We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta....
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion -- over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption....it costs under $5 per barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta.
The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't.
-- Huber and Mills, co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy."
Sure it will have economic costs, but developing technology will create jobs and result in lots of energy saving technology which can be sold.
why do people keep saying this. it makes absolutely no sense. if oil is the cheapest source of energy we have, we aren't going to spur the economy by using a more expensive energy source. it will cost more for a company to get goods to market. that means less product sold, which means less jobs for everybody. maybe a handful of windfarm engineers will find new jobs, but people, economies, and especially the poor will globally find less work and have less wealth.
and by the way "saving energy" is not a good goal. there is lots of energy out there, the problem is getting affordable energy with acceptable levels of pollution. if you just limited energy, you would be limiting standard of living.
I seem to recall a time in history when industry leaders insisted that if we enact child labor laws, the economy would suffer horribly and permanently.
In the economy there is no such thing as a permanent upturn or downturn.
energy usage echoes consumption and standard of living. the more energy you use, the wealtheir your society is. limiting energy usage, means limiting the standard of living.
people who want us to limit energy usage are asking for a halt to progress and standard of living.
whatever approach is taken needs to be a little more flexible than "we need to limit energy usage"
Significant expenditure in new, clean power plants (both big, like fusion, and small, like wind farms) also boost the economy.
this is rediculous. the "new, clean power" is obviously going to cost more and will depress the economy.
There is only a finite amount of stuff to own (no matter what monetary system you're using) - just by the fact that there are a finite number of atoms in the universe (and much fewer accessible to us on the Earth's surface). And the more stuff fewer people own, the less of it is available for everyone else to use (except by permission of the owners).
its not just about the atoms though. ideas have great value. a personal computer, for example, is worth more than a pile of the raw materials it is made out of. its not just the atoms that give it value, its the arrangement of those atoms. and don't forget the service industry. providing services, might just mean moving atoms around and often doesn't really have anything to do with the number of atoms in the universe. besides the universe is pretty big and i'm not too worried about that particular limit.
also you claim, the average standard of living of the world is higher now than it ever has been and productivity is growing exponentialy "because of socialistic practices which involve the redistribution of wealth." this statement does not mathematically make sense. redistribution of wealth could never create a higher average standard of living. that defies the definition of "average" and "redistribute". the only way to raise the average standard of living of the world is by creating new wealth.
generally, i think that you are confusing the "free" in "free market" with anarchy. freedom and anarchy are different. i am not a proponent of anarchy markets -- certainly markets do not work well in a system of anarchy. at the very least you have to be able to enforce a contract. but more than that, i strongly agree with you that corporations (and governments, individuals, nonprofits) must be policed as they commit crimes from time to time. a society needs a strong and fair judicial system for a free market to function.
when people say "free market" they use the word "free" in the same way the founding fathers did. individuals and groups are free to act in any way they choose as long as it doesn't infringe on the freedoms and rights of others. that is the difference between freedom and anarchy. and that is the kind of justice that will prevent a rigid class system.
you gave the example, of a mining company which existed where there was not a good justice system. one of the things it did was force people to accept good and services at prices above the market price. clearly people in a free market would never accept those prices because in a free market they would be free to go to another store which wass offering goods and services for market prices. but since they were forced to accept these high prices, there was no freedom, no choice, and no market, and thats not capitalism.
i think your criticism of capitalism is unfair. you should criticize the individuals and groups who are criminals and who are imposing their will on others by engaging in bribes, slavery, theft, etc. or you could criticize a society's justice system. but i don't see how capitalism is in anyway related to or responsible for companies that behave badly. (capitalism doesn't kill people. people kill people.)
so it can only be concluded that a fair system of justice means that there is no reason for redistribution to prevent a rigid class system from forming from capitalism.
1. new wealth is created all the time uh maybe i wasn't very clear. what i was trying to say is that there is not a finite amount of wealth in the world. i wasn't trying to say anything about money. steve jobs created something of value. he didn't just print money. if he just printed money, then yes, there would be a problem of inflation, but he created value.
2. trade is always mutually beneficial. i stand by my statement. thats not really a free market that you are describing. its a perverted circumstance where there is no competition for labor or goods.
