need it now, need it, or don't.
If the hospitals can't tell the difference between necessary and unnecessary care apart, then the study authors sure as shit can't. That's why the quantifier of 'necessary medical procedure' is a weasel word. If the procedure is covered, it is by definition, necessary.
It's true in the bay area to see an ENT doctor too. So your point is?
The average wait to see a specialist across the US is closer to 24 days, the longest it's ever been - the average in Canada is 21 weeks, also the longest recorded.
since you seem to have the data handy, could you check what's the average number of people filing for bankruptcy for medical reasons in Canada vs. the US per year?
It's true. I needed to get an MRI in Canada. The doctor said it wasn't necessary and even if I was put on the queue, it would be 9 months. I asked to see a neurologist. The wait? At least 6 months, absolute minimum.
I moved to the US. When the doctor told me the wait would be a couple weeks and to call back if I was having issues, I laughed. I was amazed. And the MRI was absolutely necessary.
You had good healthcare coverage in the US; that's not normal.
Having said that: (more) better doctors and (more) cheep MRI machines would really help.
You don't need coverage for MRI, as Canadian there is whole industry near border dedicated to servicing Canadian on wait lists. You drive over border, get MRI done(tomorrow), then get a dvd with results. Done. Cost is less then a $1000cdn vs waiting for 3 month
Same for some kinds of surgeries. Friend was bounced around in TO for a year he needed some knee reconstruction. He could walk but nothing else but it was not a priority.. So drove over border, had consultation, drove week later and had it done. I am not sure what it cost, but he is not rich, typical sysadmin job
Speaking of more MRI machines, Certificate of Need laws just might be one of those simple facts that would spur anger if commonly known.
Maybe. They exist because they line up with lots of people's intuition about economics though.
Poor people with free healthcare in the US can get MRIs and CT scans almost on command. All you need to do is have a normal reason and go see a physician. Your wait time will be less than two weeks typically.
How do I know? I grew up exclusively utilizing free healthcare for the poor. I never had any other kind until I was an adult. I still know a lot of poor people from where I grew up that rely on programs like Medicaid. They have no problem expeditiously accessing normal things like MRIs and CTs.
Here in the UK, I have to wait about three weeks for a GP appointment. The NHS target for routine appointments with a specialist is 18 weeks, but that target is habitually missed. Routine surgeries are frequently postponed due to a lack of capacity. Many treatments are unavailable due to a lack of funding.
We do spend less than half as much on healthcare per capita than the US and we have better health outcomes by most measures, but it's very much a no-frills system.
We(UK) actually rank relatively poorly in terms of healthcare outcomes compared to (notably) the US.
The only measures we rank highly on are those weighting access as well as outcome
My understanding is that the NHS is also suffering due to being massively gutted by conservative(?) politicians
It's a tricky issue, the NHS is probably understaffed and underfunded but also extremely expensive already. Massively gutted isn't really true: Spending ( % GDP) has decreased but levels are still at record absolute spending
Nurses are to the UK what Soldiers are to the US, any criticism of the NHS is effectively shot down as Capitalist propaganda. There are some serious questions to be asked about the NHS, which arguably cannot be answered (Even if the result is staying with the status quo) due to an extremely sceptical and anti-capitalist left wing.
I scheduled in February to see an ENT in July. I live in California, Bay Area, and seeing a specialist in this area SUCKS. Socialized medicine?
In Alabama and Georgia I've never waited more than a week to see an ENT and sometimes have even gotten a same day appointment. These things seem to vary quite a bit by region.
I’ve also had long waits in the Bay Area, but haven’t elsewhere in the US (NC, IL, TX).
I’ll believe in socialized medicine in the US when they fix Indian Health Service. Until that day, if the politicians cannot come up with a decent system for a small part of the population then they cannot for everyone.
Heck, it only took three operations to fix a botched root canal, and I considered myself lucky.
But we actually do as long is it's not a life treatning disease.
As an example, I am now waiting 2 months to see my family doctor (I just need prescriptions for simple anti histamines, since it's cheaper that way), and 3 years to see a dermatologist for a routine check.
On the other side, a member of my family unfortunately was diagnosed cancer about 3 weeks ago, and she had several medical appointments every week since then.
I had a super weird one. I worked for a startup with a British CTO who was very Republican and would constantly rail against poor people and talk about how the NHS killed people and made them wait months.
I was like, wait, you lived there, experienced the opposite of what you're saying and STILL manage to make up lies to make it sound bad? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!
> what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known
One example I would suggest is how incredibly simplified (very often to the point of being objectively not true) the various hot button topics of the world are described in the media (official and social), if they are reported on at all.
One of the main reasons "fake" news is so successful is that it's so easy to find untruths to exploit in the official or status quo descriptions of reality.
This. The level of discourse in mainstream news is gobsmacking in its simplicity. This recent "capitalism v socialism" debate revolves around a limited set of widely accepted aphorisms, happily tossed back and forth like handfuls of sand on a playground. No one bothers to disaggregate these words, examine their premises, or fit together different components to see what shakes out. Or, god forbid, ask whether they are even useful abstractions.
That's true, but I don't think any other state of affairs is possible. Compare this selection from SPQR:
> The first word of the second book of Livy's History, which begins the story of Rome after the monarchy, is 'free'; and the words 'free' and 'freedom' are together repeated eight times in the first few lines alone. The idea that the Republic was founded on libertas rings loudly throughout Roman literature, and it has echoed through radical movements in later centuries, in Europe and America. It is no coincidence that the slogan of the French Revolution -- Liberté, égalité, fraternité -- puts 'liberty' in pride of place; nor that George Washington spoke of restoring 'the sacred fire of liberty' to the West; nor that the drafters of the United States Constitution defended it under the pseudonym of 'Publius', taken from the name of Publius Valerius Publicola, another of the earliest consuls of the Republic. But how was Roman liberty to be defined?
> That was a controversial question in Roman political culture for the next 800 years, through the Republic and into the one-man rule of the Roman Empire, when political debate often turned on how far libertas could ever be compatible with autocracy. Whose liberty was at stake? How was it most effectively defended? How could conflicting versions of the freedom of the Roman citizen be resolved? All, or most, Romans would have counted themselves as upholders of libertas, just as today most of us uphold 'democracy'. But there were repeated and intense conflicts over what that meant.
