something I read recently (I'm pretty sure it was a Time article comparing East and West Germany) regarding communist (or former) communist countries stuck with me: they did not value beauty. So many of these countries appear (appear, because I'm relying on photos) to be dingy, dismal, utilitarian--with no support for natural or manmade beauty. Now they are stuck with ugly cities and ugly lives.

Also, ironically, or perhaps not, some of the most powerful art came out of the most repressive regimes. Perhaps if making art = death then the posers won't step to the plate.

Well gues what? you have one very angry people right here in the US of A. Get use to it it is about to get much worse.

Since the genuinely hateful and genuinely reactionary combination is less than one tenth of one percent of the population, I don't see an enormous problem here.

Beauty is a costly upgrade. That's one of the things that concerns me about the teabaggers. They won't want to pay for beauty.

Sort of true but it all goes to "ISMS" running afoul of Mother Nature (or at least human nature)

Communism expects everyone to work for the greater good of the whole but people are pretty much stuck on looking out for #1.

Similarly Capitalism fails because so many people are simply greedy. Wall Street Ponzi schemes, tax breaks for the wealthy, mortgage tools intended only for personal gain.
While Buffet & Bill and Melinda might be putting their wealth to work there are a few thousand millionaires more interested in Swiss banking than their fellow man.

There should be reward for risk but there should also be food, healthcare and dignity.

They had enough power/control to protect the rights and interests of the "people", but they had no interest in protecting the rights and interests of the individual.

Welcome to the Cellar, nietzschedanced. :D

Welcome, Nietzschedanced.

Those are not failures of capitalism, they are attempts at gaming the system, by sharpies and grifters. This goes on wherever there is a system of any kind. (There was probably some ancient Spartan trying to corner the market on iron, or on its distribution.) Socialism had and has a raft of 'em too, and featured protection of such gamesters and cheats through social, or class, privilege. If you were in the Nomenklatura, you could indulge in corruption your whole life without penalty.

It vexes the Left to mention, but capitalism not only can be practiced ethically, it is at its most profitable when this is done, so capitalism plain should be done that way. The Left doesn't want to hear that, because they are always looking for dirt to throw upon capitalism and its traditional, human values. But they are doomed to failure at anticapitalism and conversion back to human ways, because capitalism, in both its systematic and its unsystematic features, constitutes what humans do, absent government interference or meddling.

Socialism mandates meddling with what humans do in the one known natural way. Phooey to socialism.

I think you're shifting from communism to socialism to easily. Here are some terms and systems as I understand them.

Marxism: means of production of each workplace controlled by the workers in that workplace - kind of cooperative capitalism. Almost unknown in the world today outside of a kibbutz.

Lenin/stalinist communism: means of production controlled by central government - kind of state-owned capitalism. Vestiges of this remain in china, Vietnam, and a lot in North Korea.

Socialism - means of production generally privately owned, but subject to extra taxation to fund social welfare programs - most significantly, the welfare of all people is considered to be (at least partly) a state/collective responsibility. Found in varying degrees in many countries today.

Free-market capitalism - means of production privately owned, state takes no responsibility for the welfare of individuals (private charity is often involved).

Corporate socialism - means of production privately controlled, corporations take responsibility for the welfare of their workers (Japanese system, see also benevolent capitalists like Owen, Cadbury, Ford).

All have their strengths and weaknesses. All systems will have cheats and crooks. We're human. Communism will have its slackers and bullies, capitalism will have it's Madoffs and Leheman Bros.

I think it is pretty clear that you get more economic growth with private ownership of means of production, even when you allow for the regular booms and crashes of a market system.

We might asks ourselves, though, how much more economic growth do we need? Adam Smith's goal of growth and wealth made excellent sense 200 years ago, but it might be argued that - for modern OECD nations - human well-being is better advanced by things other than economic growth.

I recently read an article about Bhutan, where the king has declared that gross national happiness is more important than gross national product.