3. redistribution and justice i was trying to say that injustice is not a reason for redistribution of wealth. if there is injustice, than what we need is justice -- not wellfare.
the other stuff the wealth of the world is certainly not constant. the average over all standard of living of the world is higher now than it ever has been and productivity is growing exponentialy. wealth is being created.
its true that capitalism doesn't guarantee equality. wealth is distributed to those who are most productive. this can change. some people become poorer and others become richer. this is a good thing. it means that there are no rigid class systems. and people are rewarded according how hard they work. its very moral.
the situation you describe where a minority ends up with all the wealth only happens when there is a broken justice system that allows the wealthy to steal money (for example via monopoly). capitalism does require a strong and fair justice system. but it certainly doesn't require redistribution of wealth!
Otherwise, you will almost inevitably end up with economic stratification (the wealthy can leverage their wealth to become wealthier, the poor will have to do anything to survive, and the middle class will become poor as the wealthy take all their assets)
i don't mind doing a little redistribution to help people out, but i think your observation is not accurate. why can't the poor (and middle class and rich) advance? how is it that the wealthy take the assets of the middle class? i can only think of 3 (incorrect) reasons you might believe this:
1. there is a finite amount of money in the world and the rich people are hogging it all. this is not true. new wealth is created all the time. when steve jobs invented the pc in his garage, he created new wealth that wasn't there before.
2. when a consumer purchases a product they "lose" their money to the producer. when trade happens, it always benefits both parties. otherwise, they wouldn't agree to trade. both sides leave better off than they were before.
3. the rich steal it somehow. if redistribution is supposed to make up for an unfair justice system, then shouldn't we fix the justice system and forget about the redistribution?
it happens all the time. I do not own a car or have children; should my tax dollars go to fund roads and schools I do not use?.. I did not want our military to invade Iraq. Yet I am paying for that as well.
this is not a reason to put more things under government control. this is a reason why we should try to have as few things under government control as possible. let individuals decide what they want to do with their lives and resources.
socialists on the far left and fundamentalists on the far right both like to tell everyone how to behave and what to do and where to spend their money. then they say, well its democracy because the majority of people voted for it. what it is, is the tyranny of the majority. democracy and freedom are often at odds with each other in this way.
democracy is when the country as a whole gets to decide. freedom is when individuals get to decide. sometimes freedoms need to be sacrificed, but lets keep it to a minimum.
3 kids in the back seat kicking you in the butt and throwing peanut butter around as you argue about abortion with your wife while the radio blasts mariachi music is definately more distracting than talking on the cell phone.
maybe we should make that illegal too.
how about you wussies who wet yourselves while hiding under your couch during a thunderstorm and pass useless legislation telling everyone what to do and how to behave, strap on your helmets and kneepads and seat belts and take your care bear nerf tricycles with training wheels and airbags and rollbars on over to your local elementary school safety town and stay there. and leave the rest of us free to enjoy life.
i don't think thats true. the way i understand it, studies have shown that driving while talking on the cellphone is just as dangerous as driving while talking to a passenger.
huh. i thought they went out of business a couple years ago.
we had problems with everything. a lot of it was probably due to how my company handled the product. but still. there were a *lot* of gui bugs. like we couldn't turn off the tips feature. and everytime a tip tried to launch, it had an error and would pop up an error window. which was insane, because it launched a new tip every time you clicked any button. i remember it being really very very not intuitive either. i couldn't figure out how to fill out a bug. i learned bugzilla in a half hour or so, but i had to keep checking the reference sheets they gave us in order figure out how to around in rememdy. that was 3 or 4 years ago though, so who knows how things are now.
really it was so unpleasant to use and took so long to slog through, that i just stopped logging bugs i found. in retrospect i was disillusioned with the company in general and should have moved on.
The report starkly spells out the likely consequences of exceeding the threshold. "Beyond the 2 degrees C level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly," it says.
does the report spell out the consequences of going back to the stone age and living like ogg and grog, which is what would be required to have CO2 emissions decrease? shouldn't there be a comparison of the benefits?
yeah i worked for a company that used PVCS. it SUCKED. horrible experience. i hated it. cvs is sooo much better. command line, scriptable, multiple people can work on the same piece of code, and it helps that cvs is faster than a freaking ant and isn't a horriblly implemented java gui. unlike PVCS which SUCKED.
the only product that i've had a worse time with is a bug tracking system called Remedy or Peregrine. Remedy REALLY REAlly sucked. wow. bugzilla is way better.