> That's true, but I don't think any other state of affairs is possible.
As a proof of this, you point out one of many ways that words can be used to muddy the waters. I would argue a "different state of affairs" (an improvement at least) could be achieved via a concerted effort by multiple influential people or organizations to point out that contrary to the simplistic perspectives and "facts" we're fed by the media, the world is actually extremely complex and we usually only have an approximate idea of what's really going on.
I'd argue that we have the opposite problem today - there are too many simple facts unacknowledged, too many truths unspoken, too much information, so much that our reaction is to shut down and look for simplicity and easy answers where there are none. To quote Nietzsche (albeit from a different context):
You trip over truths. You even crush some to death, there are too many of them.
In the US, if people could see each other's tax filings a lot of things would become awkward.
Already many home and property prices are public record. Just google "[town / city name] gis" and you can look a lot of that up.
(It's kind of useful when negotiating... "Public record valued your land at $200,000, and you paid $180,000 three years ago, but you want $750,000?")
You can also see a lot of this on Zillow and Redfin.
Yes, but I mean income. Real Estate is pretty conspicuous by its nature.
The fact that this is so down voted supports my premise that this makes people uncomfortable. I don't have an agenda, I just think this is something people try very hard to hide.
Yeltsin by that time hadn't bought any groceries for close to 30 years as was (and still is) common for the ruling elite in Russia. He probably didn't even fully understand the extent of the scarcity his people were experiencing while he was letting his oligarch friends pillage and burn the remains of the USSR. This is kind of like when Ellen DeGeneres asked Bill Gates how much a banana costs, and his guess was $10.
So the extent of Yeltsin being "amazed" is likely vastly exaggerated here. He was a charismatic hick from the boonies, and being treated as a semi-equal by his peers in the US went to his head quite quickly and hard. He was eager to please. But no one in the West was ever confused about what he was.
That was a scene from the fictional TV show Arrested Development.
> Lucille: Don’t you judge me. You’re the selfish one. You’re the one who charged his own brother for a Bluth frozen banana. I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars?
Gates' actual guesses were pretty reasonable: https://youtu.be/ad_higXixRA
I take umbrage to his guesses being reasonable. It's obvious Gates has no idea the cost of things. He isn't even in the right ballpark on most of them, with the floss being the only thing he got. It's pretty sad in my opinion
> what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?
I don't know about revolution, but most Americans tend to be pretty shocked about the rapid development of China. Even those who have some understanding get surprised seeing it for themselves.
If Americans saw the results of their wars nightly on TV, there'd be no more military-industrial complex within days.
The fact we are sure we live in a simulation.
The fed. and how the unelected deepstate tried to oust trump. Bring on the downvotes losers
if you could just broadcast trump's actual thoughts to the public we might get one here.
Isn't he doing that himself every day on Twitter?
Covfefe.
Isn’t that what Twitter is for?
I offer you a contra thought. We have unparalleled access to information, we have Wikipedia, free online courses, video documentaries, books, you name it. Yet 1/10 people believe the earth is flat, 1/5 does not understand that homeopathy is a fraud, 1/3 believes different races have different levels of intelligence, 1/2 believe in some religion, 3/4 are proud to be born in the given nation and 4/5 never heard of the law of comparative advantages (aka why import taxes hurt economy).
My point is society has already gained all value that can be extracted from free knowledge and information. What we see today is the base level of human dumbness.
> My point is society has already gained all value that can be extracted from free knowledge and information.
This doesn't really follow. Just because the information is available doesn't necessarily mean society will instantly absorb it or trust it.
Right now we're in the early stages of the information boom, where there's a lot of information floating around, but it's difficult to validate that information and determine whether or not it's accurate. Hopefully in the coming decades we as a society will figure out better means of such validation and start to actually address the problems around "fake news" and other sources of misinformation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much.
And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.
It looked like people were paying money for food. Did they indeed pay, or was some food free? How did that work?
Why would it be free?
Lots of us are unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of soviet communism. Were people paid for their labor? Was everyone given ration cards? Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
> Were people paid for their labor?
Yes. Different jobs paid different amounts, and people were paid for overtime. (With a bunch of malarkey about what exactly qualifies as overtime.) Some jobs had a harder time attracting workers, because of relatively poor conditions + poor pay, compared to others.
Most prices for essential goods (Basic food, housing) was set by the government to be very low. Many well-paid people had money, that they couldn't really spend in the official system.
> Was everyone given ration cards?
Yes. There were a large number of consumer goods (meat, vodka, butter) that were rationed. Other goods, of which there were no real shortages of (In the post-war period), were bought at regular stores. If you weren't a drinker, you would often trade your vodka ration to someone who was.
For yet other goods, of which there were shortages of (Fresh vegetables, for instance), the government encouraged private production of them. Some Russians had plots of personal land.
You could have a plot of personal land in one of two ways. You could either be a collectivized farmer, and, after you met your annual slave-like obligations to the collective, you could work on farming your small personal plots. Alternatively, you could be a well-off city resident, owning a datcha (A small summer home, often with a small plot of land.)
You could then grow produce on your personal plot of land, and sell it at farmer's markets. Due to shortages, and artificially low prices in the official system, food at farmer's markets cost many times what it would cost at a grocery.
> Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
Official government prices for food were very cheap, and if you weren't picky, there was no shortage of cheap calories that you could buy. So, people weren't starving to death, but if you wanted more then your 500g of sausage, and 90g of butter/month, you needed to spend money in the private markets.
Party members in good standing had access to party-only stores, which sold more limited items.
> I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
No. You see, the Soviet Union never actually reached communism - for its entire history, it claimed to be in a transitional period, from capitalism to communism. Once communism would be reached, there would be plenty for all, and money would, obviously, be irrelevant! (Or not. The powers that be weren't super-clear as to how exactly that would work, and none of the citizens really gave a shit, because it was clear to everyone with a room-temperature-or-higher IQ that communism would not ever be reached in their lifetimes, and that it's better for your mental and physical health to not ask too many questions about it.)
But, in the meantime, as people were working their way towards communism, money was still necessary as an incentive for good work. State-ran businesses did financial accounting, they would purchase raw goods from other state-ran businesses, would sell their products through state-ran stores. For consumer goods, there would be multiple competing brands, with different quality, and pricing.
