I came from Soviet Union. I don't have any illusions about socialist ideas. Lots of young people here might have illusions. But I don't.
> As for the world’s second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the ‘socialist’ dungeon.
> The Soviet leadership thus portrays itself as socialist to protect its right to wield the club, and Western ideologists adopt the same pretense in order to forestall the threat of a more free and just society. This joint attack on socialism has been highly effective in undermining it in the modern period.
Source: https://chomsky.info/1986____/
I don't necessarily agree with Chomsky but "I was there mannnn" and "if you disagree with me you're young and naive" is not the standard of discussion we should hold ourselves to.
A lot of historians would strongly disagree with Chomsky here. The leaders of the Soviet Union were true believers who acted as they did to bring about communism. Here's a good interview with one such historian, a professor a Princeton: http://www.hoover.org/research/hoover-fellow-stephen-kotkin-... . I believe the relevant bits are in part 2.
Chomsky is a great linguist, but when it comes to politics, I don't give his views much weight. You only need to look at what his buddy Chavez was doing in Venezuela, while Chomsky was singing his praises among leftist intelligentsia.
The USSR said it was implementing communism (not socialism), but really implemented a brutal totalitarian dicatorship.
Its not really possible to be implement communism without dictatorship of some kind.
The moment you seize power, the very first thing you will realize is you need money to run your schemes. But there is only that much available, and that pool too is dwindling over time. Anybody good is taxed beyond their share, so they are always moving out to greener pastures, reducing your spending pool further. Pretty much everyone else thinks, its everybody else's job to work and make for them. So no one's contributing, but expecting the party to continue.
Its basically a giant negative feedback loop in a system that's amplifying what's coming in. And that is playing out at the scale of a country's economy.
Now to control it all, you need to prevent people moving out(defectors), you need to continuously control what sort of information is fed to your masses, you need to control nearly everything there is to control because any deviation means people will stray away to create their own merit based islands. And if those islands get powerful, they can pull down the regime.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't describe the history of the USSR or the Bolshevik Revolution; that was a brutal dictatorship from the start. I read in one history how Lenin controlled regions by keeping them on the precipice of starvation - anger him and rations would be reduced further. Taxes don't seem like they would be much of an issue to those people.
I've never heard taxes discussed in regard to the USSR; when the government owns everything and provides all goods and income (or close to it) I'm not sure what would be taxed.
I really think Bernie is best penned down as a "social democrat". I don't understand why he calls himself a socialist?
Also, I do recall that Linux comes from Finland.
Finland: http://startup100.net/ Norway: http://torgronsund.com/norwegianstartups/
Plus, even if there were hundreds of hot Finnish startups (there is a site that measures them actually, but I'm not Finnish so I know little about their scene) they wouldn't have exposure in the US since the US is so US-centric. Hell I'm not American so all I know of startups in the US is what I see here.
And a little note on HDI (used to measure quality of life/human development) - its skewed in favour of the US because it measures average income, not taking into account the fact Americans pay extra for health care while Europeans include it in taxes/exclude it from income calculations. Even then several Euro states beat the US.
That's exactly how I'd describe it. At least under communism the leader wasn't most likely the richest man in the world.