It increases the quality of life of any one person, but decreased the quality of life for the entire society.
that makes no sense. if it increases the quality of life for every individual it increases the quality of life for an entire society.
weather forecast for tomorrow is wrong; 100 years?
on
BBC on Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speech es _quote04.html
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
north korea, however, was a marxist paradise for about 20 years. all private property was illegal and all commerce was illegal. and everyone was equal. and several million people starved to death when the soviet union stopped sending aid in 1990's because korea couldn't support itself.
also the amish engage in trade and are not communists.
marx said the first step to communism was to have the government take everything from everyone and give it to the state. then, later on things would magically be equal and everyone would live in peace and harmony.
stalinist russia did follow marx's prescription. they might not have reached paradise, but they the first steps he prescribed in his manifesto.
north korea, however, was a marxist paradise for about 20 years. all private property was illegal and all commerce was illegal. and everyone was equal. and several million people starved to death when china and the soviet union stopped sending aid in 1990's.
growing marijuana gets you jail time China: they kill you for selling drugs
police come into the house if you are suspected of being a terrorist USSR: kgb come into the house if you are suspected of being a terrorist and kill you.
zoning North Korea: you don't get permission to build, the government tells you to build. or they kill you.
seizure North Korea: government owns everything and seizes your property regardless of whether you are a drug dealer or not. it was illegal own own property or engage in any kind of commerce for about 20 years. you die of starvation or torture or execution.
1000 disenfrachised voters who wouldn't have made a difference anyway 200,000,000 disenfranchised soviets get to vote for stalin.
some people don't have health insurance 40,000,000 starve to death in China under Mao's great leap forward.
a few people are homeless some people were homeless in Nazi germany too
5% unemployment 20-40% unemployment in Saddam Hussein's Iraq
a few people standing in food lines 20 million people are deliberateley starved to death by stalin.
high price of medicine (and the best health care the world has ever seen) soviet union -- little or no medicine, lines, few doctors, bad doctors, poor equipment, no one can afford it anyway.
gosh you are right, the extreme forms of communism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, and monarchy are all exactly the same as our democracy here in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
no one. there is enough cheap oil in canada and venezuela to last for a century.
from the wall street journal, january 27, 2005:
...
...it costs under $5 per barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta.
We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion -- over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.
The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't.
-- Huber and Mills, co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy."
just because the glacier is melting means nothing. scientific proof means proving why the glacier is melting.
Sure it will have economic costs, but developing technology will create jobs and result in lots of energy saving technology which can be sold.
why do people keep saying this. it makes absolutely no sense. if oil is the cheapest source of energy we have, we aren't going to spur the economy by using a more expensive energy source. it will cost more for a company to get goods to market. that means less product sold, which means less jobs for everybody. maybe a handful of windfarm engineers will find new jobs, but people, economies, and especially the poor will globally find less work and have less wealth.
and by the way "saving energy" is not a good goal. there is lots of energy out there, the problem is getting affordable energy with acceptable levels of pollution. if you just limited energy, you would be limiting standard of living.
i know. it was just a dumb joke.
I seem to recall a time in history when industry leaders insisted that if we enact child labor laws, the economy would suffer horribly and permanently.
wow, you were alive in 1938?
In the economy there is no such thing as a permanent upturn or downturn.
energy usage echoes consumption and standard of living. the more energy you use, the wealtheir your society is. limiting energy usage, means limiting the standard of living.
people who want us to limit energy usage are asking for a halt to progress and standard of living.
whatever approach is taken needs to be a little more flexible than "we need to limit energy usage"
Significant expenditure in new, clean power plants (both big, like fusion, and small, like wind farms) also boost the economy.
this is rediculous. the "new, clean power" is obviously going to cost more and will depress the economy.
i agree with both you and the grand parent poster.
its not just about the atoms though. ideas have great value. a personal computer, for example, is worth more than a pile of the raw materials it is made out of. its not just the atoms that give it value, its the arrangement of those atoms. and don't forget the service industry. providing services, might just mean moving atoms around and often doesn't really have anything to do with the number of atoms in the universe. besides the universe is pretty big and i'm not too worried about that particular limit.
also you claim, the average standard of living of the world is higher now than it ever has been and productivity is growing exponentialy "because of socialistic practices which involve the redistribution of wealth." this statement does not mathematically make sense. redistribution of wealth could never create a higher average standard of living. that defies the definition of "average" and "redistribute". the only way to raise the average standard of living of the world is by creating new wealth.
