Excellent, now that you've actually addressed one of my points of contention and provided citations to work with I can refine my response from the assumptions I had to make before. Thank you for your effort in sharing that.

Now, your sources seem to conclude that the alleged propaganda of the West is misrepresenting the situation and that the Holodomor is actually more of an accident coupled with ineptitude rather than willful malice. OK, that is fine with me. I don't have any commitment to the idea that Communists were sitting behind closed doors going "mwahahaha, let's sacrifice millions." But, your information does not really remove my point of criticism.

Allow me to build my contention off what you've acknowledged here. There was, in fact, a famine and people were not able to gain food resources in part because of socialist policies. Ineptly managed or not, the socialist system itself contributed to the problem. Most especially by preventing alternative actions that may have mitigated the disaster. What sort of alternative actions? Consider that 'corn under the snow.' Do you really think that would happen in a free market system? Of course not. Some enterprising citizen would put in the back work and dig up the friggin corn to sell it to their neighbors for a marginal profit. The Communists, however, would have punished that and taxed it to extinction because of their regulated and controlled system. Even so, such a behavior would've saved people from dying were it implemented. On those grounds, I can make the contention that socialism is harmful to the citizenry simply on the basis of its managed economy alone. Indeed, my friend's Russian professor made very clear to him that the "boots on the ground" situation was indeed that stark.

And since you made the case that it's mismanagement and ineptitude, I think it's also worth noting that this situation isn't unique. Mao's cultural revolution also exhibited this feature. As did many other cases of socialist implementation. Why should such a perfect system introduce such flaws? Because, it is my perspective, it is a flaw inherent in socialism itself. It fails to take into account a very important element of the universe. The element of human behavior and choice. It simply treats an economy like a machine that can be tuned and fixed. The failure to accommodate human choices and freedom is a failure that results in dehumanization and subjugation of the will to the leaders of the system. That isn't an accidental side-effect but its natural rule. The only real contention you can add against this is that this may not be intentional but a side-effect of the ignorance of the leaders when to loosen the control levers.

But that really sums up the thrust of my criticism against socialism in general. The very core paradigm seems to involve the supposition that the individual is not permitted to act for himself but may only work with respect to the collective. That is inherently false. Self-interest is a valid necessity that contributes to man's ability to survive. In socialism, those principles are taken out of the hands of men and given to the system. You do not own the means of production. The state does or society does. You are thus perpetually a slave to society as, your own philosophy alleges, the workers in capitalism are slaves to the capitalist. But Marx was incorrect. In capitalism, the workers do have freedom. They have the choice to continue to cooperate with the owner or not. They may reject a corrupt boss and choose a better one. At least as long as the system operates as it's intended. When we reach a situation where we have a few large monopolies that's going to generate another problem which I'll address later...

With socialism, the worker's actions are always taxed and managed. Always owing society, never receiving any benefit except the common dole. There's no incentive to work well. And this takes away a vital freedom of man to make decisions for themselves and makes them slaves of the legislators' will. In fact, I'm actually referencing Frederic Bastiat's The Law here. Man must be free to be man, not a slave to some system of control devised by bureaucratic fiat. There's instances when this sort of regulated system can be useful, but making it the general paradigm of society undermines respect to the individual's own freedoms.

Workers in capitalism in its proper sense are technically leasing their own time to someone else. And that's something your system if implemented makes infeasible. As was demonstrated above, your managers told the workers not to harvest and so they just sat there and didn't harvest. There was no incentive to do so because they wouldn't earn any money doing so. The entire system of capitalism would have addressed the problem by having workers acting on their own intiaitive and selling food to their neighbors regardless of the economists in Moscow.

Furthermore, the other point in in any socialist's argument always seems to involve the fact that capitalism is nearly always being usurped by the Crony elite class. This, however, is a slanted position that is actually a sort of confirmation bias against Captialism. I would fully concede to you that "Crony Captialism" as RD called it is evil. But, as I said to him, I think it's actually part of the same poisonous tree that I see underneath the principles of socialism. As stated above, monopoly is a problem for a free market. It disincentivizes the benefits of the system by removing competition. It's ultimately this "control system" which infringes on man's freedom of conscience and decision that I find problematic. I don't want you telling me what to think or what to do for my own life. I am an intelligent person and can make those decisions myself. The real unfortunate fact is that some degree of management of decisions may sometimes be necessary where ignorance actually prevails. But a real question is how much and why we need that regulation. Diversity of thought is not evil, it's simply an effect of having different minds.

Part of the inequality problem, however, is that not all people have equal aptitudes. Some excel more than others and reap an economic benefit because of that. Which creates an uneven Pareto distribution that generates my aforementioned "greed and envy cycle" that ultimately leads to a collapse into either corrupt Crony Capitalism or socialism. Neither of these stopgaps fix the issue but create their own set of problems that undermine human liberty. I'll even agree with you if you think Bill Gates is an existential threat, but I won't agree that the mechanism that unwittingly allowed him to exist, because he was able to abuse something most people at worst try to use for their survival responsibly, is necessarily the problem.

Anyway, hopefully my more precise criticism will help you to tune your responses to my objections. What I'm objecting to is not exactly just socialism per se but rather the whole vain presumption that economic calculation can effectively or correctly be done by the centralized system. It's trying to manage an infinite problem with a finite mind. And I oppose many kinds of government on that same principle.