What's so terrible about Communism ?

let's say that a dictator that actually managed to get most power in his personal hands for real (like we think Putin lately did), is just another name for a monarch.

that setup is simply less common than people would otherwise think it is, just because the dictator (or actual monarch).very often has to assuage many conflicting minor power centers behind him and he rarely manages to do so by annihilating them and consolidating the power in his hands.

when the dictator/king actually is prevented from doing a lot of things by the need to balance the interests of other parties in society , or risk being killed and substituted, that's when his power isn't actually absolute.

Is money not a dictatorial force in the United States ?

Does a dictator have to be a individual person ? How about in the case of a mass psychosis such as the period leading up to the Salem Witch Trials ? Is there not the potential for a mob mentality which serves as the dictating force ? Jung warned about such episodes.

If that’s the case, then wouldn’t we have to eliminate certain expressions of communist ideology from this totalitarian absolutism that you have set up as its equivalent? I mean we can look at states like Yugoslavia and Cuba and though there is a great deal of state control it is not absolutely commanding. Surely if we can count the church as a competing institution, we can also count workers’ councils and other entities that are more akin to unions or guilds.

I mean look at a country like Vietnam. It’s surely dedicated to the principles of communism but doesn’t maintain absolute control over everything. Nor does really China for that matter. How can you have a stock market and banks that are absolutely centrally run. There are certain other businesses and private property that also attains.

In fact if it’s absolute totalitarianism that is communist I can surely contrast in history where that seemed to be the dominant strain versus the states that haven’t accepted absolute dominance of the state with a centralized head that dictates all. That would be like North Korea, Stalin and Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, the early days of Castro. Definitely more but that’s off the top of my head. On the other hand we have Tito, modern Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos. Probably more examples that can be named, but the abject failures stand out more than the moderate ones.

Anyway I think to understand the Marxist/socialist/communist ideology we have to recognize that there has been a longstanding pattern of anger towards both capitalism and the West due to the connection with exploitation, imperialism, and colonialism of the industrial variety. That’s not to say that we should divorce those things from its historical context of being the default pattern of behavior for thousands of years, but it still sucks to be in that position and we can see the reasons for the anger. The problem is that the communists way oversell communism’s ability to be a solution for any of that, and undersell the strengths of capitalism and market economics.

Absolute totalitarianism is the communist *goal*, which they rarely manage to achieve because of practical problems. In many cases including China since Xiaoping, in order for the elite to survive they made compromises with that goal.

Communism like all revolutions doesn't start with the masses. It starts from disillusioned intellectuals every time. It's people who failed within capitalism to get as much as they wanted with legal means, and instead of admitting their failure at playing the game of life and try to change their course of life to the better, within the system, they try to upheavel the system to get "what they deserve" (power & status, what most people are after).

If you check the bio of all communist revolutionaries leaders, they are all intellectual-class failed men, there are no actual real workers. They "studied a lot", but achieved little to nothing, and they think they deserve more. Same thing with current revolutionaries from the radical left. An overproduced intellectual elite that ends up living worse than a truck driver does gets very angry at the system and tries to change it violently. It was the same with the french revolution, it's the same everytime.

Workers and actually exploited people (when they exist) only enter the picture after , as pawns in the war used by the overproduced, pissed off elite.

The above is Turchin thesis which i think explains societal phenomena like this very well

Why would you compare our economy with the US?
Wyy by y not Mexico, Europe, China, Argentina ,etc ….?
I thought u spoke just about the actual Canadian economy shrug ….

Ps: maybe the total cost of housing is a disaster (where it isn’t?) , but those having a house for some time now do not mind it at all shrug .

If it gets increasingly difficult to afford to afford purchasing a home, then the generational wealth divide will increase. When the generational wealth divide increases, it will get increasingly difficult for many to afford purchasing a home.

Basically, the lower middle class and downwards will get poorer and more indebted. Now, economists have never figured out whether that hurts the economy, which goes to show that "the economy" isn't nearly a useful a term as it is claimed to be.

Of course, home ownership in developed economies tend to represent the majority, so governments tend to placate home owners who aren't keen on prices crashing and might not even be too keen on them plateauing.

So it is political pickle, but not really an ideological one. Building more housing and it doing it affordably is not in opposition to neither staunch communism nor free market capitalism.

there are several places in Italy (in total where the majority of Italians live) where the nominal cost of houses (*NOMINAL*, not inflation adjusted) is lower than before 2008.

those include world famous cities in the north like Genoa and Turin.