&gt;And it is at least debatable, I think, whether more automobiles<br>&gt;represent a more efficient economy or simply a more rapacious one.<br><br>Sorry, still not convinced. Communism was not nobly husbanding its resources out of disdain for Western rapaciousness, it simply failed to utilise them effectively.&nbsp;  It's not as if communism wasn't rapacious where it could manage it, given the scale of environmental damage in the former Soviet Union due to heavy industry. I have greating difficulty accepting that a system can be lauded for having been too inept to achieve its own ends. A valid comparison could be made between a capitalist system and some form of social model that explicitly rejected such aspects of modern technology and industry - I'm open to suggestions, but I'm not aware that one exists. Perhaps instead of smoking or car accidents as indicators, life expectancy is probably the better one:
<br><br><a href="http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/life-exp.htm">http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/life-exp.htm</a><br><br>More generally, I'm rather concerned here that we are talking at cross-purposes here as it seems to me that you aren't talking about political or economic systems at all but about resource consumption, the sort of thing&nbsp; Jared Diamond addressed in Guns, Germs and Steel with reference to the collapse of civilisations like the Maya and Easter Island.&nbsp; In that context, an economically inefficient system would inhibit resource consumption&nbsp; but it still  seems a poor comparison. 
<br><br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>&gt;But we shall see. Perhaps you would be kind enough mention<br>any conclusions which suggest themselves to you from this data?
</blockquote><div><br><br>Which bit - pet euthanasia, eaten by tigers or abortions?  More seriously, if you did want to take a look at the social evils of  capitalism, I'd probably want to look at the crime statistics as much as those on poverty and disease, given that it seems reasonable to expect those to be markedly higher in capitalist states. I'd also want to look at all of those in comparison with say,&nbsp; communist states on the one hand,&nbsp; extreme free market states (China possibly at the moment, the US for earlier examples)&nbsp; and more social-democratic states, with Sweden being the classic example. Alternatively, India would be a good example given that its various states seem to have tried pretty much every imaginable form of economic model between them. 
<br><br>The figures on decommunisation in Russia are interesting, though I think you'd have to take all the former Soviet-bloc states into account - given that (with the exception of Poland) they all followed the same advice from the IMF some of them seem to have recovered much more easily than Russia. 
<br></div></div><br>&gt;<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?s=fde661ea44e70bc3557f937ccfc5e2e1&amp;showtopic=44797&amp;st=0&amp;#entry1292030741" target="_blank">
http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?s=fde661ea44e70bc3557f937ccfc5e2e<br>&gt;1&amp;showtopic=44797&amp;st=0&amp;#entry1292030741</a><br><br>Given that said list blames the evils of capitalism for everything from European fascism to massacres in countries like Afghanistan that are barely feudal, I would have to observe that said&nbsp; list does seem an exercise in bad faith. As a defence, I'm not sure it works; the Soviet system was not generally attacked on the grounds of imperialist escapades so it does seem like a straw-man argument. For what it's worth its probably true that the US has been especially belligerent (more so than the Soviet Union) but that can hardly be extrapolated to every capitalist country. Unless Canada and Holland turn out to have a long list of unconscionable crimes to their name. 
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