Steve Balmer quotes

I wasn’t referring to 30s and 70s as time periods, but the actual life expectancies.

Oh, I must have assumed you meant otherwise because the USSR never reached that high of a life expectancy. They peaked in 1970 at 68 years old, at which point it trended down again. Russians never reached a life expectancy of 70 until 2015. You should also consider how volatile that graph has been in general, it simply isn't good for a state to have that much influence over the life expectancy of all of its people.

That little bump in 1985-1990 correlates with the reign of Gorbachev. He implemented policy that gave more autonomy to enterprises (less state control), and allowed for foreign trade (opening the market, again less state control). This included giving way more autonomy to the collectivized farms, as well as allowing for private farms for both personal use and for sale on the market - in other words, he de-collectivized. Given that the central authority in the USSR was the state, you could also say the central authority has less control, and thus they decentralized.

Compare this the the US life expectancy of time. It's much less volatile for one thing, it's a very steady incline. They also actually did reach a life expectancy of 70 by 1970, they had it by 1965 in fact.

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Honestly, we totally agree on quite a bit here. We obviously both don't advocate for Stalin himself, and we totally agree decentralization is a good thing. It's just strange to me that in the case of the USSR you don't see how the act of decentralization was literally being less strict on collective control and more lenient on private control - in other words, being less strict on socialist policy and being a little more lenient on private ownership.

it’s also important to acknowledge that many parts of the USSR did work

It's also important to acknowledge which parts worked, it's also important to acknowledge why they worked. When farmers were given private ownership, they had more freedom of choice in how to manage it, which is really important to have on farms for a myriad of reasons I can get into if you want. But in any case, they were better able to feed themselves as well as bring more product to market. Surplus on food and freedom of distribution means less hunger.

However, this cannot be meaningfully achieved in a top-down system like Capitalism.

Take farming as an example since it's on topic. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. In 1985-1990 USSR most privately owned farms were small scale and personally managed. What's more top down, a guy owning a plot of land and doing what he wants with it, or being assigned to work a plot by the regional agriculture authority, who answers to the ministry of agriculture, who answered to the council of ministers, who answered to the Communist Party leadership?

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Private Property Rights require a state while public property does not

Public Property: something owned by the city, town, or state.

I understand that the line is blurry on whether public means "of the state" or "of the people". For example, the Romans saw the state to be in service of the people, so "public works" were state works for the people. They also saw the republic as a government of the people, so state projects were of the people either way you take it. This is exactly the same in our democracy, public spaces are managed by the state, on behalf of the people, but the democratic state is also a government of the people, so it's effectively redundant in the modern context.

In any case, I don't exactly think the distinction matters. As soon as a large group of people (the public) see the need to come together and make decisions and how to manage certain things and/or how to cooperate to get something done, a government is formed. When the Romans did this, they literally didn't have a distinctive word for it, which is why they basically just called it the "public thing", the group that handled public decision making. The nature of the Roman "public thing" swayed in and out of meaning of for the people, by the people, in service of the people, in command of the people, and it was never exclusive to one of those things.

Private property demonstrably does not require a state to exist, because that's not always how property rights are handled. In this early period of Rome, the state could purchase and grant rights, but so could private citizens. If the people of Rome wanted a plot of land to themselves, the legal way to do so would be through a legitimate exchange with a private owner. Property rights are granted by whoever holds the property rights, private or public. Modern nations technically own the land they claim, which is why they grant access.

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The far more important distinction are the things that which the people don't decide need collective cooperation. That's what we call "private". To be privately controlled, you can't be under the control of the collective or the control of the state, which is precisely why "private" is the antithesis of "public". In the context of Rome, centralization would be to make it part of the "public thing". So, if the people and senate of Rome decided to bring the whole market under the control of the people the way they did the army and roads, they would have been both centralizing control of the market and technically socialist, as the means of production would been publicly controlled. The USSR was socialist for exactly that reason.