Comment by hylaride

> Today we effectively have the means to ensure the goods of society are evenly distributed as a baseline and we also have the means to effect that distribution

We arguably had the means even back then, but it obviously still failed and would likely fail again. Even in the west, hyper-rationalists took various forms (Keynesian economics, urban planning, etc), but it mostly ended up in failure.

The main issue is that there was and is not a static distribution or demand of goods. We can't just decide to give everybody 4 apples/week, etc. Even if we could, demands will always shift in unexpected ways. New products can shift demand in ways planners can't possibly foresee. A new apple desert could come, or people could just plain get tired of apples.

Right now the best and most successful mechanism we have is price signals. When it is said that communism failed because there were bad incentives, people assume that it was because there was no incentive to work hard. While this is somewhat true, the main issue was actually that planners and the whole communist economy could never rationalize supply and demand because they ignored price signals, meaning they often actually induced demands with artificially cheap prices, often resorting to rationing (either formal or de-facto in the forms of long lines).

Even worse, people were rewarded for hitting planning targets, even if the results (successful or not) were often not their fault. The result was people lied, making actual planning nearly impossible. A shoe factory would get bad leather, but make the shoes anyways, even though they fell apart sooner and then (outside of the plan) induced demand for new shoes. There are even stories of cab drivers lifting their cars and running it in reverse to continue working because they otherwise hit the "max" driving they were expected to do.

So "human nature" does in fact play a role, but not in the "I'm to lazy to work in communism" that most people think it is. Amazon doesn't evenly distribute anything, they have a highly sophisticated planning system that at the end of the day responds to price signals, either via bringing in more revenue or reducing costs.