The difference between the USSR and the USA, in this sense, is where the profits would go, and how much of the accounting was 'real'. The government would often place economic orders that it wouldn't need to pay for (If the army needs to move a 50 soldiers from Moscow to Vladivostok, it doesn't pay the transportation department the price of 50 train tickets.) It would also do financial malarkey with the profits of state enterprises (To subsidize things like staple foods, housing, education, medical care, etc, which were provided to the citizenry at below-cost prices.)
PS: Bonus point:
You may ask: Well, what did people who had extra money/vodka/etc do with it?
There were a few things you could spend it on - there were some non-essential consumer goods that had vastly inflated sticker prices. Luxury goods (Which you might buy second-hand from a party member, who bought theirs from an official, party-only store), and domestic appliances were one example. Cars, were another - they would cost multiple years of wages - and also came with a multi-year, sometimes decade-long waiting period.
Bribes were a third one - with a large bribe, you could often shave a few years off your waiting period for a car.
The black market was a fourth one - a lot of people in the Soviet Union stole from their workplaces. And I do mean a lot. There weren't department stores, you couldn't go into a Lowe's, and buy a bunch of new roof shingles for your datcha. Yet, everyone who cared about the roof of their datcha had new roof shingles. How was this possible?
The answer is, of course, elementary. What you would do, is get in touch with an alcoholic who works at the roof shingle factory, he will arrange for a pallet of shingles to fall off the back of the delivery truck, and you will arrange for him to get fifty rubles, and four bottles of vodka. He will be drunk for two days, the truck driver will buy a radio for his girlfriend, his workplace will do some accounting bullshit to try to avoid blame, the government construction site that expects these shingles will have to delay work for a week, and the Regional Minister of Construction Supplies will give a radio speech about how if we only worked really hard, to produce enough roof shingles, in a few decades, we will finally attain communism, and we might have department stores, where private citizens could go to, and purchase shingles for their datchas.
It's all insane, of course, but I've yet to live in a country which wasn't.
Great comment, thank you for the write-up.
did you grow up in russia? great write up
Only during the very tail end of it. But I have asked all of these questions to my parents, and all four of my grandparents.
Between all of us, we had two cars, one datcha, one relative who was an agricultural auditor (and, therefore, recipient of food-related bribes), one black and white television, one vacuum cleaner, a few people with the status of 'victims of political repression' (awarded post-1991), one four-room apartment with a solarium (for six people), and one three-room apartment (for five people).
So, all-in all, we were quite well-to do. (Thanks to my grandparents, who were factory workers. My parents, who were physics professors, were not making very much.)
My earliest memories include standing in bread lines during the transition period in the early 90s, reading through textbooks with pro-communist pages crossed out, and listening to TV news announce a higher and higher dollar to ruble exchange rate on a day-over-day basis.
People were paid for work and you'd buy groceries with money.
Yes.. like the joke goes.... The factory worker says: ‘They pretend to pay us an honest wage and we pretend to do an honest day’s work.’”
Interesting, we had sorta the same saying in romanian, "they pretend do pay us, we pretend to work".
So... capitalism?
What makes communism communism is central planning. Money becomes more of a voucher than a measure of value.
It depends who you're talking to. If you're talking about what the founders of modern Communist theory thought Communism is then you're incorrect; Marx sets out in Capital specifically what he considers to be wrong with money and wage labour in general - its genesis in commodity exchange, as Engels said, money is contained "in embryo" in the fact of commodity exchange.
The USSR, as a matter of fact, operated under mostly capitalist conditions, capitalism distinguished by:
* The predominance of wage labour in the economy
* The goal of economic activity as the accumulation of capital
* Private ownership of means of production (this is the "mostly" part - the USSR did not have much private ownership, which sets it apart from other capitalisms, but Marx was careful to point out that even under simple "public ownership", society becomes a "general capitalist")
In short: if there is wage labour, it is most definitely not "Communist". Money in its function as money in the circuit of capital, that is, C-M-C', remains money, not merely a symbolic "voucher". Socialists have proposed the idea of non-exchangable labour vouchers, but this is a far cry from real money which was what the USSR had. The ruble was just as much money as the dollar.
Nit - the goal of economic activity in the USSR was not entirely the accumulation of capital - it was production of what were considered necessary goods. Televisions, automobiles, bombs, tanks, that sort of thing.
This is, in some ways different from economic activity for the purpose of making more money (Which, in addition to producing things like television, automobiles, bombs, and tanks, also ends up producing things like advertising.)
There was certainly advertising in the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries. Here's an article describing how bizarre it was: https://www.rbth.com/blogs/continental_drift/2017/05/18/sovi...
That's a good point, but according to my knowledge this was a matter of degree rather than quality - almost all countries have or have had such production in whole or in part, implemented through subsidies and especially during wartime or other hardships. It's also to be expected when production is at least nominally democratic and central, it's not all about simple appearances. But what distinguishes a socialist society from any other is that goods would no longer be produced as commodities - i.e they are not imbued with the form of labour which tailors for exchange over use. Capital tends to totalize all labour into that which works for exchange over use, e.g. it has subsumed artwork and non-tangible goods from things of use into things with exchange value and a use-value. But exchange value tends to prevail and even changes the concrete form of labour, e.g. advertising as you suggested, and also, for instance, music sold on platforms like Spotify to maximize revenue, such as shorter, highly-replayable and segmented songs. Capital exists no less for the state, which will tend to share the same motivations as other capitalists, especially since it must buy and sell to other states or private individuals abroad.
Ruble wasn't quite as much money as a dollar -- it's value, both relative to other currencies, and relative to goods, was completely artificial.
Also, that value was different for different people. I.e., if you were an average citizen, you could spend on bread, maybe meat, and vodka. Once a year you might get a "zakaz" (literally, it means an order, as in mail-order, but in practice a way of distributing some scarce goods to people deemed worthy; you'd still have to pay for it, of course) with maybe a piece of imported salami or a can of pineapple. If you were, say, a driver for Central Committee member, you could get into a different store, which at least had all the staples all the time. And if you were a Central Committee member, you would just shop in a store that had some pretty nice stuff, at a prices that werre set in 1930s and haven't changed since then. Obviously, your ruble would go much further in that case.
