So I had an economics professor in college. Taught economic history; an absolutely fascinating subject. Anyway, he had a story from his time at an economics conference in Soviet Moscow.
The professor, a large man, was staying in a hotel with the rest of the US economists. One of the other attendees, a small female, asked him to come to her room to move a lamp from a table. He thought, well this is odd, why can't she move it?
He goes to the room and attempts to move the lamp. He can barely budge the thing. So he calls a few of his friends and they are able to lift and move the lamp.
This confused the economists. Why have such a heavy lamp? They found a scale and weighed it, notating that it was more than 200lbs. Why on earth would anyone build a 200lb lamp??
As economists, they decided to research. Turns out, the factory where the lamp was produced was on a quota, much like all the other production in the USSR. However, production was measured not by the number of working lamps, but by the weight of raw materials converted to finished goods.
So, instead of making 100 2lb lamps, it was easier to just make 1 200lb lamp.
See where we are going here? There was no profit motive, only an arbitrary quota to be filled. And they will fill that quota in the easiest way possible for the facility.
Upon further research, a majority of production facilities had quota systems that were not making the most efficient use of raw materials or labor in the USSR.
In essence, communism, if continued on its course, would be wholly unsustainable given non growing inputs. See, the USSR constantly needed new countries or territory to continue the Ponzi scheme. This led to US policy on communism; contain at all costs, and got us in to quite a few wars to stop the spread of communism. They knew that given enough time, the system will collapse. Turns out it did.
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