| taggartaa said: The main issue with communism is human drive. What motivates you to go to work every day? What motivates you to do a good job? What motivates you to get a higher education? The principles behind communism sounds great, everyone deserves equal treatment. Janitors are just as important as doctors to have a functioning society, so why pay them differently? However it is easy to see right where this breaks down, who is going to go through 8 years of med school so they can work long hours every day while being oncall all the time when they can just get a job right out of high school that pays exactly the same with the exact same benifits? The greater good of your overall society is (sadly) not enough of a motivator for most people, and thus communism breaks down. The reason capitolism works (better than any other system tried on a scaleable population in my opinion) is that it supposes that a person is naturally greedy/competative. People naturally want to get ahead of eachother and capitalism rewards that behavior. |
And yet, for some reason, Cuba - which is clearly the most communistic country that still exists, even if it's not a true communism either - has about the highest percentage of doctors in the whole world, being only slightly beaten by Monaco and Qatar, two of the richest countries of the world. Despite their doctors being paid just about 15$ per month, pretty much like everyone else. How do explain that, when it seems to clearly contradict your argument?
I think that one of the things you ignore is that a higher salary isn't the only benefit that counts for people when choosing a profession. Doctors are often about the most-respected people in society. This probably also has an effect on women - cuban woman will probably also tend to prefer doctors over janitors. And when you're forced to do your job for several decades, there's also other things that will make one job seem more attractive than other jobs. Many people will probably consider a janitor job more boring, and doctors will probably tend to feel their work being valued more. And so on...
And studying in Cuba is free (just like health care, school etc.), so it's simply not like in some other countries, where becoming a doctor can be so extremely expensive that it only makes sense if you're earning a lot afterwards.
But anyway, where does communism even necessarily require everyone to earn absolutely the same? I've so often heard that argument, but I've never heard why. I mean, even if "who would become a doctor if he could become a janitor instead and earn the same?" really was an eternal fact, one could easily think of a compromise: Make the best-earning job earn, say, twice as much as the lowest-paying job. That should already drive people's motivation. The exact ratio is totally up to debate, of course, I'm just trying to point out that it would be easy to counter certain problems that communism is said to have by making small compromises.
Btw, I doubt that some of the conclusions you make about the "human nature" are actually as clear as you believe. A while ago, some scientists published a very interesting paper called "The weirdest people in the world". They came to the conclusion that findings in psychology are usually based on experiments with only western participants, simply believing that they are sufficiently representative of the whole world. But when some people actually made certain game theory experiments (which are about the most interesting psychological tests there are) all around the world, they were surprised that contrary to what they expected, people in other regions of the world would sometimes behave completely different than what they expected from the results of earlier tests.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/03/01/we-are-the-weird/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/files/2013/03/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf
