right, so there's many roads to perdition. what style of government is best equipped to avoid these types of problems? Is it democracy? Possibly so. Paraphrasing Churchill "the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried".

All of those other systems I've mentioned also have high functioning, efficient, non-corrupt versions of them as well. Look at Singapore for an example of a high competence, low corruption form of Authoritarian government.

So I'll just say it one more time. Communism is orthogonal to competence/corruption of government. The fact that so many people implicitly believe they're linked is evidence of the century long propaganda campaign against anything socialist that has been waged by the powers-that-be in the capitalist system.

> All of those other systems I've mentioned also have high functioning, efficient, non-corrupt versions

I can't readily think of an example of a high functioning authoritarian Communism, but maybe there's one out there like those other forms... but I'm not sure counterexamples would go very far anyway.

I maybe said "cause" earlier, but I'm thinking "cause" in the sense that smoking causes lung cancer. You can smoke and not get cancer, and you can get cancer without smoking, but we still say they're causally related.

> The fact that so many people implicitly believe they're linked is evidence of the century long propaganda campaign

Eh, I dunno. Mostly the smart people I know who have studied economics and 20th century history seem to think there's a strong relationship, and they can provide plausible theories to explain why Communism would be particularly prone to these sorts of disasters.

Namely feedback systems... in democracies, when things go horribly wrong, the officials tend to lose power. In capitalism, when there's horrible mismanagement, those responsible tend to lose most of their capital, reducing their influence in turn. They might not always lose proportionate to the damage they caused, but the feedback is comparatively sharper than under authoritarian communism.

There are some other bits about the theory of prices as an information system, but I think feedback systems are the main issue.

Maybe those people that I think are smart are really part of a global disinformation campaign, but it seems pretty unlikely. And if all my friends are loading me up with propaganda, I'm probably screwed anyway.