Hillary Clinton

[21st Century Man]

SV,
   You have to admit from an American perspective, your country does indeed appear to be socialist.  Not as socialist as other countries but still socialist.

As for the US being in decline, that was true under Obama but maybe not so under Trump.

[SredniVashtar]

SV,
   You have to admit from an American perspective, your country does indeed appear to be socialist.  Not as socialist as other countries but still socialist.

As for the US being in decline, that was true under Obama but maybe not so under Trump.

Not so sure about that. I don't hear him talking about investing in education, which is the biggest thing you can do to pull yourself out of a decline, but that's a solution for the medium-long term whereas all he wants is the quick fix of a sticking plaster. Instead he's talking about hanging on to jobs that will drain away in any case to countries where the costs are lower.  He sounds like a typical big business guy - keep labour costs as low as possible. As the world leader you ought to be showing the way in innovation and technology, not following third world countries.

[SredniVashtar]

The traditional definition of socialism is that the means of production - eg gas, electricity etc - are owned by the state. Thatcher sold them off, so that doesn't hold over here.

[21st Century Man]

Not so sure about that. I don't hear him talking about investing in education, which is the biggest thing you can do to pull yourself out of a decline, but that's a solution for the medium-long term whereas all he wants is the quick fix of a sticking plaster. Instead he's talking about hanging on to jobs that will drain away in any case to countries where the costs are lower.  He sounds like a typical big business guy - keep labour costs as low as possible. As the world leader you ought to be showing the way in innovation and technology, not following third world countries.

I don't disagree but I also don't think we should also show our strength in manufacturing.  I don't know about you but I'm rather tired of buying shoddy goods manufactured in 3rd world countries.  It wouldn't hurt the US to lower our corporate tax rates to a competitive level like Ireland has.

[Jackstar]

SV,
   You have to admit from an American perspective, your country does indeed appear to be socialist.

Once again, I must reiterate that the present American perspective is that to be a "socialist" is to be proficient at using social media.

Here's the perspective:

[Jackstar]

We've spent the previous few centuries trying to teach you lot the rudiments of civilisation.

You might start by spelling it correctly, with a zed.

[SredniVashtar]

You might start by spelling it correctly, with a zed.

Consider this a belated Xmas wish: eat shit and die, numbskull! Don't forget to do it in the correct order, otherwise you ruin the effect.

[SredniVashtar]

I don't disagree but I also don't think we should also show our strength in manufacturing.  I don't know about you but I'm rather tired of buying shoddy goods manufactured in 3rd world countries.  It wouldn't hurt the US to lower our corporate tax rates to a competitive level like Ireland has.

People who seem to know about this say that the actual rate people pay is a lot less than the stated one, and that there are all sorts of loopholes. I suppose you could show your strength in manufacturing, but that would be via massive automation.  I don't think you are going to get labour costs down sufficiently to be competitive, nor should you, so it's not going to much of a job-creator. As I said, you don't want to compete with third-world  countries in that way, by treating your people like dogs. The reason socialism came about in the first place was because poor people were being exploited during the industrial revolution in Europe.

[21st Century Man]

People who seem to know about this say that the actual rate people pay is a lot less than the stated one, and that there are all sorts of loopholes. I suppose you could show your strength in manufacturing, but that would be via massive automation.  I don't think you are going to get labour costs down sufficiently to be competitive, nor should you, so it's not going to much of a job-creator. As I said, you don't want to compete with third-world  countries in that way, by treating your people like dogs. The reason socialism came about in the first place was because poor people were being exploited during the industrial revolution in Europe.

Well, yeah, I agree that we don't want to treat people like dogs.  I think we can manufacture good products without treating people like that if we can keep our tax rates down.  We can at least be on an even keel with places like Ireland.  Sure, automation is the wave of the future but there are some things that will still need the human touch.

Personally, I prefer the way you Brits spell words.  Adds more colour to the vocabulary. lol.

