3 hours of waiting on processing payment ? <| sep |> I hate this excuse . It only looks good on paper if you don ' t understand basic economics . And no , it ' s not because people are selfish or something . Communism doesn ' t work because the knowledge you would need to centrally plan an economy without markets can only be obtained through markets . It ' s a catch 22 and always will be , even if people were all altruists . Neither was the Soviet Union a bad example . If anything it was a particularly benign one , because at least they had some idea of the value of goods and services relative to each other , since they could observe market prices in the surrounding economies . But even that didn ' t save them in the end . Centrally planned economies simply cannot direct resources anywhere close to efficiently without market prices . EDIT What some of you don ' t seem to be understanding is that economic efficiency means lower infant mortality rates , higher life expectancy , better education , less poverty , less disease , and so on , and no , not just for the rich . If all those things sound terrible to you then by all means , never crack open an economics textbook , and continue to remain ignorant about one of the most important questions of our time .