Oddbean

You're making the same mistake that Yuval Noah Harari made in his book Sapiens... the belief that capitalism REQUIRES you to make every single decision in your life based on monetary profit motives. This is obviously incorrect. Do I need to charge my kids money before feeding them dinner in order to be in adherence with capitalism? Obviously not. Does capitalism allow me to be charitable with my neighbor? Obviously yes. Can I decide to buy something local even though it costs more than a similar item on Amazon or Walmart? Yes I can, and that doesn't mean I am violating capitalism. Capitalism IS free/voluntary exchange and engagement. People can voluntarily join a commune under capitalism!! What makes it "communism" — the way 99.9% of human use the word — is when there's a centralized government pointing guns at people's heads, forcing them to behave in certain ways. Your post describes people voluntarily engaging with one another. You are describing free markets / free exchange / capitalism. Additionally, these are nothing more than meaningless feel-good nonsense: > "in favor of a decentralized, stateless society where resources and goods are communally owned and managed." > "manage their own affairs, making decisions through direct democracy and consensus." > "exchanging goods and services based on need rather than profit" > "work together for the common good" > "operate on principles of mutual aid and shared resources" These all mean NOTHING until applied to a specific situation. And then anyone with the tiniest bit of mental maturity would understand that SOMEONE is going to decided what different people's "needs" are... SOMEONE is going to decide what "consensus" means... SOMEONE is going to decide what "the common good means" etc etc So, yes, communism IS coercion... and nothing you said in this incoherent post above demonstrates otherwise.

It seems to me that commies understanding of economics still remains at a very primitive level. Marx wrote Das Kapital during the marginal revolution and he never seemed to quite grasp it, his critique of capitalism was still based on the classical/ Ricardian framwork. I would say the reason why communism won't work really comes down to economic calculation, and coercion being the offshoot of the incentive problem, which can be solved in a compulsive and coercive way. But the ECP can never be solved by AI or big data or any technology, however advanced. For prices cannot emerge via any equation, the price of a good is based on the subjective valuation of both parties, and this presupposes private ownership in not just the MoP but consumer goods as well. Higher Q lower P or lower Q higher p, this relationship between P and Q is in no way linear, it's in no way pre-existed. It's solely based on the subjective valuation of both parties. It can very well be the case that when we cut the price in half, the quantity demanded does not simply double. For the marginal utility of a good does not diminish in an exactly inverse proportion. The seller must set the price at the most profitable level, and he can only do that with the apparatus of economic calculation. It is precisely the fact that there are so many ways to make the same good that we need economic calculation to find out which way is the most profitable, and whether there are any more valuable uses for the MoP remain unsatisfied and unrealized. The failure to grasp this leads to production chaos. As per Mises "we have a socialist community which must cross the whole ocean of possible and imaginable economic permutations without the compass of economic calculation. All economic change, therefore, would involve operations the value of which could neither be predicted beforehand nor ascertained after they had taken place. Everything would be a leap in the dark. Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy." Socialism, Mises, p.122.