In capitalism many people get paid without work (they get paid for having capital).
Can you not own any real estate period in Communism?
That obviously depends on the communist you ask. I don't think many would support privately owned real estate – that is, land you own but don't use it yourself but rent it out or use wage labor to do something with it. Personal property – property you use yourself like a house you live in – is a different matter.
土地是国家的。
Socialism, it’s in the country name.
A transition state towards communism. That's what the government officially called it. The country spent 74 years in that 'transition' state.
It had little in common with the socialist democracies of Europe, nothing in common with the communist proscriptions of Marx, and some in common with the much maligned state capitalism of today's China.
Yes. Real communism have never been tried. Perhaps impossible to try.
We'd be better off brainstorming a new, 21st century solution to the excess of capitalism, rather than relying on the industrial past.
> We'd be better off brainstorming a new, 21st century solution to the excess of capitalism, rather than relying on the industrial past.
That sounds like something a socialist would say:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/socialism-as-a-set-of...
Democratic People's Republic of North Korea
"People's" is a negation word, like "non" or "not".
German Democratic Republic. Is "German" a negation word too?
I heard there was a Soviet-era joke along these lines:
Q: Under true communism, will there be money? A: Yes and no. Some will have money, others won't.
The one I heard was this:
When Ivan was a boy, he asked a Party Man, "How will we know when true communism has been acheived?"
The Party Man thought for a little bit, and said, "The shops will be full of goods, and there will be no money."
Decades later, in the early 1990s, Ivan is now an old man. He looks through the windows of the department stores, and sticks his hands in pickets. He smiles to himself, and whispers, "At last, true communism!"
My grandfather visited Moscow after chernobyl on invitation by some radiation chemistry prof he knew. You had to stand in line to buy a weight quantity of bread and other basic necessitys like cheese, butter oder meat. There was only one type of bread. They ate their eveninglunch in a park. I can not tell how the food was for official delegations but this was what a privat dinner with a relative well off friend looked like.
Why should it not be free?
I'm not saying there aren't any reasons. But since the people nominally owned the Soviet economy, it's odd to assume by default that the people is charging itself.
They got away from that idiocy once they starved 10mil+ people to death. Money was there and barter(vodka as premium item that could get you anything, like seeing good doctor, getting car fixed, getting caviar). Also those stores also sold from the back to their friends
The idiocy of not charging money unless there is a reason for it? Why does everyone get incapable of reading when it comes to this topic...
Also, citation needed for the Holodomor (which I guess you are alluding to) being caused by free food.
Well I think a certain amount of food should be free, and only really communists talk about that kind of thing historically. I was curious if that had been implemented there. For example in present day japan individuals do not pay for medical care. I wondered if the soviets ever tried to do that with food.
I’d like to see free food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and internet access made available to all people. I just wondered if the soviets tried any of that.
It’s interesting the notion of waiting in lines. Yesterday at Home Depot I needed a four foot length of hose cut from their hose area. Most employees, even a pair standing and talking right near the hose, said they couldn’t help me, we needed someone from plumbing. They called three separate times for someone from plumbing and after 10 minutes or so someone arrived. But another man had been waiting since just before me, so he was helped first. That took an additional 20 minutes. Even once he came to me, it took maybe 10 minutes because the hose didn’t have the right SKU and he didn’t know what to put on the ticket.
So I had to wait more than 30 minutes for a single piece of hose.
I bet that’s not as bad as lines were sometimes in the Soviet system, but it’s not fantastic on its own. Imagine if Boris Yeltsin had to wait 30 plus minutes for a four foot length of hose that none of the employees standing around were able or willing to help him with...
I’ve been remembering to go to the small Ace Hardware store in town lately. They are much smaller but still seem to have stock of the right items, and I can get a person or two to help me immediately.
Capitalism as we know it played a big role in the abundance we’ve had here, but it has also left the US with the most expensive medical care and alienated individuals. Our system may be better than the Soviet system in many ways, but is it the best we can do?
I was just thinking about this myself, having recently had to spend exorbitant times waiting in line at both my local Sprint store and a Best Buy. It does seem like this is a problem that isn't specific to Home Depot (where I've had to wait in long lines as well); it's more a problem that seems to be metastasizing across all sorts of big retail.
My suspicion is that it has something to do with the jobs these companies offer being increasingly precarious, poorly trained and ill-paid. Corporate America has spent decades striving to get to a point where workers can be treated as interchangeable widgets, swapped around at will and just discarded when they wear out. Well, they got there, and now we discover that when you build an entire culture around treating people without respect they don't have a lot of respect for you or the job you're asking them to do either.
Workers in the old Soviet Union supposedly had a joke: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." It's not hard to imagine someone working first-line customer support at a big box store saying the same thing.
You can shop somewhere else besides Home Depot... that's the beauty of the free market.
Only if you've got alternatives. Where I am, your choices are Home Depot or ten-foot-wide hardware stores where you can find any bolt you want but can't get a sheet of plywood.
Sure... but you're living in a rural area! What do you expect? I also live 20+ minutes from big box stores. Being away from civilization is kinda the point of being in the country, no?
Watch the 1990s era video linked in the original article (and mentioned elsewhere in the commentary here). Those 90s Muscovites were living in the most urban part of the Soviet Union. Just imagine trying to get a grade 8 bolt in the countryside.
I live in Somerville, Massachusetts. It is the sixth most densely populated city in the United States that isn't part of the NYC metro area. That's why the hardware stores are the size of closets. If I lived in a rural area--well, I grew up in Maine, surrounded by large hardware stores that frequently did have that sort of thing, like the Aubuchon Hardware chain. Home Depot is the only store in the city, and the only one within quick-trip distance outside of the city, that has a broad selection and services like rough-cutting.
(I do like Tags in Porter Square, but their selection is lacking. Great people though.)
How far do you really have to go?
In the outskirts of San Francisco (where I moved from), it's easy to find massive hardware and fixture stores that aren't Home Depot. The East Bay is full of them too. In LA and Sacramento there are literally giant industrial parks full of retail stores dedicated to specific home improvement niches. I once spent nearly a whole day walking door-to-door looking at flooring.
Of course, it might take you an hour to get across town if you time traffic badly...
