Look at what it did to Cuba, North Korea and 19th century China. It is unbelievable that people still consider socialism as a desirable way ( or reference point) to organize society. What evidence do they need to convince themselves of the destructive power of socialism? What is the point in equality in misery and poverty? Discuss
The power of socialism
-
What? No USSR on the list? How socialism caused it to lose to Germany in WW II and fail to put up the first space satellite? Of course, it did stagnate eventually and slow down and there was the famine in the 1930s, not to mention lots of political repressions, but there was lots of political repression under the tsars, and the current ruling bunch are not exaclty diadems of real democracy.
Also, there is the minor matter of competing definitions of "socialism." If one includes social democratic welfare states such as the Nordic economies, well, those are some of the best economically performing in the world along with having well functioning liberal democracies with excellent civil liberties.
-
I'm starting to get quite sick of Americans putting together socialism, communism, welfare state, and any kind of state intervention. Among other things, communism implies that the state (actually, the workers) controls the means of production and there is no such a thing like "private property". Socialism just advocates state intervention to correct major market failures. Then we can discuss how much state intervention is desirable in an economy given normative preferences about inequality, government failures and so on.
-
Right, communism are all the bad guys lumped together, and we socialists are the ones that are not crazy. You realize something? - every socialist everywhere in the world has been saying that. The chinese said the soviets were the failed communists. The cubans said the Chinese didnt do it right. And now Hugo Chavez claims to have invented an entire ideology of his own, which is nothing more than the usual mixture of chauvinism and socialism.