> it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism
You mean, those who were forcibly starved by their government, those who were forcibly murdered and displaced by their government, and those who were put into forced labor "re-education" work camps by their government.
I'm not talking about the baseline of human problems and suffering that is everywhere -- that's not communism's fault. Communism is responsible for the large increase in death rate following a country's fall to it, and especially for the murders it commits (literally shooting, hanging, decapitating, working to death in gulags, etc., as well as imprisoning and persecuting dissidents and mass theft of peoples' property leading to mass poverty).
The vast power communist leaders hold always corrupts them and turns them into monsters.
> go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means
> Death by capitalism.
You might as well say that everyone in a family who had a preventable death experienced "death by family". Or that everyone with an employer who had a preventable death experienced "death by employer".
It's not other people's job to prevent a given person's misfortune.
> Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food
That's due to government corruption more than anything else. Government officials should be held accountable and prosecuted.
I'm talking about wrongful deaths. It is wrong for a government to kill people for any reason other than conviction of murder. The Bolsheviks, Red Giard, and Stasi straight up murdered people because they owned means of production, disagreed with communism, or tried to escape to a different country. That us evil.
I know that most of the early deaths under communism were due to starvation, what GP calls "misallocation of resources". Thats a fancy term for stealing. Violation of private property - literally taking people's land and things - is evil and it's also directly responsible for the massive famines that happened under communism.
The longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the idea of communism arises because of envy, and not understanding that wealth doesn't just "exist" statically such that it can be fairly (re)distributed.
The real value is what people sell - either food, clothes, houses, and goods/services. By solving the wrong problem, Communism messes up the motivation to work, produce, and sell. And so everyone becomes far more equal - but poor and starving (except political leaders, they usually do far better than the populace... they're "more equal" than others).
It's an evil idea.
... and I am having trouble understanding why all this needs to be said again. Where the heck is the idea that communism is good coming from? The harrowing biographies and memoirs of those who lived under it are out there - all the content dying, famine, fear, the KGB banging on front doors at 3am to "disappear" people (who return 10 years later and talk about torture, prisons, guards authorized to do "anything" to prisoners, and gulags), the learned willing ignorance ("the less you know, the better you sleep").
I had a Russian co-worker over for dinner once who lived through the tail end of the Soviet Union. "The less you know, the better you sleep" is a quote from him.
I'm astounded that people actually think this is mental gymnastics... would you like the KGB banging on your neighbor's door at 3am and sending them to the gulag for saying something critical of the government?
Collectivization is impossible without expropriating people by force. How would you propose accomplishing that without the government's involvement? Central planning also requires a government to allocate resources and fix prices.
If you disagree, I'm curious what government types you think collectivization and central planning can be accomplished with besides those that directly take charge of those things.
We have some good examples to pick from throughout history - postwar Britain nationalizing major industries, Sweden’s soc-dem era, Allende’s Chile (though the US put a quick stop to that), Israeli kibbutzim…
You are collapsing three different questions into one illogical conclusion, leaning heavily on one of the least successful examples of collectivization in the history of mankind. One could use your line of reasoning to argue that because there are bad capitalist countries with authoritarian governments, who do indeed go door to door and murder its citizenry as political suppression, capitalism itself is bad. But they still wouldn’t be logically correct.
You mean, those who were forcibly starved by their government, those who were forcibly murdered and displaced by their government, and those who were put into forced labor "re-education" work camps by their government.
I'm not talking about the baseline of human problems and suffering that is everywhere -- that's not communism's fault. Communism is responsible for the large increase in death rate following a country's fall to it, and especially for the murders it commits (literally shooting, hanging, decapitating, working to death in gulags, etc., as well as imprisoning and persecuting dissidents and mass theft of peoples' property leading to mass poverty).
The vast power communist leaders hold always corrupts them and turns them into monsters.
> go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means
> Death by capitalism.
You might as well say that everyone in a family who had a preventable death experienced "death by family". Or that everyone with an employer who had a preventable death experienced "death by employer".
It's not other people's job to prevent a given person's misfortune.
> Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food
That's due to government corruption more than anything else. Government officials should be held accountable and prosecuted.