these 2 graphs and the accompanying article back up my claims:
gdp per capita,
world population and production,
article (the last paragraph is especially relevant).
generally, i think that you are confusing the "free" in "free market" with anarchy. freedom and anarchy are different. i am not a proponent of anarchy markets -- certainly markets do not work well in a system of anarchy. at the very least you have to be able to enforce a contract. but more than that, i strongly agree with you that corporations (and governments, individuals, nonprofits) must be policed as they commit crimes from time to time. a society needs a strong and fair judicial system for a free market to function.
when people say "free market" they use the word "free" in the same way the founding fathers did. individuals and groups are free to act in any way they choose as long as it doesn't infringe on the freedoms and rights of others. that is the difference between freedom and anarchy. and that is the kind of justice that will prevent a rigid class system.
you gave the example, of a mining company which existed where there was not a good justice system. one of the things it did was force people to accept good and services at prices above the market price. clearly people in a free market would never accept those prices because in a free market they would be free to go to another store which wass offering goods and services for market prices. but since they were forced to accept these high prices, there was no freedom, no choice, and no market, and thats not capitalism.
i think your criticism of capitalism is unfair. you should criticize the individuals and groups who are criminals and who are imposing their will on others by engaging in bribes, slavery, theft, etc. or you could criticize a society's justice system. but i don't see how capitalism is in anyway related to or responsible for companies that behave badly. (capitalism doesn't kill people. people kill people.)
so it can only be concluded that a fair system of justice means that there is no reason for redistribution to prevent a rigid class system from forming from capitalism.
1. new wealth is created all the time
uh maybe i wasn't very clear. what i was trying to say is that there is not a finite amount of wealth in the world. i wasn't trying to say anything about money. steve jobs created something of value. he didn't just print money. if he just printed money, then yes, there would be a problem of inflation, but he created value.
2. trade is always mutually beneficial.
i stand by my statement. thats not really a free market that you are describing. its a perverted circumstance where there is no competition for labor or goods.
3. redistribution and justice
i was trying to say that injustice is not a reason for redistribution of wealth. if there is injustice, than what we need is justice -- not wellfare.
the other stuff
the wealth of the world is certainly not constant. the average over all standard of living of the world is higher now than it ever has been and productivity is growing exponentialy. wealth is being created.
its true that capitalism doesn't guarantee equality. wealth is distributed to those who are most productive. this can change. some people become poorer and others become richer. this is a good thing. it means that there are no rigid class systems. and people are rewarded according how hard they work. its very moral.
the situation you describe where a minority ends up with all the wealth only happens when there is a broken justice system that allows the wealthy to steal money (for example via monopoly). capitalism does require a strong and fair justice system. but it certainly doesn't require redistribution of wealth!
Otherwise, you will almost inevitably end up with economic stratification (the wealthy can leverage their wealth to become wealthier, the poor will have to do anything to survive, and the middle class will become poor as the wealthy take all their assets)
i don't mind doing a little redistribution to help people out, but i think your observation is not accurate. why can't the poor (and middle class and rich) advance? how is it that the wealthy take the assets of the middle class? i can only think of 3 (incorrect) reasons you might believe this:
1. there is a finite amount of money in the world and the rich people are hogging it all.
this is not true. new wealth is created all the time. when steve jobs invented the pc in his garage, he created new wealth that wasn't there before.
2. when a consumer purchases a product they "lose" their money to the producer.
when trade happens, it always benefits both parties. otherwise, they wouldn't agree to trade. both sides leave better off than they were before.
3. the rich steal it somehow.
if redistribution is supposed to make up for an unfair justice system, then shouldn't we fix the justice system and forget about the redistribution?
it happens all the time. I do not own a car or have children; should my tax dollars go to fund roads and schools I do not use? .. I did not want our military to invade Iraq. Yet I am paying for that as well.
this is not a reason to put more things under government control. this is a reason why we should try to have as few things under government control as possible. let individuals decide what they want to do with their lives and resources.
socialists on the far left and fundamentalists on the far right both like to tell everyone how to behave and what to do and where to spend their money. then they say, well its democracy because the majority of people voted for it. what it is, is the tyranny of the majority. democracy and freedom are often at odds with each other in this way.
democracy is when the country as a whole gets to decide. freedom is when individuals get to decide. sometimes freedoms need to be sacrificed, but lets keep it to a minimum.
