On balance, Capitalism is a better system for mankind then Communism

Introduction CON has sworn and ad hominem attacks that should cost him the conduct point. Examples include “No, you've talked a whole load of sh1t.”. CON also believes that I broke the rules since I provided videos as sources. However, these are my sources and not my arguments. The videos are my source for #6 and #10. They do not need to be viewed to respond to my arguments, only to confirm the facts in my arguments. However, for future rounds, I will not add videos as sources. 1. The Social Calculation Problem CON states that the solution to the social-calculation problem is democracy. However, there are multiple problems with democracy which I will state below. a) Arrow’s Impossible Theorem [1] Arrow’s Impossible Theorem is a proof that when voters have three or more distinct choices, it is impossible to create a voting system which reflects the preference of society. Since there are millions of goods and services, there is no way any voting system could be used to properly reflect group preference. b) Rationally Irrational [2] Based on research done by Bryan Caplan, voters tend to make systematic errors while voting. However, voters do not have an incentive to change their voting behavior since their vote will not affect the outcome of the election. The “cost” of their vote is diffused. However, benefits, such as feeling as one is making a difference, friends and families can have certain political beleifs, and the cognitive pain that comes from changing viewpoints and being wrong are some of the personal reasons why one would not want to engage in rational voting. c) Special Interest groups If a system is created where one penny was taken from every single person and given to one person, nobody would notice. However, that one person would notice. This is an example of the special interest group, in which special groups get benefits from a democracy at the expense of others. It is easy to extract resources from the group through special interests rather than have the resources go to the benefit of all. d) Bundled goods In a democracy, goods are bundled together. To make a system where they are not is near impossible since there are too many goods that there would be too many things to vote on. People cannot spend their entire day just voting on how resources should be distributed or allocated all day. Even those who spend all day voting, tend to vote on legislation that contains bundled goods. Most people tend to be dissatisfied with the candidates since the probability of a candidate agreeing with everything he/she agrees with is low. e) Principal-Agent Problem In a system of democracy, there will have to be agents that will have to make decisions on behalf of the people. However, the agents are also self-interested so will try to act on their own behalf instead of the people. For example, there are actually elections that occur in North Korea[3], but the agent (the Korean Government and Kim-Jong Un) rig the elections. 2. Empirical Evidence against Communism CON states my examples are insufficient, and that true communism has not been tried. However, he even states just a few sentences over that “China are competing with the rest of the world, largely as Communists, and are fvcking owning!“. So this a direct contradiction of his original claim. I will also make a rebuttal to this claim. China has had some market liberalization policies that is increasing its growth but still has some elements of communism in it. Previously, China was more communist and faired far worse. China also isn’t “owning” because it has only a gdp per capita of $8,387 while the US has a gdp per capita of $48,442[4]. While China has been increasing its economic growth, it’s easier for developing nations to increase their growth then developed nations. This is known as the “catch up” effect[5]. A lot of their economic growth is based on unsustainable practices of misallocated resources as demonstrated through the ghost city videos. The Soviet Union was thought to surpass the US in terms of gdp per capita, but the Soviet Union collapsed and it turned out they were not as wealthy as originally thought. North Korea, China and Soviet Union have elements that would be classified as communism. They all have command economies, and restrict private property for the means of production. Stalin had a policy of enforcing collectivization of farm land so that no individual own the farms[6]. In Soviet Union, worker councils consisted of worker-elected delegates that would have legislation and executive powers in the Soviet Union[7]. Lenin followed the word of Karl Marx very closely and believed in his ideology. North Korea actually has elections. For a better example of a more democratic and a socialist nation that had poor economic growth as a result of socialist policies, India is good example. Even if CON accepts that the nations I describe are not “true communist” these are as close a measure that one can find of communism. Therefore there’s no reason to believe that a true communist nation will not perform as poorly as the nations listed. However, let’s say CON is right and “true communism” has never been tried. It is more likely that communism will not work out as predicted and fail. This is because any proof that it will be successful, will be based on speculation. Speculationis likely to be wrong since it is difficult to predict how human motives will interact with one another in a complex world and there are more ways to be right then to be wrong. In order for his system to work, all his assumptions and predictions would have to hold true, which is unlikely to be the case. Now we know that the system of capitalism has improved the lives of billions since before feudalism. Therefore, a priori we should accept capitalism as the better alternative to communism. 3. Tragedy of the commons CON states that overfishing is an example of capitalism failing not communism. However, this ignores the idea that the oceans are not privately owned and communally owned. I’ve previously demonstrated examples of how private property succeeds. There are not problems of overgrazing despite land being privately owned. Nor is there a problem of deforesting, even though there is a demand for lumber. Contrary to popular belief, the amount of forests have actually been increasing. There’s more forests now then there are in the 1920s[8]. This is because people plant the trees that are cut for lumber since they want their land to remain profitable. 4. Innovation incentive and productive efficiency Badger states that democracy can innovate, but as I stated they do not have the same incentive and structure that I described previously that increases innovation. Democracy has a lot of failures that make innovation difficult a I described earlier. For example, is the school system which is massively inefficient. A system where a teacher goes up to lecture to 30 students, when lectures can be massed produced for almost no cost is absurd. However any reforms to change the system are struck down due to teacher unions. This problem is made even worse, since one of the fallacious thinking that humans use is the “make-work fallacy”, in which people underestimate the value of conserving labor. Thus people in a democracy will more likely reject technology and improving efficiency since they believe it will destroy jobs. Without a measure of using accurate price information to minimize input and maximize output, there’s no way one can do the calculations to increase productive efficiency or even know if the process is efficient or not. If one ends up using more capital resources at the expense of less operating resources, is that efficient or not? There’s no way to know without a price mechanism. [1]http://tinyurl.com... [2]http://tinyurl.com...[3]http://tinyurl.com... [4]http://tinyurl.com...[5]http://tinyurl.com...[6]http://tinyurl.com... [7]http://tinyurl.com... [8]http://tinyurl.com...