Dragan,

>>I have 100 jellie beans in a bag. Only one of them has a deadly poison in it.
>>
>>Would you like one of my jellie beans?
>
>Which one? :)

You pick. <g>

>
>>Personally I think the abstract goals of communism are great but they figuratively crash their car into the ditch when they presume they can change human behavior.
>
>If capitalism was so good, communists would never have stood a chance.

Uhh.. Psstt.. Except for some US university campuses they're gone. <g>

>
>Now that you mention their intent on building "a new human", just like many other things they failed, they actually succeeded but in a wrong manner. There was an enormous effort in brainwashing generations into beliefs such as "the common good comes before my own", "we're cutting corners now, but that's investment in the future" etc etc, most of which were actually praiseworthy. But, the major flaw was that the Party was "always right", pretty much like "Pope never said anything wrong". That put them beyond control, and you wouldn't believe the speed at which it attracted power-hungry guys. And while ordinary people had built some ethics which was pretty close to what the supposed image of an ideal socialist citizen was, the higher you went the more rotten it was. Even ordinary floor manager in a shop or a restaurant was very likely to be corrupt in this way or another. So yes, they have built a new man, and what a creature it was - just like the old one, just more the same.

You.. Religion with the god of no god. Very odd actually.

>
>The self-management system was a good experiment; the people had the incentive to do their best at the job, because they also had a share in decision making (workers assembly instead of stockholders assembly, and the elected workers council instead of board of directors) and a share in profits; actually they could decide what to do with them. The bad thing about this was that it was driven to absurd: first, the part of the profit they decided about was diminishing over the years (going down to about 2% in the end) so the whole thing was becoming pointless, and the incentive thing was also limited: the Party took care that nobody gets rich. Also, there were absurd situations when janitors and hall cleaners had their say when a new CAT scanner was to be bought for a hospital.

Yup. While capitalism is very very far from perfect it does one thing that will always cause it to prevail - it recognizes a more accurate view of man's nature. Greedy and terminally self-centered.

>
>Still, the whole idea that the employees manage the enterprise worked well when it worked. Former former Yugoslavia had quite a strong economy, given the background etc.


Again, a single idea taken to an absurd point. I'd recommend Dr. Thomas Sowell's book, "Knowledge and Decisions".