[Jackstar]

Gawd. Ye're so tyresome.

[21st Century Man]

Once again, I must reiterate that the present American perspective is that to be a "socialist" is to be proficient at using social media.

Here's the perspective:

No, that is just what the uneducated think it is.

[21st Century Man]

Gawd. Ye're so tyresome.

See, isn't that more colourful than tiresome? lol.

[Jackstar]

the present American perspective is

what the uneducated think

I accept your capitulation.

[The King of Kings]

Because it lessens the pain that an old man with the intellect of a block of wood, the attention span of a guppy, the temperament of a bawling toddler and the social graces of a chimp is the next president.

So you are saying Hillary couldn't defeat a man with the intellect of a block of wood, the attention span of a guppy, the temperament of a bawling toddler and the social graces of a chimp?

Why would you even want her as President if she is that inept?

[Yorkshire pud]

So you are saying Hillary couldn't defeat a man with the intellect of a block of wood, the attention span of a guppy, the temperament of a bawling toddler and the social graces of a chimp?

Why would you even want her as President if she is that inept?

I didn't say I did. But you knew that.

[Yorkshire pud]

.  Of course to an American the idea of noble birth is as abhorrent as warm beer and Marmite and we say as much in our constitution.

Really? That could explain why American tourists flock to country piles that are occupied by the aristocracy (Chatsworth house in Derbyshire being just one); why being a certain 'Lord' or 'Lady' opens doors in the US, gets the good tables, the contacts etc.

As SV says, we look at the Firm (royal family), as a throwback we don't really take seriously. I see William and Harry as breaking the mold though. Both have served in the military, Harry doing two tours of Afghanistan: How many American high office politicians have seen their kids and grandkids go to Iraq or Afghanistan? Their grandmother drove ambulances in WW2, their grandad was in the RN, an uncle flew helis in the Falklands war, so there's form. I put that in because Americans make a great deal of past military service irrespective of if the person actually saw action. All the above did see it.

They both get massive attention in the US, especially now Katherine has had two children. Like it or not, most Americans, despite the revolution, despite the civil war and so on, like the whole concept of the continuity of a monarchy, borne out by the head counts of Americans on vacation in London paying to go in Buck House. I've said several time I'm ambivelant about it, I see the good and the bad sides of it,.

Several very left wing MP's over the years have pushed to eradicate the RF, and have a republic. But its never been popular. Only in the US could a Republic be seen as not left wing, when the rest of the world sees it rather differently.

Happy Easter.

[Juan]

No, we are amused by your royalty and glad that you pay for it.  You just can't get better than Charles saying we need to pay attention to Mohammed on Christmas.

[Yorkshire pud]

No, we are amused by your royalty and glad that you pay for it.  You just can't get better than Charles saying we need to pay attention to Mohammed on Christmas.

Oh, he definitely isn't taken seriously. Anyone who can wear a camel coloured overcoat with grey trousers and keep a straight face is best left alone with a glass of port and a piece of stilton.

[SciFiAuthor]

Not so sure about that. I don't hear him talking about investing in education, which is the biggest thing you can do to pull yourself out of a decline, but that's a solution for the medium-long term whereas all he wants is the quick fix of a sticking plaster. Instead he's talking about hanging on to jobs that will drain away in any case to countries where the costs are lower.  He sounds like a typical big business guy - keep labour costs as low as possible. As the world leader you ought to be showing the way in innovation and technology, not following third world countries.

Oh we're going to show the way in innovation and technology alright. It's called factory automation. Trump knows that there's only about a decade left as far as any kind of manufacturing job is concerned. Past that the manufacturing process will be almost entirely automated. So we may as well take what jobs we can in the short term. But there is no long term for anyone in manufacturing. Unfortunately, as we've already seen here to some degree, education past high school is a band aid. It's a good thing until you saturate the job market with degrees, which is what we've done. Education is good, no one disputes that. But when you have 100 applicants for every teaching job 99 people are going to walk away unemployed and still in debt from student loans.

