Comments by "N Velsen" (@nvelsen1975) on "That Time the Soviets Tried to Abolish Money" video.

Nope. The oligarchs were made mainly out of companies being turned into 'Employees' shares'. Owning 1/3800th part of your company had no value at all for people, so a few enterprising invididuals who were deep in the Soviet barter system to trade goods, were basically able to swoop up large sections of a huge industrial company for the equivalent of a few glasses of vodka or a pack of cheap cigarettes. Then came a chaotic time when the nominal tax rate in Russia was above 100%. So make one ruble, pay 2 rubles in tax. So EVERYBODY who owned a company during that time period is technically guilty of tax evasion: They had no choice. This according to dr Leo Paul's lectures at Utrecht University. Imagine that as an example Jefferies Financial goes Soviet and now 2885 people who all don't know what shares are, can't spend them and don't care, own that company. Now you're smart, you've saved up some goods so you begin trading and by giving 2000 of them a drink at the pub, a pack of cigarettes, or some item of clothing, you acquire their shares. And because it's Russia you simply steal another 300 shares off of people and convince another 400 to hand over their shares for free because you demand it over some Soviet regulation. Congrats, for the equivalent of a few month's work, you now own a Fortune500 company. That's how Russian oligarchs came about, by acquiring huge industries at a fraction of their assets-based cost.
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@healord51 'It was a sacrifice we the party bosses were willing to make'
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@artemplatov1982 Sir, our Swamp-German language is a form of art. We have all the best words. Personally I am fond of kinderstraatfeestvoorbereidingswerkzaamheden.
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@tomblaise "There is no market for air or sunlight currently" Au contraire. Certain individuals have had great succes selling fried air. 😉
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Funny trivia: In Dutch 'nep' means fake.
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And ironically the czars pushed alcoholism both as a means of their income and a means of pacification. The Soviets pre-1917 were screaming "alcoholism bad". Then immediatly after 1917 they were pushing alcohol production even harder, sometimes literally using food crops that were desperately needed, to make alcohol instead. The result was from basically the start of the 20th century to the present day in 2023, some parts of Russia have a lower life expectancy than Lesotho, the country with the lowest life expectancy on earth.
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@MisterKackhaufen No, it was services between companies. Like I run a factory that makes furniture, you run one that makes nails. I buy nails from you, so I have to pay you in non-cash rubles. Your factory then owns a number of non-cash rubles, but you can only buy from other factories. You can't use it as worker wages. (so people were kept poor) I am drawing most of this from the lectures of Dr Leo Paul of Utrecht university, so it was a while ago that I was taught.
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@cv990a4 Corruption? I would rather put it this way: What those lectures and studies mostly taught me, is that the Soviet Union is probably the least funny meme ever create in history. 😉
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2:46 Small critique of that: Fischer's Law (not to be confused with the much more well-know Fisher Effect) states that the purchasing power of money (assuming no price effects) is basically the amount of money multiplied by the speed at which it is spent. The more often money changes hands, the more we can purchase goods and services to satisfy our needs with the same amount of money. Thus a capitalist will want to perform M-C-M' as rapidly as possible to increase overal economic strength, only held back by which transactions aren't in his interest. There is no incentive to just sit on a pile of money and do nothing. We don't have savings to look at them and go "Oooh, nice numbers on my bank statement", we have that to prepare for setbacks or prepare for investments. In daily reality this shows by governments encouraging spending, such as the EU having negative interest rates for a while, which lead to a veritable investment rush since everybody who was just sitting on a pile of money, suddenly HAD to spend it. As I understand it Fischer's Law has fallen out of use outside of basic highschool economics due its simplistic assumption of no currency inflation. But as happened basically always, highschool economics destroys marxism. 😆
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@bhante1345 Not as far as I know, but it was mentioned in the Utrecht Social Credit system that was speculated about, before the liberal party went "Over our dead body" and the socialists had to back down. It involved basically banning things we consider normal, like having the ability to reach your house with new furniture, and then putting it behind a paywall that required you to work for the government for free first. Euphemistically called volunteer work, this would violate the 1936 Geneva Convention. (the one on forced labour and slavery, not the one on war)
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@Gormilein So you're saying that the nazis writing election campaigns filled to the brim with promises for "The German worker" isn't socialism? The NSDAP core party program of 25 points reads like Marx wrote it and contains statements like making money out of being rich, is a crime against the German people. Face it, this debate has been done already. National-SOCIALISM. And sad pathetic socialists today still defending their genocidal ideology exclusively through No True Scotsman fallacies have lost the debate conclusively. International Socialists and National Socialists had beef with eachother, definately. But you can't sectarian squables within the socialist religion as an argument as to why it's not socialism. That would be like saying "The pope approving of Hitler in 1933 didn't mean Hitler was endorsed by Christianity: The pope is simply not a Christian"
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@ivok9846 Children's street/neighbourhood party preparatory works. If the street's too dirty you may need to do a bit of kalkwaterzandsteenstralen on some of the stones.