The rich cities (basically just the ones around Boston) in MA basically don't have anyone who does things themselves so there's minimal need for hardware stores. All the nuts and bolts get driven in from the suburbs in the back of tradesmen's vans as they go to work for the day. Basically everything in the Boston area is optimized for white collar professionals and college students. There's only the bare minimum of everything else.
Meanwhile I live in a "blighted shithole" in MA and anything I could possibly want to buy is likely within a 20min drive. Like, I needed a CV shaft for a (not obscure but not common) 25yo car last week and four(!) different stores had it in stock, two stores had multiple different options. If I lived in the Boston area I would have been dragging my ass to the massive Autozone in Framingham
Most of the tradesmen who work for our property management business live in Somerville, Medford, or Malden, I think. I haven't done an exhaustive poll, though.
(They all spend half their lives at thay same Home Depot, too.)
The nearest one of comparable size is a Lowe's, which is probably 45 minutes away in favorable traffic. Too far for a lunch errand for sure, especially with Home Depot literally three stoplights from my house. I'm not aware of anything between a Home Depot/Lowe's and an Ace Hardware in my area.
There are a lot of smaller stores, don't get me wrong. But figuring out which has inventory, which can cut something so it fits in my car, etc. - functionally, Home Depot just wins. Which is a bummer, 'cause their service can be really bad. I try to know exactly what I need before I even go in, and try to minimize the need for stuff like cut-to-size services even though my hatchback isn't huge.
Do you realize those videos are from after the Soviet economy crashed, right? I'm not trying to apologize for the terrible economic system employed by the Soviets, but to call that video representative of 40 years is just wrong.
It wasn't any better before.
1990 is before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and highly dysfunctional food distribution was a characteristic of all socialist economies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_1981_hunger_demonstrati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma...
You are free to start your own store which you cant do in communist countries or you would need to bribe lot of people to get the permission.
ah... Home Depot dysfunction. yesterday, at Home Depot a fellow customer told me about his experience buying bags of gravel. he paid for the materials and the HD workers told him they'd bring it out to the loading area so he could put it in his vehicle.
he waited there for forty minutes. no gravel. his patience ran out and he decided to ask for a refund. they sent him to the refund desk, which, naturally, required him to return the gravel before they could give back his money.
Honestly I'm tired of Home Depot. If you want real service go to your local Ace or similar. Plus they have a more refined selection of products.
Ace barely scratches the surface if you need to do anything beyond what a normal homeowner would do by themselves. It's the training wheels of hardware stores but the selection (and quality) of tools is a lot lower because for higher priced, more specialized stuff nobody goes there.
I agree, but Home Depot has been piling a lot of junk on their shelves lately. Think the $5 keychain package with strap when a $0.50 loop will do. Do they stock the $0.50 loop? Good luck finding them or anyone that will know where they are! But you'll surely have no problem finding the big stand of trinkets next to the terrible key cutting machine.
Ace will just have a bin of loops and you pick the ones you want, done.
This pattern, over and over. Yes, you CAN get great stuff at Home Depot for a decent price, but good luck getting out of there with all your bits at a reasonable price. It just seems to me that they're losing sight of what makes a big box store useful.
Of course if I want a stack of PVC or conduit or pressure treated lumber I'm probably going to Home Depot (or a local lumber supplier.)
This guy was looking for cuts of hose. That's an Ace visit.
If you’re doing remodeling work or additions you need Home Depot or Lowe’s. Ace is for minor things around the house.
My not particularly large community has a Menard's and a decent lumber yard (that also sells nice hardware items) and a place ~10 miles away that you can order whatever from.
I sort of hate Menard's, but they do charge a lot less than the better builder stores.
Another small town I've lived in had a Home Depot and a higher end builder store right across the street.
Yesterday at Home Depot I needed a four foot length of hose cut from their hose area. Most employees, even a pair standing and talking right near the hose, said they couldn’t help me, we needed someone from plumbing. They called three separate times for someone from plumbing and after 10 minutes or so someone arrived.
I was at Home Depot to get some roller blinds, which they advertised they could cut to measurements. I got the blinds and went to the machine, which basically had a thing to spin the blinds around and cutting blade screw-clamped to a ruler-like fixture, which allowed adjustment to measurements. (The point being, that you could align the blade to any measurement shown on the ruler.)
A store clerk finally comes after a long time, and I give her the measurements. Her response: "The machine doesn't do fractions." This was clearly a lie. The machine did fractions. The clerk didn't.
Not even in the same ballpark, imagine having to queue up for 5-6h to be able to buy your monthly ration of 1kg of sugar in the only shop in town without knowing if it will run out by the time you get there or not.
30m waiting time with the option of coming back or going somewhere else is a breeze.
A singular example of 'having to wait for a few minutes' in Home Depot doesn't really help make your case.
Whatever we might not like about the 'Big Box' nature of it ... 'Home Depot' is actually an excruciatingly example of that which is articulated in the article.
HD is this massive place where you can buy a gazillion different types of products (and services); there is an amazing degree of variety and specialization in every little aspect of it all.
Home Depot is in many ways a luxury store of the suburban middle class, a blatant example of the massive surpluses inherent in the modern economy. It's a testament to a lot of things. It's a kind of 'bourgeois for the masses'.
Consider for a moment that such a thing doesn't even exist in Europe! Now, most of this is cultural, in that, for a variety of historical reasons, they don't have that 'DOY' kind of culture; but make no mistake, it's also economic. People generally don't have the garage space (or a garage/shed) in which to store all of the semi useful bounty they collect from such a place. And neither the income to support it.
If HD were a place wherein it was impossible to get service, where staff 'knew nothing' and it was a desperately terrible business, then I think there'd be a point to be made but as it stands ... 'having to wait in line once for something' is almost crossing the line into entitlement.
And of course, the reason lines existed in the Soviet Union is something else entirely, and so the comparison is problematic to begin with.
Education and Health Services are 'problem areas' for capitalism, at least in the American sense, but I suggest with some meaningful reforms, it could work out. A handful of European nations have 'somewhat/mostly private' though still 'socialized' systems that work well.
"He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution.". This is really a historical statement. If we can move past issues of national pride and the 'we are better / I told you so' jingoisms, there's a lot to be learned from this. In fact, so few statements communicate so much.