This is a fact of life that future politicians will have to deal with. Likely during Trump's second term should he have one, job automation will begin to permanently outstrip job creation. All countries should be trying to stick plaster because it's now a game of where the means of production ends up located and who gets the tax revenue from it. Ironically, the only way to accomplish that are corporate tax cuts which are on Trump's agenda. In short, you are seeing the U.S. convert itself into a tax haven. What sort of economy that yields is anyone's guess, seems to work for places like the Cayman Islands, but how that works for a huge country with one of the largest economies in the world is unknown.

The U.K. will survive by doing what it always does, follows suit to some degree and adjusts the model as needed. London will always be an economic powerhouse, there are plenty of cool heads there to keep things running. It could even be said that you kicked off this new world order with Brexit. Bravo, but be careful, Europe won't fare so well. The EU is well and truly fucked, and as we've seen before when you put continental Europeans in that position they lose all hold on reality and go extreme with their politics. For those that think Trump is extreme, he's got nothing on the European right. Angela Merkel has destroyed the European political status quo through gross mismanagement. What replaces the old order might not be so nice.

In the end, the true loser here is China. Their business people are already disillusioned, disgruntled and ready to fuck off to somewhere else. That could be anywhere, but China's 15 minutes of fame have come to an end.

[SciFiAuthor]

Oh, he definitely isn't taken seriously. Anyone who can wear a camel coloured overcoat with grey trousers and keep a straight face is best left alone with a glass of port and a piece of stilton.

Something tells me that he'd rather have some hummus.

[Kidnostad3]

Oh we're going to show the way in innovation and technology alright. It's called factory automation. Trump knows that there's only about a decade left as far as any kind of manufacturing job is concerned. Past that the manufacturing process will be almost entirely automated. So we may as well take what jobs we can in the short term. But there is no long term for anyone in manufacturing. Unfortunately, as we've already seen here to some degree, education past high school is a band aid. It's a good thing until you saturate the job market with degrees, which is what we've done. Education is good, no one disputes that. But when you have 100 applicants for every teaching job 99 people are going to walk away unemployed and still in debt from student loans.

This is a fact of life that future politicians will have to deal with. Likely during Trump's second term should he have one, job automation will begin to permanently outstrip job creation. All countries should be trying to stick plaster because it's now a game of where the means of production ends up located and who gets the tax revenue from it. Ironically, the only way to accomplish that are corporate tax cuts which are on Trump's agenda. In short, you are seeing the U.S. convert itself into a tax haven. What sort of economy that yields is anyone's guess, seems to work for places like the Cayman Islands, but how that works for a huge country with one of the largest economies in the world is unknown.

The U.K. will survive by doing what it always does, follows suit to some degree and adjusts the model as needed. London will always be an economic powerhouse, there are plenty of cool heads there to keep things running. It could even be said that you kicked off this new world order with Brexit. Bravo, but be careful, Europe won't fare so well. The EU is well and truly fucked, and as we've seen before when you put continental Europeans in that position they lose all hold on reality and go extreme with their politics. For those that think Trump is extreme, he's got nothing on the European right. Angela Merkel has destroyed the European political status quo through gross mismanagement. What replaces the old order might not be so nice.

In the end, the true loser here is China. Their business people are already disillusioned, disgruntled and ready to fuck off to somewhere else. That could be anywhere, but China's 15 minutes of fame have come to an end.

A thoughtful wnd well articulated analysis. 

[Yorkshire pud]

Oh we're going to show the way in innovation and technology alright. It's called factory automation. Trump knows that there's only about a decade left as far as any kind of manufacturing job is concerned. Past that the manufacturing process will be almost entirely automated. So we may as well take what jobs we can in the short term. But there is no long term for anyone in manufacturing. Unfortunately, as we've already seen here to some degree, education past high school is a band aid. It's a good thing until you saturate the job market with degrees, which is what we've done. Education is good, no one disputes that. But when you have 100 applicants for every teaching job 99 people are going to walk away unemployed and still in debt from student loans.