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@saturationstation1446 There's always a socialist who feels the need to embarass himself by telling wild lies about the US and European countries. Preferably coated in racism and bigotry like 'Evil white people starved a lot of peeps in the colonies'. These dumb, moronic racists, can easily be refuted that nearly the starvation under socialism was DUE to socialism. While it is exceedingly rare, nearly non-occuring that a capitalist system ever went "Hey, if we starve everybody to death, will get richer and have succeeded in destroying ourselves. Let's do it, out of capitalism." ....And the death blow comes because nearly all those starvation events were due to tribalism and feudalism, not capitalism. Such as Indian princes in an already-strained economy going "....But what about my feudal dues? Religion says I own you, so you go starve now".
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@Scott C. Oh god here we go again with genocidal socialists argueing "If only the evil white people / bourgeois / America / CIA left my genocidal regime alone, it would've been paradise".... Now there's an embarassment in politics that hasn't changed since 1900 at least.
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@elizabethtamp1537 Thank you for your schizo rambling. It probably made any form of sense to you.
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@Vysair ....That's the same currency, there is no difference. Yuan is the term of the denomination. RMB or renminbi is the official term: "The people's money" Kind of like you can be paid in dollars, but I give you a dollar. When I said I give you a dollar, I am giving you 1 in the currency of dollars. But that doesn't mean a dollar and dollars are a different currency.
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@MisterKackhaufen He means you could not take that debit and turn it into physical money. You couldn't spend it on consumption (where you are the end-user). It was basically money that was only valid between companies. This shrank the money supply and protected the (badly failing) Soviet consumer goods system from the effects of too much money and too much demand. Too much demand would show how broken the system was. "We're too poor to buy" is easier to accept then "We have the money, but the idiots can't deliver"
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@farfromreal They typically won't pay that in exchange for nothing, but what many a socialist or other type of idiot gets wrong, is that many things which they ignorantly label as 'without value' has huge value. Such as logistics, retailing, warehousing and a sheer bridging of a lack of knowledge in consumers, knowledge past, current and future. If you told someone in 1920 they should plonk down two months wages for a plastic box that makes sounds because they need one, you would've been institutionalised. Nowadays most of the planet's population has a mobile phone. My company steamrollers urban planning and specialises in ramming through legally bulletproof plans in an ever-more complicated regulation environment. There are some dimwits who argue neither the developers we work for, or us, have no value. This is because they're ignorant and don't realise that having a bag of money and the sheer willpower to fight for years is a product. As is legal expertise. As is knowing how to work with or against a bureaucracy that exists for good reason. Another nail in the coffin is such people is that the amount of houses for the people that they spontaneously shat out in an environmentally friendly, socially sustainable, properly planned and safe way, currently stands at zero with no plans of adding any in the coming 500 years or so. 😆 So the housing development market can be divided roughly into two categories: Those who understand and respect the current system, how it formed and why. And people / socialists who just don't get it and ruin everything they touch. In just eight years of this work I have seen such people destroy a bare minimum of 250 houses for the people by imposing ridiculous political demands. That's several times the number of houses I've
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@justovision I feel like socialists such as Brian Carthans are completely ignorant of how value is created, leading them to say ridiculous statements like "An easily replacable guy building DIY chairs is being exploited if he doesn't make as much as a company that built and maintains an entire sewer system which if you're not India, is an indispensable service that everybody needs". It's not equal, but it's roughly fair. Equal would ironically equal being extremely unfair. The guy who cleans my office charges 20 per hour. I charge 150 per hour. So for the same money for which I leave my office and drive about 5 minutes towards where you are before turning around as you've run out of that 20 cash, you can have him drive over for free and clean your entire office. Socialists and other idiots might argue this is unfair. They could threaten to murder my family like socialists do and force me to charge only 20 per hour. Outraged at YEARS of studying, hard work, building knowledge, contacts, taking risks, having to do extremely complicated work etc being ignored, I would immediatly stop working for 20 per hour, or get a minimum-effort job and teach my kids not to work but instead find the best way to game the system of this socialist dictatorship. And after a few years the socialists who took over my particular region using brutal violence, are rushing through an emergency 5 year plan as the entire real estate production has collapsed, while fervently denying this could have any connection to them forcing the guy who kept it running, to work for 20 per hour and quit.
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