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Pros And Cons Of A Command Economy

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In 1918 the Bolshevik Party became the ruling power in Russia and eventually founded the U.S.S.R and in turn made Russia into a communist country, and along with that came their command economy. It was not until 1991 that the Soviet Union officially collapsed and aborted their communist form of life. Since this is economics I’m going to focus on what exactly economically caused their system to fail. The U.S.S.R. is a good example because it was their command economy that ultimately led to their collapse. A command economy is an economic system in which basically every aspect of money is controlled and regulated by a central government. This included setting the prices that goods would cost and even assigning incomes to workers. Rather than relying on supply and demand as we do, they rely on goals and production outputs that the central government places. Command economies can be very efficient in the use of the countries resources since they can be easily controlled by the government and also there is usually very low unemployment as the government basically hands you a job. The cons of a command economy far outweigh the pros which is exactly why they did not succeed in the long term. The biggest flaw of command economies is the lack of competition and the lack of motivation. (Blunden, 1993) Since people are guaranteed and income they have no …show more content…

The government owning everything and providing everything removes the incentive of profit from businesses. Profit is the driving force behind market economies because businesses are based around making money and if they aren’t making money then they fail. People argue that having no profit can be a good thing since businesses in market economies take it too far and stop at nothing to increase profit; whether it be destroying or polluting the environment, ruining people’s lives, or trying to destroy their

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