Yep; same in the UK. We used to have a few people going to universities and polytechnics getting a grant to support their time there; obviously a long term degree such as medicine took a bigger chunk, and something such as economics perhaps two years. But in their wisdom, the polytechnics thought that they'd be sexier being universities rather than polytechnics, utter bullshit; and then what followed was the encouragement/blackmail that the governments introduced whereby they demanded that kids leaving school had to have a higher education or be employed in something (difficult when with an unemployment number of 3 million has very well qualified people in it already). Loans were introduced because it was too expensive to sustain grants, cos of the numbers.

So although 'micky mouse' degrees were introduced and numbers attending went up, the take up of those actually getting a job didn't increase. There was a joke doing the rounds: What do ask a university graduate with a 2.1? Can I have a Big mac and fries please?

This is a fact of life that future politicians will have to deal with. Likely during Trump's second term should he have one, job automation will begin to permanently outstrip job creation. All countries should be trying to stick plaster because it's now a game of where the means of production ends up located and who gets the tax revenue from it. Ironically, the only way to accomplish that are corporate tax cuts which are on Trump's agenda. In short, you are seeing the U.S. convert itself into a tax haven. What sort of economy that yields is anyone's guess, seems to work for places like the Cayman Islands, but how that works for a huge country with one of the largest economies in the world is unknown.

Well yeah. How are you (or Trump or whoever), going to feed, home and employ all the people to sustain any meaningful society when the premise is to get rid of humans in the manufacture of things? Be a service economy the same as the Uk has become? That can't work forever, because eventually the pool of those needing the service of the things made in China gets smaller.

The U.K. will survive by doing what it always does, follows suit to some degree and adjusts the model as needed. London will always be an economic powerhouse, there are plenty of cool heads there to keep things running. It could even be said that you kicked off this new world order with Brexit. Bravo, but be careful, Europe won't fare so well. The EU is well and truly fucked, and as we've seen before when you put continental Europeans in that position they lose all hold on reality and go extreme with their politics. For those that think Trump is extreme, he's got nothing on the European right. Angela Merkel has destroyed the European political status quo through gross mismanagement. What replaces the old order might not be so nice.

I'd go along with Merkel well and truly shooting herself in the foot; but the Brexit thing is still an unknown quantity. We're not even in the initial stages yet of how, what and when the process will take place. The ones crowing in the UK are disingenuous when they laugh the sky hasn't fallen in yet. We're still as it was before the referendum. Give it a few months or a few years after the withdraw and then we'll see. I think 2022-24 is the time to make a reasonable assessment.

In the end, the true loser here is China. Their business people are already disillusioned, disgruntled and ready to fuck off to somewhere else. That could be anywhere, but China's 15 minutes of fame have come to an end.

Think so? They're actively encouraging foreign investment in China to the detriment of their own base. In other words, for all his bluster about US companies having their products heavily tarriffed if they're imported into the US from abroad, you may mind that such as Ford and GM, GE, and the like will have made in China on their label with adverts telling you its a great American company.


Apple won't have their tat made in the US; its far too expensive for them. They wouldn't pay for either the infrastructure nor the salaries of the workers employed there if they brought it back to say California. And if by some strange chance they did, they would want to have massive government subsidies or be allowed to pay under the level that is livable for those who work there. Or of course they could employ illegal immigrants on a very low wage; that would go well. 

[Yorkshire pud]

Something tells me that he'd rather have some hummus.

