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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Communism, like capitalism, is an extreme that has certain, very difficult to achieve, requirements. Capitalism needs everyone to be morally decent in order for companies to focus on winning customers through innovation instead of propganda and lobbying, and to accept losses instead of whining. Even the transition into communism is incredibly complicated and technically what where the USSR was stuck, and once there you have to hope that the rest of the world went along with it because it’ll work either on increbily small scales(individual companies, for example) or on a global scale but not really on a mid-sized scale. Plus in both you have basic greed and people who are literally just born narcissitic or legitimately psychotic.
Extreme ideologies are great thought experiments but rarely have any kind of well-developed protections built and are pretty fragile.
If you want a better answer, look at the quality of life in countries with stronger regulations and more communism-according-to-North America systems. In the heavily privatised U.S. there are a lot of people who live absolutely shit lives due to an abyssmal lack of protections. Even in Canada, which is far too close to the U.S. here, at least a homeless person can recieve some level of medical assistance including major surgeries and Covid stimulus was more than a cheap joke.
Extreme
Canada's medical assistance for the homeless is becoming just offer them an assisted suicide.
That's a cute meme, but not true at all. Canada spends a lot of money on health care for the homeless. In fact, the current system of NOT spending enough on basic shelter and mental health & addiction supports means that we spend far more than we should on emergency care and downstream health-related consequences.
There is widespread agreement among those who work in social services that some form of supervised, humane institutional living is needed if we are going to solve the homelessness problem. There is hesitation to implement that because it is extremely expensive and politically fraught.
More importantly, if we are being honest, housing people in decent conditions for free would create a huge amount of competition with private sector landlords, retirement homes, long-term care homes, etc. Unfortunately, the "system" implicitly uses the threat of homelessness or squalid accommodations as a major lever to motivate people to work at jobs that are not very stimulating. Mind you, human nature being what it is, I think the same would ultimately be true under any economic system or form of government.
At least until our robotic AI overlords invent an unlimited energy source and take over the tedious work so we can all sit around doing whatever pleases us, lol.
Canada's idea of dealing with the homeless is to send cops after them and then subsidize rental housing. Because that's worked so far...
Fact check: True
Source: Parent's friend went through MAID a month ago because they couldn't get a job.