Comments by "" (@freesk8) on "Vejas Liulevicius - The Backgrounds of Marx and Engels" video.

I wish I could go back in time and help Engels' father to raise him properly. I mean, he was clearly a rich boy, with no understanding of how his father created his wealth. The Starnes family heirs from Atlas Shrugged come to mind. I'll bet Engels dad was too busy to spend any time with him.
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@kimobrien. And yet, capitalism has never developed in to feudalism as Marx predicts. Also, Socialism has never developed in to full anarcho-communism as Marx predicts, either. Seems like he was wrong all around. And then just compare the nations that are relatively free market, like Switzerland, Singapore, Canada, England and the Scandinavian nations on the one hand, to the nations that aspire to Marxist values on the other: China, Cuba, Venezuela, N. Korea, etc. Which set of nations would you rather be in? In which set of nations would you prefer to be poor? The free market nations, of course. Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and to the greater extent that socialism is implemented, the sooner the economy collapses and the greater the poverty and hardship for the poor. Most people learned something from the collapse of the USSR in 1991: socialism doesn't work. As Deng mentioned, it's a dog that won't hunt. And the only way that Socialism continues to gain followers is that the History of the failure of socialism is censored.
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@kimobrien. How do you solve the problem of information? In a command economy, prices are set by bureaucrats. But these functionaries lack the important information needed to set prices: demand, supply, scarcity, resource availability, labor... The free market is an automatic system to set prices, and each price is set hyper-locally, in reaction to the local conditions that exist on the ground in every place. No central authority will ever have this data. You can not set prices without a free market. They will always be wrong. Too high or too low. This means gluts and shortages all across the nation of a planned economy. How do you solve that problem? von Mises proves that Communism can never work.
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@kimobrien. I've read Das Kapital. It includes some good criticism of free markets. I will never argue that free markets are perfect. But Kapital also misunderstands free markets. And it does not present an alternative that is any better. In fact, the alternatives to a free market are all worse, especially for the poor.
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@kimobrien. And the labor theory of value has been completely discredited. It ignores the costs of the means of production, the value differences between different kinds of labor, and the value of the organizer of labor, among many things. Do you charge the same for an hour of labor from a brain surgeon as you do from a ditch-digger? It's just a crazy theory.
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@richardkammerer2814 Comments are full of crypto spam bots. "Grincepe" and "Magnetic Aura" by Takeshi Mizuki is what they are hyping. Wish there was a bot we could use to automatically hide or delete these.
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