3 kids in the back seat kicking you in the butt and throwing peanut butter around as you argue about abortion with your wife while the radio blasts mariachi music is definately more distracting than talking on the cell phone.
maybe we should make that illegal too.
how about you wussies who wet yourselves while hiding under your couch during a thunderstorm and pass useless legislation telling everyone what to do and how to behave, strap on your helmets and kneepads and seat belts and take your care bear nerf tricycles with training wheels and airbags and rollbars on over to your local elementary school safety town and stay there. and leave the rest of us free to enjoy life.
i don't think thats true. the way i understand it, studies have shown that driving while talking on the cellphone is just as dangerous as driving while talking to a passenger.
huh. i thought they went out of business a couple years ago.
we had problems with everything. a lot of it was probably due to how my company handled the product. but still. there were a *lot* of gui bugs. like we couldn't turn off the tips feature. and everytime a tip tried to launch, it had an error and would pop up an error window. which was insane, because it launched a new tip every time you clicked any button. i remember it being really very very not intuitive either. i couldn't figure out how to fill out a bug. i learned bugzilla in a half hour or so, but i had to keep checking the reference sheets they gave us in order figure out how to around in rememdy. that was 3 or 4 years ago though, so who knows how things are now.
really it was so unpleasant to use and took so long to slog through, that i just stopped logging bugs i found. in retrospect i was disillusioned with the company in general and should have moved on.
good luck.
The report starkly spells out the likely consequences of exceeding the threshold. "Beyond the 2 degrees C level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly," it says.
does the report spell out the consequences of going back to the stone age and living like ogg and grog, which is what would be required to have CO2 emissions decrease? shouldn't there be a comparison of the benefits?
yeah i worked for a company that used PVCS. it SUCKED. horrible experience. i hated it. cvs is sooo much better. command line, scriptable, multiple people can work on the same piece of code, and it helps that cvs is faster than a freaking ant and isn't a horriblly implemented java gui. unlike PVCS which SUCKED.
the only product that i've had a worse time with is a bug tracking system called Remedy or Peregrine. Remedy REALLY REAlly sucked. wow. bugzilla is way better.
i love my new company.
It increases the quality of life of any one person, but decreased the quality of life for the entire society.
that makes no sense. if it increases the quality of life for every individual it increases the quality of life for an entire society.
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
h es _quote04.html
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speec
the manifesto says:
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
i didn't have the energy to read your hole post, but i agree with your subject line anyway.
north korea, however, was a marxist paradise for about 20 years. all private property was illegal and all commerce was illegal. and everyone was equal. and several million people starved to death when the soviet union stopped sending aid in 1990's because korea couldn't support itself.
also the amish engage in trade and are not communists.
marx said the first step to communism was to have the government take everything from everyone and give it to the state. then, later on things would magically be equal and everyone would live in peace and harmony.
stalinist russia did follow marx's prescription. they might not have reached paradise, but they the first steps he prescribed in his manifesto.
north korea, however, was a marxist paradise for about 20 years. all private property was illegal and all commerce was illegal. and everyone was equal. and several million people starved to death when china and the soviet union stopped sending aid in 1990's.
in order:
growing marijuana gets you jail time
China: they kill you for selling drugs
police come into the house if you are suspected of being a terrorist
USSR: kgb come into the house if you are suspected of being a terrorist and kill you.
zoning
North Korea: you don't get permission to build, the government tells you to build. or they kill you.
seizure
North Korea: government owns everything and seizes your property regardless of whether you are a drug dealer or not. it was illegal own own property or engage in any kind of commerce for about 20 years. you die of starvation or torture or execution.
1000 disenfrachised voters who wouldn't have made a difference anyway
200,000,000 disenfranchised soviets get to vote for stalin.
some people don't have health insurance
40,000,000 starve to death in China under Mao's great leap forward.
a few people are homeless
some people were homeless in Nazi germany too
5% unemployment
20-40% unemployment in Saddam Hussein's Iraq
a few people standing in food lines
20 million people are deliberateley starved to death by stalin.
high price of medicine (and the best health care the world has ever seen)
soviet union -- little or no medicine, lines, few doctors, bad doctors, poor equipment, no one can afford it anyway.
gosh you are right, the extreme forms of communism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, and monarchy are all exactly the same as our democracy here in the US.