The Tragedy of Communism (Homo Economicus)
I was reading this post over at Azarius' blog, and felt that I needed to have my say on it, as it describes a dichotomy between capitalism and communism as a choice between a future-driven lifestyle and a present-driven lifestyle.
What Azarius proposes is that in communism (he is an anarcho-communist), each person would have a choice about how much time to use in productive means, and this would be independent of their quality of life, whereas in capitalism, each person needs to sacrifice time in order to gain wealth.
Whilst this picture looks very glamorous for communism, what Azarius fails to mention is that although people will share society's wealth, the actual amount of wealth in society is higher when there are more hours spent on productive means.
In other words, although for the individual, his graphs are correct, the graph labelled 'Private' will always represent the time to wealth relationship for the society. The more productive society is, the more wealth will be distributed amongst the people (whether via capitalism or communism).
What is Freedom?
I decided to start my blogging with a bit of a heavy question: 'What is freedom?'
Personally, I determine the freest society as one where each person has the right to do whatever he/she wishes, so long as it doesn't prevent anybody else from doing whatever he/she wishes.
However, even a statement like this can be interpreted in at least two ways:
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