Rick Suddeth: USSR: Moscow 1989 Grocery Store

> a communistic state Yeah that worked out well for the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик! It managed to give the world the worst nuclear disaster ever seen! And also managed to keep an entire nation with vast resources so fucking poor that their supermarkets - lol, who am I kidding? There were no supermarkets in Soviet Russia. Hell, there were barely even markets... but they basically looked like this: ▶ this video Keep your goddamned "Ridiculous idealism that will never work because it defies human nature" to yourself. You will never, and I mean ever have a successful communist state. There's never been a single one, and never will be.

> democratically planned economy Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale. Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects. Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving. EDIT: Video of a grocery store in Moscow, USSR, 1989: ▶ this video

▶ this video - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much. And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.

No doubt Barry Schwartz has never lived without choice. He's wrong, and obviously so. Freedom of choice is vastly superior, in every possible way, to the alternative. A nicer Soviet-era grocery store: ▶ this video The stories are overly plentiful of people that were held in low-choice captivity in the former USSR, breaking down in tears upon seeing western grocery stores. I know several people who lived under Communism in Romania, their experience was identical. I'd suspect that very few people arguing against choice, have ever lived in a situation where they were actually deprived of it. They're essentially spoiled brats.