In what sense does such a thing as Home Depot not exist in Europe? In Ireland we have two chains of big warehouse-style DIY stores: Woodies and B&Q, sized around 50,000 sq ft. In both of them you can get power tools, timber, bathroom and plumbing supplies, garden furniture, paint, flooring, doors...
I've never been in a Home Depot but they sound pretty similar. Are they just so much bigger?
I always imagined most things in Ireland and UK in general as being smaller than the US. A quick search and yes, HDs are typically 100,000 sq/ft. Average grocery stores here are 50k and Walmart & Costco around 100k - 150k.
The new Ikea down the road is 344,445 sq ft in floor space over two floors - so about 170k in size - and it has a B&Q next door that's about two-thirds that size, although only one floor. That's within a few miles of the centre of London, there are bigger stores outside of towns and cities across the UK.
Supermarkets here can range up to 100k for the very largest, although they're apparently moving away from absolutely huge stores to stores in the 30k - 50k size. So
I don't know Ireland, but Home Depot is almost like the Costco of such stores. The most popular car in Europe is VW Golf, the most popular 'car' in America is Ford F1 truck. Consider what people are using such things for :). 'Mr Bricolage' in France is 1B Euros sales, Home Depot is 100B USD in 2018. Though Woodies is apparently large relative to Ireland's population.
The new Ikea down the road is 344,445 sq ft in size, it has a B&Q next door that's about two-thirds that size and there are at least three other shops selling DIY supplies within ten minutes walk. Plus a couple of large specialist trade-shops for builders. And this is within a few miles of the centre of London - there are bigger versions all over the country. What is unique about Home Depot?
>I’ve been remembering to go to the small Ace Hardware store in town lately.
I never made a conscious decision to avoid the big box stores, but living in downtown Boston forced that decision on me, so I got used to going to a small, local store for just about everything. I've since moved to a suburb, but still go to the small stores, even when it's less convenient.
I’ve felt a general decrease in retail experience in the past year or so. Maybe Amazon is eating everybody's lunch. But labor is tight, and employee quality is down.
NYT reported yesterday that we are well past full employment -- because employers are willing to hire anyone, including felons, and will overlook things that used to be firing offenses.
At the same time, I can preshop Home Depot online and it will tell me the row and bin that I need to go to for just about every item in the store. IKEA is the only other store I've ever actually been able to do that.
>Imagine if Boris Yeltsin had to wait 30 plus minutes for a four foot length of hose
You have rubber hose!?!?! What do you mean its not rationed? I can buy whole 4 feet at once? Are you sure I dont need my ration stamps? and someone will actually cut it for me? :o no signup lists? I only have to wait 30 minutes? so quick I dont even have to hire someone to stand for me!
https://culture.pl/en/article/10-mind-boggling-oddities-of-c...
This! I don't think western people can grasp the communist queues and shops.
>>Capitalism as we know it played a big role in the abundance we’ve had here, but it has also left the US with the most expensive medical care and alienated individuals.
Healthcare is one of the least capitalistic parts of the economy, in the US and the rest of the Western world, and consequently, suffering from increasing costs.
In contrast to the increasingly regulated and subsidized major medical fields, the most capitalistic fields of medicine, like cosmetic procedures, have actually seen prices increase at below the rate of inflation over the last several decades.
It's not an either or...
Our supermarkets have lots of regulation ranging from what food may contain, how it is produced, to how it may be markedet.
The more regulations you have, the less market freedom you have, so it is either or. Of course it's on a spectrum, from total government control, to total market freedom, but that doesn't change the fact that these are mutually exclusive properties, that exist in inverse proportion of each other.
Supermarkets and the food supply chain are far less regulated than hospitals and the healthcare supply chain. That's why they've seen far greater gains in efficiency.
Claiming that "free" markets improve healthcare is just ignorant of the facts. These things are pretty much uncorrelated.
Many countries make regulated healthcare markets work. Many countries make non-market healthcare work. The quality of a country's healthcare system is predicted by 1. how much it spends 2. if it's the USA.
The evidence we have, of medical fields where market forces are more dominant, compared to medical fields where market forces are less prominent, suggests market forces reduce prices in medicine.
In the US, the increase in healthcare costs is directly the inverse of the percentage of the population covered by insurance. Insurance removes the market force of consumer price consciousness and bargain-hunting. Government regulations encourage the provision of healthcare through insurance. The increase in insurance coverage is an artificial outcome of government intervention.
>>Many countries make regulated healthcare markets work. Many countries make non-market healthcare work
No, they don't. The healthcare systems of all developed countries I've seen have severe problems. Case in point, Canada:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/doctor-shortage-cancer-video-...
The problems with the US healthcare system originate in regulations. There was a 3,200 percent increase in the number of healthcare administrators between 1975 and 2010, compared to a 150 percent increase in physicians, due to an increasing number of regulations:
https://www.athenahealth.com/insight/expert-forum-rise-and-r...
I think you're calling cosmetic procedures a "capitalistic sector" of the medical industry because insurance companies won't cover these elective procedures, so folks have to pay for them out of pocket, so the providers have to price the service at a level that people are willing to pay for. That all seems like a good example of companies that are competing on price, classic capitalism, fair enough.
But if we pick any other particular area of medicine where prices are out of whack -- say drug companies that raise prices by exorbitant amounts, or hospitals charging hundreds of dollars for an aspirin -- isn't that still classic, unchecked capitalism in action? Aren't these just ordinary companies, working to optimize their profits by cornering a market on certain products or services and charging the maximal value they can extract from their customers?
I don't think anyone is arguing that the market for health care is functioning well. The question is - why is it broken?
Prior to consumer protection laws, you would take your car in to an auto mechanic, they'd "fix it", and then they'd charge you whatever they felt like. Now we have laws requiring written estimates in advance. How about we start with that?
Capitalism also funded the research and development of that medical care you're complaining about being too expensive. Better that it exists and is expensive rather than that medical care not existing at all.
This sounds like a positive claim that could use proof.
I think arriving at a hard percentage would be difficult, but I don't see how it is controversial that US government funded research has been well supported by capitalism and contributed much medical knowledge, or that there has been lots of private research and development work in the medical field in the United States (I guess lots and lots of development has been privately funded).
Of course, that history played out that way is a different argument than claiming that we could only arrive at our current level of medical knowledge by that path.
All we'd need to do is look at the tax code for health care businesses.
