I was reading Paul Orlando’s latest post, “The Youth,” in which he reflects on his encounter with the Spartacist Youth League (a fancy group of communists in America). Having lived all my life in Kerala, I’m not a stranger to communism, as my Vietnamese friend had boldly reminded me during my trip to Ho Chi Minh.
Anyway, Paul’s reflections closely mimic mine. My go-to argument against communism only involves human nature. The default human nature is so incredible that we collectively built a system where everyone gets what they want. Do you want to buy avocados in your small, remote town? Well, it’s a bit pricey, but here you go. Do you like Arabian food more than you like Ethiopian food? Well, there are more Arabian restaurants in town anyway!
The incredibleness here is that no central planner asked your local fruit seller to sell avocados, and nobody asked the farmer he buys it from to plant avocados. No government has asked business owners to build Arabian restaurants, and nobody has forced you to like Arabian food. It all comes together just because people act in their best interest. i.e., each individual made decisions on how they should act instead of a central planner, and that made you, the seller, the farmer, and the countless others in what we describe as our economy, happy.
The fact is, a central planner can never plan this. Even the most meticulously thought-out plan, which uses all possible data and all science we know to come to a plan, would fail because I could easily decide to have kiwis instead of avocados. While the meticulous plan fails, the economy doesn’t, and if the demand and supply aren’t matched, individuals will act.
The bottom line is that a central planner can never be as good as individual planners who act in their own interest. That’s where the core idea of communism fails. That and the countless times it has been tried and failed (including similar policies in non-communist states) should be enough to deter more young people from being brainwashed.