[SciFiAuthor]

Yep; same in the UK. We used to have a few people going to universities and polytechnics getting a grant to support their time there; obviously a long term degree such as medicine took a bigger chunk, and something such as economics perhaps two years. But in their wisdom, the polytechnics thought that they'd be sexier being universities rather than polytechnics, utter bullshit; and then what followed was the encouragement/blackmail that the governments introduced whereby they demanded that kids leaving school had to have a higher education or be employed in something (difficult when with an unemployment number of 3 million has very well qualified people in it already). Loans were introduced because it was too expensive to sustain grants, cos of the numbers.

So although 'micky mouse' degrees were introduced and numbers attending went up, the take up of those actually getting a job didn't increase. There was a joke doing the rounds: What do ask a university graduate with a 2.1? Can I have a Big mac and fries please?

Precisely. We set up a bunch of degree mills, some of them publicly funded, and did the same thing. While it sounded good, the politicians certainly played up the education card, all we really did was make pizza delivery a job for people that hold liberal arts degrees. While I advocate education for education's sake, it's always a good thing, but only do it if you can afford it because it may not yield a job.   

Well yeah. How are you (or Trump or whoever), going to feed, home and employ all the people to sustain any meaningful society when the premise is to get rid of humans in the manufacture of things? Be a service economy the same as the Uk has become? That can't work forever, because eventually the pool of those needing the service of the things made in China gets smaller.

That's correct and there's another problem. You can automate a service economy too. Take call centers, every day they grow more automated and the computers get better and better. There will come a time -- soon -- where you won't be able to tell that you're not speaking with a human. All any politician will be able to do is put people on welfare through a guaranteed basic income. It's the only choice. And to do that, you need a tax base. That tax base will be the corporations and the new politics will consist of walking a tight rope of keeping tax rates reasonable enough to keep the corporations in the country, but high enough to support society. Eventually though this too is unsustainable because the corporations end up shrinking the markets because nobody can afford their products. Since you can't let the infrastructural means of production go out of business, there is no choice at that point but nationalization of factories that are failing. People don't realize it yet, but the end result of capitalism is a form of communism. That will happen long after Trump, but he needs to do everything he can right now to get those automated factories and corporate headquarters on U.S. soil.

I'd go along with Merkel well and truly shooting herself in the foot; but the Brexit thing is still an unknown quantity. We're not even in the initial stages yet of how, what and when the process will take place. The ones crowing in the UK are disingenuous when they laugh the sky hasn't fallen in yet. We're still as it was before the referendum. Give it a few months or a few years after the withdraw and then we'll see. I think 2022-24 is the time to make a reasonable assessment.

Merkel could well be the most irresponsible politician I've ever seen in my lifetime. She flat out destroyed Germany's political order, i.e. her political order, for no reason. The Germans see their political system as an amalgam of "bright Germany", i.e. centrist and left-wing ideologies and "dark Germany" which is the right both moderate and extreme. "Bright Germany" has held power for decades through basically being preachy and shaming the German right with anti-nationalist rhetoric. That would have continued to work had she not flooded her country with Syrians and god knows who else. Now, they're wide open for a political revolution and the German right is nothing like the British or American right.

As far as Brexit, I wouldn't be too worried. The EU wasn't going to last in the form that it was regardless of what you did. You just can't put obsolete globalist fossil thinkers like Van Rompuy in control of anything. Doing that creates things like Brexit and Donald Trump, it does not solve the world's problems.

Think so? They're actively encouraging foreign investment in China to the detriment of their own base. In other words, for all his bluster about US companies having their products heavily tarriffed if they're imported into the US from abroad, you may mind that such as Ford and GM, GE, and the like will have made in China on their label with adverts telling you its a great American company.

It's a stop gap. The fact is both wages and taxes in China are rising. It's a natural effect of rising affluence. Eventually, all Asian economies Japanify and stagnate. It's just the nature of economics in Asia. Once that happens you start seeing things like Toyota opening factories in the US because it's cheaper to make cars here than it is to make them elsewhere and ship them in. Add a tariff and you simply encourage them even more to manufacture here. The rub, of course, is that the factories grow increasingly automated.