Are you sure about that?
Plenty of medical science has been done with less greedy motives, such as eliminating suffering. For that reason, medical science can easily survive the capitalists abandoning it.
Aren't there any other countries than Soviet Union and the USA?
According to TV, no.
Hmmm, I always thought it was me, but there really is a natural reaction of dismay, to witness what seems to be a bottomless pit of goods always on standby on store shelves.
In particular, with perishables, I look at the things that won't possibly sell before being removed for lack of freshness, and I've always considered it to be an absurd waste.
The other night, I walked by a Dunkin Donuts, and a garbage bag of donuts and bagels had spilled across the sidewalk. It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods. But the line out the door at eight in the morning meant that profits had more than cleared that margin of disposable food. How to reconcile that with the bums panhandling and playing doorman all day?
That stores display perishable products for the sake of advertising to foot traffic has always freaked me out on visceral level. To waste a quantity of human activity for purely ostentatious purposes doesn't sit well with one's primal conscience.
> It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods.
100$ at their prices or 100$ of flour and sugar? I think what they mostly were throwing out was peoples work but that's exactly same thing as with any form of advertisement.
It is an inherent problem in capitalism. We're throwing away perfectly good food and other products, for no reason other than they aren't profitable enough, and giving them away would cut into sales of competing or newer products.
Meanwhile millions die each year, from starvation, disease and lack of access to clean drinking water. Because it is not profitable enough to help them.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/werner-herzog-gorbachev
Recent Werner Herzog interview talking about interviewing Gorbachev. He discusses a little about the Yeltsin years following and puts Putin's popularity in context of how bad things were during Yeltsin's term. Worth a listen if you have 20 minutes.
Yeltsin here looks like just some late-middle-aged executive guy—which he was, as he wasn't president yet.
My favorite pic of his, from the time of actual presidency, is rather different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clinton_Yeltsin_1995.jpg
A very similar reaction to the Romanian communist chief of state when visiting a Macy's in New York: https://twitter.com/NightmarEclipse/status/97837502295490969...
I'm from Clear Lake.
This is hilarious and is making its way through private threads I have with former astronauts and Nasa Employees.
Love HN.
Really the key quote is:
> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
The link in the article: "By contrast, this is what a Russian grocery store looked like at the same time."
I remember going back to my hometown to visit my parents, who live in a somewhat rural part of a "Red State." By the Walmart out by the run-down local mall, there's this depressing discount food store, which, as far as I can tell, exists for the people who are too poor to shop at the Walmart. Most of it contained boxes and bins like the Soviet store. Most of it was dry and canned goods.
There is great wealth and opportunity in the US. There is still something left to do, however. The solution isn't to emulate Venezuela or the Soviet Union, obviously. Yet, there is disaffection here in the US as well, and there is a reason for it. The solution isn't to punish and blame the disaffected.
If only he could see the free food samples at Costco's and Korean groceries.
"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" - Sorry, this content is not available in your region.
Oh come on! Seriously?
"In 1989 Russian president Boris Yeltsin's wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to the downfall of communism."
It didn't led to the downfall of communism but it helped tremendously in Yeltsin's understanding what communism really was and is: just another form of human exploitation by a small group of elitists (or aristocrats).
Noteworthy is the following description of events which happened while travelling in the US:
""For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. 'What have they done to our poor people?' he [Yeltsin] said after a long silence." He added, "On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the 'pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments'." He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, "I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans." An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed" inside his boss."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin
In case anyone wants to know what actually led to the dissolution of the USSR check out this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...
I remember this, but I wasn't sure if it was real or not. It seems like Yeltsin really did want to abandon communism after he visited a grocery store. Crazy.
Cool article.
Any other Clear Lakers here?
Here! Always fun seeing Clear Lake mentioned on HN!
Actually Canada has a stronger claim to speeding the fall of Communism given that Gorbachev had a similar revelation when he visited Canadian supermarkets in 1983: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15129713
He looks skinny.
Khrushchev to Nixon in the 1959 Kitchen Debate, "...we will pass you and your capitalism in our advancement and wave to you as we go past..."
SOCIALISM... some people never learn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvQOuNecy4
"...we will pass you and your capitalism in our advancement and wave to you as we go past..."
In our high-speed train. That's China.
supposedly something similar happened when Kruschev visited Los Angeles decades ago and thought that all the cars/trucks he saw jamming up roads and freeways were put there to impress him.
we tell ourselves these stories to make ourselves feel good about our misshapen consumer-oriented economy. and it doesn't quite work as well now because they more or less have the same stuff in China. also, we're buying a lot of that stuff from China, so it makes even less sense.
supposedly something similar happened when Kruschev visited Los Angeles decades ago
Anatoly Dobrynin, the USSRs ambassador to the US from 1962 to 1986, wrote that when he arrived in New York, he was amazed to see traffic jams were real. In the USSR, they were claimed to be American propaganda.
The world has advanced a lot since then. The third world now has much worse traffic jams than the US.
(Dobrynin's autobiography describes how he became a diplomat. One day, Stalin was grumbling about the old diplomats around him, and said that the USSR needed New Soviet Men, like aircraft designers, as diplomats. The next day, Dobrynin, aircraft designer, was essentially arrested at his drafting table at work and sent to the Higher Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.)
Is there any meaningful sense in which China is communist?
My understanding is that the party controls all land, has controlling interests in many if not most critical companies--as of 2016 the Chinese government owned three percent of all companies in China and up to thirty percent of industrial output[0]--and even theoretically independent companies have former Party officials or relatives of those officials running the show.
So it's surely not your textbook Leninist system, but it has many aspects thereof; I suppose you might characterize it as a mixed-command economy. It isn't what we would describe in the vernacular as "socialist"--as that word today generally, outside of the fever swamps of the American right wing, refers to countries like the Nordic or other Western European countries that work within something of a mixed-market system; it's definitely more command-oriented than that, still. Leninist/Stalinist communism generally sports a number social factors that definitely still exist in China outside of the economic structure, such as strong informational control, a smorgasbord of human rights abuses, and a generally totalitarian mode of governance and operation.
