That example misunderstands both communism and human behavior. Free access doesn’t mean unlimited misuse; rules, responsibility, and social norms still exist. By that logic, free roads would mean everyone drives endlessly until they crash. Reality is more complex than that.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Fools, what you're supposed to do with free water is make your own hydroelectric generator!
I don't like this argument because it concedes the premise that communists want to make everything free, which we do not.
I think all human needs are abundant enough to be made free, I think the rich need to be heavily taxed until there effectively are no billionaires,
but as a counterpoint somebody somewhere is running the tap at all times in a Starbucks or an ice cream parlor during a drought even when it's not free.
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/starbucks-massive-water-waste
They needed to be heavily taxed thirty years ago.
They need to be butchered now, for the damage they have done to the earth. They and their heirs must be exterminated to the last. If there is one survivor, all our futures are forfeit.
Good luck trying to convince a majority of that, but also they can reproduce faster than you can kill them. There will always be opportunists and assholes as long as mankind exists, better to stop them from forming than strike them down as they come about.
How do you pre-judge a person before they are born?
By assuming that person will be human and have human needs and wants based on the instincts crafted from hundreds of millions of years of evolution, with about 8 billion living examples to work with and the tangible results of about 110 billion past examples.
All humans are assholes, they all have selfish desires, the key here is to plan around that so that the most beneficial thing for the individual is what is beneficial for all of us, and that is already almost always the case even though it's not always obvious to them.
There's like a couple thousand billionaires, maybe a couple million of the ultra-wealthy. You wouldn't need a majority
In the last US Election they elected a Billionaire president and immediately started stripping away regulations. You're not just dealing with Billionaires, you're dealing with all of the people who support them.
Don't even get me started on the less free nations run by autocrat billionaires like Saudi Royalty, Xi Jinping, and Putin.
The people who support them are problems. They are not problems that can only be solved with extermination.
That's because Starbucks is a corporation; they only care about making their number go up. People don't really behave like that.
A corporation is just a group of people.
Yes, but people acting for their own livelihoods don't follow the same patterns as people acting to maximize wealth. This is a systemic problem, not (or at least not necessarily) a human nature problem.
If humans naturally stopped at enough then billionaires already wouldn't exist.
Read 'Cadillac desert'
It's orders of magnitude worse.
Your tap water is free?
In Ireland it is, but our neoliberal governments are constantly trying to push wildly unpopular charges.
Is it free or is it paid through taxes? If it's paid through taxes how much does it cost you in taxes? Also, are there any other fees that aren't "paying for water" but functionally are?
For example, I pay approximately $50 per month for water, but if I wanted to be cute I could say I only pay $7.00 per month because the rate is $3.50 per 1,000 gallons. The other $43 dollars are in fixed meter, availability, and stormwater charges (basically the basic price needed to ensure infrastructure is maintained no matter how much water I use).
Humans will take more than they need of what’s free, if there’s a way to turn it into profit for them. If profit is allowed to be a way to secure power and control, there will always be be a desire to hoard for oneself.
Capitalism rewards hoarding and profiting, and also rewards making the in group as small as possible.
Other factors can cause hoarding as well to be clear, such as fear of scarcity/needs not being met.
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I keep thinking of one of the old videos I saw.
"...I dunno, maybe we should get rid of all of the landlords!"
"But who would we then pay rent to?"
I was, like, holy shit, things are so much more complicated than I even realised, everything is based on some dumb suppositions or some shit.
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Having good health care means you just consume as much medicine as you can. I get vaccinated every day, I own 500 pairs of glasses, and all my teeth have been root canaled
I get vaccines for diseases that don't even exist... Everyone has the small poxs vaccine but I also have medium poxs and even large poxs vaccination.
I will say one I don't recommend is I got the mumps vaccine so I figured I should get a dumps vaccine... It just made me really constipated.
/s this is a joke, yes get your vaccines but only ones for real diseases...
Jokes aside, "great pox" is siphilis. I don't know if there a medium pox...
If you have both does siphilis and small pox does it become mega or epic pox?
I'd rather not find out!
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There's a similar bit to that in the classic graphic novel Maus:
(edited for clarity)
yep. also people wont do any work if they dont have to because all their needs are met. this is why all rich people are retired.
this is why all rich people are retired.
Veblen discusses how the pursuit and the possession of wealth affects human behavior, that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society.
Functionally retired.
You see it all the time among Tech plutocracy, with Bezos's Venice Wedding and Zuck's endless home construction.
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And don't want us to have a 4-day week or work remote.
I know this is a joke but... Communism doesn't mean "free stuff". Probably the opposite of what this joke implies, it's communal ownership. You wouldn't waste water if you felt it was your water. People waste water when they feel it's someone else's water (government, landlord).
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Meanwhile people living in literal deserts are draining the water table to grow lush green lawns and fill swimming pools ...
And powering chatbot training datacenters
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