One possible unintended weird consequence of this is that companies like Toyota may now see tax benefits sufficient to relocate completely to the US and put their corporate headquarters here. Another case of this is Europe, if you're InBev and you own a perfectly good corporate headquarters in the US, as they do having acquired Anheuser-Busch, it might make sense to locate the InBev corporate headquarters to the country with the cheapest tax rates. That ain't Belgium and never will be. So if Trump drops that rate to 15 percent, well . . . au revoir.

Apple won't have their tat made in the US; its far too expensive for them. They wouldn't pay for neither the infrastructure nor the salaries of the workers employed there if they brought it back to say California. And if by some strange chance they did, they would want to have massive government subsidies or be allowed to pay under the level that is livable for those who work there. Or of course they could employ illegal immigrants on a very low wage; that would go well.

You can put an automated factory in China, or you can put it here. The labor doesn't really matter because there isn't much, just a few people to service the machinery. It's just a matter of costs. If Trump makes it expensive to import coupled with a low corporate tax rate, then they will build a nice, shiny, fully automated factory in the US. That doesn't do much as far as job creation is concerned, but it's viable now.

[SredniVashtar]

That's correct and there's another problem. You can automate a service economy too. Take call centers, every day they grow more automated and the computers get better and better. There will come a time -- soon -- where you won't be able to tell that you're not speaking with a human. All any politician will be able to do is put people on welfare through a guaranteed basic income. It's the only choice. And to do that, you need a tax base. That tax base will be the corporations and the new politics will consist of walking a tight rope of keeping tax rates reasonable enough to keep the corporations in the country, but high enough to support society. Eventually though this too is unsustainable because the corporations end up shrinking the markets because nobody can afford their products. Since you can't let the infrastructural means of production go out of business, there is no choice at that point but nationalization of factories that are failing. People don't realize it yet, but the end result of capitalism is a form of communism. That will happen long after Trump, but he needs to do everything he can right now to get those automated factories and corporate headquarters on U.S. soil.

Marx knew all about the way that bourgeois capitalism was sowing the seeds of its own demise. He just got the time frame wrong, that's all. I don't know where you get off criticising 'leftists' when you can see that the upshot of all this is that the state needs to step in to correct what the free market can't do by itself.

[SciFiAuthor]

Marx knew all about the way that bourgeois capitalism was sowing the seeds of its own demise. He just got the time frame wrong, that's all. I don't know where you get off criticising 'leftists' when you can see that the upshot of all this is that the state needs to step in to correct what the free market can't do by itself.

Marx got more than the time frame wrong. He failed to realize that his ideology, albeit tweaked, could be far more deadly than capitalism. He forgot that people are not robots and that power corrupts. But at least Marxism is a coherent ideology. Leftists at large however have absolutely no idea that technological unemployment is a problem we need to be addressing now. Instead, they are more concerned with convincing everyone that gender dysphoria is a serious social issue. I look at left leaning economists like Krugman and they have absolutely no idea of the implications of technological unemployment even though Keynes warned them about it a century ago. They've allowed their ideology to basically become a mish-mosh of unrelated social causes. If the modern left had some sort of coherency in their ideology it would be one thing, but they don't. So I dismiss most of them as scatterbrains.

[SredniVashtar]

Marx got more than the time frame wrong. He failed to realize that his ideology, albeit tweaked, could be far more deadly than capitalism. He forgot that people are not robots and that power corrupts. But at least Marxism is a coherent ideology. Leftists at large however have absolutely no idea that technological unemployment is a problem we need to be addressing now. Instead, they are more concerned with convincing everyone that gender dysphoria is a serious social issue. I look at left leaning economists like Krugman and they have absolutely no idea of the implications of technological unemployment even though Keynes warned them about it a century ago. They've allowed their ideology to basically become a mish-mosh of unrelated social causes. If the modern left had some sort of coherency in their ideology it would be one thing, but they don't. So I dismiss most of them as scatterbrains.