So I guess the question becomes "well, what does 'communist' mean?" My own, inexpert answer would be "it's not 'communist', except insofar as 'communist' is defined to mean 'what China does'," and my own thinking is that today it maps more to an ethnonationalist--though this isn't a perfect description as many groups are accepted, but at the same time one can see see the routine oppression of Tibetans, Uighurs, etc.--totalitarian state with a largely centrally-controlled economy. That doesn't map to any historical definition of 'communist' that I know of, but reasonable minds can differ.
[0] - https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Wendy-L...
My own, inexpert answer would be "it's not 'communist', except insofar as 'communist' is defined to mean 'what China does'," and my own thinking is that today it maps more to an ethnonationalist--though this isn't a perfect description as many groups are accepted, but at the same time one can see see the routine oppression of Tibetans, Uighurs, etc.--totalitarian state with a largely centrally-controlled economy. That doesn't map to any historical definition of 'communist' that I know of, but reasonable minds can differ.
We've seen other centrally controlled ethno-nationalist governments in the past, particularly in the early to mid 20th century. The confusion we have in 2019 is that we label those historical examples as "right-wing." This is actually quite strange, since these historical examples had highly centrally controlled societies and economies. The government set prices, determined working conditions, and dictated who sold to whom. Centralized control extended to all aspects of society and culture. Those are hallmarks of far left and communist governments. As in present day China, human rights were nullified, and certain ethnic groups were vigorously oppressed. As in present day China, industry "worked closely with" the government, and while wealthy oligarchs were created, they were very much subject to the whims of the government. There was also very close control of the media and information access by the public.
The only real categorical differences I see amount to stated ideology, and thus lip service: Is ethnicity important, or is class important? I think that's 1) only relevant to how the ideology is propagandized and sold and 2) only orthogonal to the left-right axis. It might also have an affect on whether and how obviously rich oligarchs are allowed to exist. (Can't contradict the party narratives, too much.)
I think the "right wing" label being applied to such totalitarian governments with centrally controlled economies and many left-wing characteristics is itself a propaganda maneuver of convenience. It's really the degree of authoritarian control which is most important in 2019.
One of the ethno-nationalist governments you're talking about is obviously nazi Germany. Need I remind you that the nazis systematically privatized the entire German society? They also supplied prisoners to these companies, as slave labor.
Most of the corporate empires and fortunes exisiting in Germany today owe their legacy to the nazi party, a fact which they are obviously keen to hide.
Just one example out of many: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-nazi-bahlsen-idUS...
Calling the nazi party "left wing" or "socialist" is blatant revisionism, which has become extremely common in conservative and alt-right circles.
Similarly, the USSR was a totalitarian state capitalist dictatorship. The state (ie. the party) owned everything, there was absolutely no collective ownership. There was still wage labor and a very clear hierarchy, not to mention absolutely massive amounts of corruption and grift. In that sense, nazi Germany and the USSR were surprisingly similar; a strong leader with all power consolidated at the top, concentrating ownership and power with a small wealthy elite.
The actual far left is composed primarily of socialism, communism and anarchism. All are defined by the collective ownership of the means of production. Not state ownership or party ownership, but collective ownership. Their main difference is whether a state exists (socialism) or has withered away (communism) or if all forms of hierarchy have been abolished (anarchism).
The actual far left is composed primarily of socialism, communism and anarchism. All are defined by the collective ownership of the means of production. Not state ownership or party ownership, but collective ownership.
This either exists only on small scales, or as a fiction. On the scale of national governments, it's always a fiction disguising state control. Whether it's a totalitarian state controlling corporations or a totalitarian state controlling "collectives," it all just amounts to a totalitarian state with some form of disguise.
The real revisionism is putting a fig leaf of one form or another on all forms of totalitarian governments with centrally controlled societies and economies, then saying they're vastly different because of these different fig leafs. It's more fundamental to observe how they behave historically with regards to human rights. The most important aspect is the authoritarianism.
I assume you propose capitalism as a better way? Unfortunately the free market is a utopian myth.
Personally I agree with anarchism that all hierarchies must be abolished, including monarchy, wage labor and even the concept of the nation state itself.
Greed and territorialism have only ever brought grief and misery. The people in power have succeeded in dividing us into easily-manageable tribes and set us against each other, and while we squabble they reap the rewards of our work.
You really should look into anarchism (or anarcho-communism). Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin are good places to start. I would also recommend Max Stirner, for a good introduction to individualist anarchism.
I assume you propose capitalism as a better way? Unfortunately the free market is a utopian myth.
No disagreement there.
Personally I agree with anarchism that all hierarchies must be abolished,
Such societies don't exist. Societies which are highly communal exist until they reach about 450 people. Even then, they develop hierarchies of personal power.
including monarchy, wage labor and even the concept of the nation state itself.
Arbitrary and corrupt hierarchies need to be reformed. It's an ongoing process. That's built into human nature. There are also good hierarchies which have done much good in human history.
There's a pretty simple definition of communism and it's "workers own the means of production".
That's the one defining trait of communism according to any communist.
Sure, but that also has never been practically the case in any communist nation of which I am aware. Getting into No True Communist discussions isn't meaningfully productive, but there might at least be something to be made from looking at other self-declared communist states and teasing out the differences.
And I don't want to start that discussion. I just think it's easier to call China a totalitarian capitalist state, without torturing other labels to make them fit. It's not unthinkable for a state to miss represent it self when it comes to names or labels.
I just think it's easier to call China a totalitarian capitalist state, without torturing other labels to make them fit.
I think calling them capitalist doesn't involve much less "torturing labels" than calling them communist.
Ok fair enough. What is it about China that makes it explicitly not capitalist?
Since it's absolutely not communism, what makes it absolutely not a capitalist economy?
There's a ton of state ownership of industry, particularly manufacturing, and land is strictly controlled.
That's why I called it "mixed-command".
I...agree? I mean, I said that. ;) Unless your definition of "communist" is "what China is," it doesn't qualify.
Then I didn't fully understand your initial post, I am sorry.
I think people associate a "one party system" with communism. But really the system of government isn't strictly tied to how the economy is managed (see: monarchies, fascism).
You're right though. Economically China isn't communist. Especially in their "Special Administrative Regions" (Hong Kong, Macau).
While recounting anecdotes and making witty observations, let's not forget that this man was responsible for bringing incredible misery upon the people of Russia. Not he alone, but he was the main one.
Also a drunkard, a dictator and a darling of the West.