Asymmetrical Information

Communism is forced to rely on brutal repression because it's a fundamentally unfair and wildly inefficient economic and political system. By ruling out incentives and forbidding any connection between what people contribute to society and what they are allowed to keep for themselves, communists have to rely on excessive force to keep people participating at all.

A great book to read if you want to get a better understanding of why communism doesn't work is Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, by Jasper Becker.

The clearer one's vision of the goal, the more likely one is to buy in to the moral perspective of the state, i.e., that a certain level of casualties are acceptable. This is true of those who support social programs as well as wars. And so it seems, the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions.

We could also add most of the dead from the wars of 20th century onto communism's total. Fascism arose almost entirely as a counter-reaction to communism. If there had been no communism there would have not been any significant Fascism. More directly, Stalin was willing partner of Hitler's in the launching of WWII. Without Stalin's cooperation and material assistance, Hitler could not have invaded Poland or western Europe. Virtually every conflict of the Cold War era was driven by communism as well.

Such a bloody business and still so many people hold such warm and fuzzy feelings for it. It is a testament to the power of revisionist historians.

Note that this is Alex Tabarrok quoting Rudy Rummel, not Alex Taborrok writing the passage.

Shannon: I had the impression that German fascism (that is, the Nazi party) arose as a response to the Treaty of Versailles rather than to communism. The Nazis were socialist totalitarians too, they just chose to apply total control in other areas than the economy, leaving the rich with much of their wealth while regulating heavily enough to provide plenty of chances for influential Nazis to enrich themselves through corruption. Nazi-Communist disagreements were rather in the nature of family fights, which can be the nastiest of all fights, especially when it's a "family" of sociopaths.

OTOH, the rich German industrialists who funded the Nazi party (while generally despising the Nazis as low-class thugs) were mostly attracted by the Nazis' anti-communism. Communists would take all their property and shoot them, too; Nazis would steal some but not everything, and might provide opportunities to earn much more. (I doubt any of them were foresighted enough to realize that those plump defense contracts would eventually cause thousands of B17's to bomb their factories.) It's likely that without that funding plus direct political support from some industrialists, the Nazis would have remained a marginal group. They got a plurality in the German parliament in 1933 with that money plus political influence that helped them get away with physical attacks on rival campaigns. Then someone persuaded Hindenburg to turn over the government to them; I very much doubt that low-class thugs could have bullied this old Prussian general at all, but rich men like the owner-manager of Krupp would have had great influence.

Considering all the eggs they broke, they sure weren't able to make much of an omlet.

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