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Constitutions, including our own, create economic climates, the way ours creates capitalism, but the climate has to have some basis in the will of the people, and the actions of the people.
The problem with "communism" as it was tried in the Soviet world is that it was forced on people against their will, and against the economic realities around them. When a government has to force an economic or political structure, it becomes unworkable. As we are seeing in Iraq, at least in part because the government is setting itself up as a rival, and therefore is always at odds with the will of the people.
I think a communist type of system could emerge from a capitalistic economy, over time. I think there are hints of it now, in America, in parts of Europe, where social spending programs have stabilized the radical economic swings of "pure" capitalism.
We are led to believe that governments are something opposed to the people, and that economies are natural developments based on consistent natural laws. We think of things like property ownership, wages, money, etc, as absolute. Either a person owns property, or they don't. Either a person makes money, or they don't. Land ownership is a myth, though. What we really mean is land usage rights. You can't "own" land, or anything else, you only use it. In some cases, you use something until it is gone--food, cars, whatever. In the case of land, you use it until you die, or until you move. The land stays there, ready for the next person to use.
So what we are really talking about with capitalism, communism, feufalism, or any other property usage scheme, are the rules behind proerty usage, not ownership. We currently have a system where a person can pay a certain amount of "money" (labor converted into transportable and standardized value) to use land for our whole lives, and to pass that usage to our kids. Government creates the laws that dictate how that usage is allocated. The "money" is stadardized by the market, and its value is gauranteed by the government, but it is still only a person's labor. In short, government controls how much labor you have to provide to use land. In other words, capitalism is not so different from communism, except that we don't notice it as much, since it evolved as a natural system.
The differences in capitalism and communism is largely in the wording when it comes to "ownership," but when it comes to labor and money, the differences are extreme. Capitalism allows one person to control the labor of many people, by accruing money. At its best, it's a beautiful thing. One person accrues the standardized labor (money) of many people, and uses that labor (money) to create more jobs, thus giving more people the opportunity to earn standardized labor. Everyone's living standards go up, and the "capitalist" (capital equals someone else's labor) is rewarded for his role in raising everyone's standards by earning a much higher standard of living.
That system works beautifully on paper. In real life, greed means that the capitalist tries to cheat people out of their labor. Thus, unions arise, government regulates (when it is a legitimate government), minimum standards are set (minimum wages), and capitalists are controlled so their greed cannot ruin the system.
What we started doing in the thirties was, in addition to controlling capitalists' greed, to redistribute some of the extreme wealth. Since no capitalist operates in a vacuum, he or she benefits from even the poorest in society (sales of merchandise created by labor, education of labor itself, etc), capitalists were forced to give some back to the people--to enforce a minimum standard, which is to say, to even out exploitation.
That's where communism would come from. Government would use taxes to redistribute wealth to minimize exploitation. Government would tax those who benefit most and use those funds to create a more equitable climate for everyone, providing certain minimum standards (health care), as well as providing the basic tools to improve the overall welfare (education, roads, security, electricity, etc). Improving the overall general welfare also creates a better business environment, which helps the capitalists who whine about it.
If left uncheked, that system could continue to evolve into communism, where the government (the will of the people, with variations) rewrites "owndership" (usage) laws to fit a Marxist model, while severely limiting how much profit a single person can control. Ultimately, government would reach a point where all wages were paid in taxes, and redistributed as needed to everyone. Workable communism.
And I believe that would be bad. The general welfare and overall standards of living would begin to decline, as people no longer had the incentive to collect money (labor) and allocate it. Everyone becomes both an "owner" and a "laboror," since everyone works for the government, but the government is owned by the people. Resources (including labor) would not be allocated as well, because their would be no reward for working to allocate them. Sure, many people would do it just because it was a challenge and they had pride in their work. That's the part that would remain workable. I'm not saying that a real communist system would devolve to a Soviet-style existence. But the motivation wouldn't be as strong for as many people, and the quality of life would suffer.
Neither pure capitalism nor pure communism would be ideal. They are both just words anyway, just absolute terms--in some ways ad adsurdum arguments--attempting to describe a more complex reality. What we have here is better than both--a capitalist based system tempered with a lot of socialism. True, right now it's going badly, but in general, we've had an impressive record. Our poor are richer than any other poor in history. It's not good enough, yet, but it's better than what's come before. (I'm including all basic western economies, not just the US, in that statement.)
Geeze, like anyone's still reading this! Move over Marx, grab a bench, West, jobycom is babbling like a brook! Sigh. Better get to work before I lose my source for standardized measures of labor.
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