Marx didn't just come out of a blue sky, he was a consequence of the horrors of the factory system in England. If you were one of those people who found themselves exploited by the Industrial Revolution (including very young children, who were worked until they dropped in the factory system) I don't think things could have got much deadlier for you. Likewise the peasants under serfdom in Russia, treated like slaves under the knout. It's also a misconception to see Marx as someone who saw people as robots, in fact the opposite was the case. He was a very civilised man who saw that there was more to life than work and wanted to make sure that recreation was just as important as the weekly envelope. I don't think Henry Ford was all that bothered what people did when they were off the clock, or any other business magnate, but Marx realised that money was not an end in itself, and that deserves to be recognised and respected.

As for the other stuff, it depends where you look. If you see the left as refracted through the prism of talk radio then that's what you will see, but there are a plurality of views. The ones that get played up the most usually originate on college campuses where it's anything goes at that time of life and it's only natural to expect more heat than light. There's more to it than that, though, you just have to pay attention.

[chefist]

Marx didn't just come out of a blue sky, he was a consequence of the horrors of the factory system in England. If you were one of those people who found themselves exploited by the Industrial Revolution (including very young children, who were worked until they dropped in the factory system) I don't think things could have got much deadlier for you. Likewise the peasants under serfdom in Russia, treated like slaves under the knout. It's also a misconception to see Marx as someone who saw people as robots, in fact the opposite was the case. He was a very civilised man who saw that there was more to life than work and wanted to make sure that recreation was just as important as the weekly envelope. I don't think Henry Ford was all that bothered what people did when they were off the clock, or any other business magnate, but Marx realised that money was not an end in itself, and that deserves to be recognised and respected.

As for the other stuff, it depends where you look. If you see the left as refracted through the prism of talk radio then that's what you will see, but there are a plurality of views. The ones that get played up the most usually originate on college campuses where it's anything goes at that time of life and it's only natural to expect more heat than light. There's more to it than that, though, you just have to pay attention.

Henry Ford paid the highest wage at the time, $5 a day to production employees. The reason being is that his employees could afford to buy one if his cars.

Under Marxism, 40 years later, you had to wait 10 years for a car that was technically inferior to the Model T, AND you had to pay up front.

Good intentions don't guarantee good results...

[SredniVashtar]

Henry Ford paid the highest wage at the time, $5 a day to production employees. The reason being is that his employees could afford to buy one if his cars.

Under Marxism, 40 years later, you had to wait 10 years for a car that was technically inferior to the Model T, AND you had to pay up front.

Good intentions don't guarantee good results...

Good intentions don't guarantee good results, but they are a start. And certainly better than bad intentions, or even simple indifference.

Giving them enough money to buy his cars is a bit like what they used to do in the factories over here by paying them truck tickets they could exchange in the company store. Ford was a notorious control freak who took over the lives of his employees, virtually. That kind of closed circuit isn't all that different Soviet style communism.

[Yorkshire pud]

Henry Ford paid the highest wage at the time, $5 a day to production employees. The reason being is that his employees could afford to buy one if his cars.

Under Marxism, 40 years later, you had to wait 10 years for a car that was technically inferior to the Model T, AND you had to pay up front.

Good intentions don't guarantee good results...

The flaw was that the then Soviet Union (as the Russian Federation does now) wasn't an equal society. It was (and is) an elite and corrupt hierarchy; A catastrophically bureaucratic and inefficient disaster that I doubt Marx envisioned. It wasn't a true collective with equal say and deed; sure the same poverty was enjoyed by all, be it a doctor or road sweeper, but that's as far as the equality went.

The inferior stuff was as a direct result of the insular paranoid maintained by the hierarchy, and the perverse belief that building a million tractors that were shit was better than building ten thousand that John Deer would envy.