Although it has nothing really to do with socialism … there is absolutely no theory of socialism which says that everyone should get exactly the same regardless of who they are and what they do.

It should be easy enough to check the truth of the story – simply look up the grades of every economics class in TT for the past X years. I guess no-one did that.

Incidentally, can someone explain why the communist USSR produced so many excellent physicists?

As for the degeneracies, I think for humans in works the other way around. The more stable, the more people will have time to think about in whatever justification to justify their power. In the case of violent transitions of thoecratic dynasties, praising a new god, making new customs and architecutres,it is like a new dynasty is like superimposing a new country. The memory and custumos old times is destroyed or remodeled just like a new conquered territory.

If you look at the list you provided, the democracy overlaps monarchy, and many of the forms of democracy never really existed… As for a republic as an example of monarchy, I was thinking of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowned_republic

And by this I was trying to say that monarchy is not a nice to characterize a socio political system because of its several degeneracies

a) to illustrate your point you have listed theocracy (twice) and republic as examples of monarchy; republic is not a monarchy by the way
b) if one takes your physical analogy (energy levels, degeneracy) seriously, one will easily recall that excited levels are typically more degenerate than the ground state; you may guess correctly that the same hold for political systems, i.e., democracy is more degenerate in your sense than monarchy – you may want to check out this article on Wikipedia and compare it to the one about monarchy
c) Actually, no transitions between “degenerate” states you mentioned happened in Egypt for 5000 years (Egypt was absolute monarchy), neither they happened in China

So, I am not sure why you expected me to take your argument close to my heart.

Cheers,
Dmitry.

monarchy is the lowest possible energy level of a State

I think, this statement just reinforces my argument that monarchy is the most stable social system By the way, I don’t think that republic is really a form of monarchy.

Pure capitalism circa the US at the start of the industrial revolution ends up with monopolies that destroy the very spirit of competition.

Communism ends up forming government or bureacratic elites that breaks the egalitarianism of the system. And so on and so forth.

The systems that are most stable are the pragmatic ones that constantly update themselves to correct these instabilities. Which is why I believe its very important to never have just one dominant party or one inflexible dogma, but rather a healthy mix that wax and wane in popularity depending on the needs of the moment.

not really, since, as I said above, monarchy as a governmental system in Egypt (or, say, China) survived for 5000 years (in China – more as they claim). So I have a nice cyclic argument here

The reason why we have a misunderstanding is that you talk about a single dynasty’s reign (the counterpart of this in the case of democracy would be 4 year term) while I am talking about stability of the System.

Cheers,
Dmitry.

It’s not clear to me why I think that the letter would make me go crazy. It’s a great story of a wise professor who may have shown pretty clearly to a gang of slow and bigoted students why socialism cannot work, and the more socialist something is, the less it works.

There are probably many colleges where every class would have to be failed in this egalitarian fashion. More obviously, most instructors at certain schools (and whole departments at many universities, including very famous ones) would have to be failed, too.

Dmitry, it seems that it wasn’t me, but you, who went crazy because of this e-mail because you simply can’t swallow that this story is true, wise, as well as insightful.