Socialism

Y’all know that communism and socialism are two different things, right?

No, they're not.

This video whines about propaganda being the problem, as if we haven’t seen communism destroy the USSR.

That's not the biggest problem with the video. The biggest problem with it is the speaker speaks nothing about class struggle or the dictatorship of the proletariat, but appeals to vague notions of "change" like some kind of Obama enjoyer and expresses the desire for more careerism in communism like the opportunist he is.

As an economic system, communism failed. Having a central authority trying to take resources and distribute them to those with the greatest need was an absolute failure.

You know this happens in capitalism right? It's called primitive accumulation and it's the reason capitalism was able to effectively establish itself. While they happened in the earlier colonial periods in the liberal democratic capitalist countries, the collectivization in early capitalist China and Russia represented a more recent primitive accumulation.

Why Russia is not socialist (1970)

Schematic Chronology of the Chinese National Epic (2006)

There was no socialism/communism in Russia - there was a brief DotTP that failed after 1923 due to the failures of the European revolutions. In China the revolution was entirely bourgeois to begin with. Your raving betrays your ignorance on the subject.

a free market that allows people to decide on what they need at any given moment, and how much it’s worth to them, capitalism was OBVIOUSLY superior.

Lol the old bourgeoisie exclamation "They can buy whatever they want!!!". More like the little they can buy with their crap wages.

To me, this is a no-brainer. Keep using capitalism to generate new wealth, allow the hardest workers and innovators to become rich… but keep these in incentives to exactly the minimum level they need to be in order to motivate people.

This is a complete fantasy world. You're imagining an idealist world where classes still exist, but class struggle doesn't. First of all, capitalism "generates wealth" ie. augments Capital by exploiting the proletariat to begin with. This exploitation is in direct proportion to the Capital generated. Second, it ignores the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. As competition intensifies, as Capital grows, it becomes more and more difficult for the capitalist to make a profit. This pushes capitalism towards crises of overproduction and even war. No matter how much wealth we distribute, these tendencies would still hold and push us towards capitalist crises.

For example… do you think college drop-out Bill Gates, working in his parents’ garage would have worked any less hard if he knew he was going to earn $50,000,000 instead of $80,000,000,000?

More bourgeoisie claptrap. "The rich just work so much harder than everyone else!!!". This needs no further comment.

So set exponentially higher taxes that make it virtually impossible to earn more than $50 million. Allow our rich people to have great wealth, enough to motivate people to shoot for that lifestyle… but then keep that wealth to a level where it isn’t taking the bare necessities from other people.

This is all just a petty bourgeois scheme to save wealthy business owners money. More welfare will simply diminish the cost of the reproduction of labor-power and cause a fall in wages. The workers are still exploited and suppressed, you're just arguing (imagining, really) a slightly more tolerable exploitation where the working class happily accepts its subordinate role. None of this junk could be further from socialism.

Redistributing wealth is a great idea, but you first need to have a system that generates wealth. Communism absolutely fails at that.

"Redistributing wealth" is not the goal of communism. It can be a step on the way there, but the ultimate goal is the abolition of the bourgeois state, money, wage-labor, and commodity production.