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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

This is not about electricity. This is about giving everyone a day of the week off to distract keep the people happy(-ish) in the face of a rapidly decreasing quality of life.

This isn't about socialism. This is about what is a dictatorship in all but name.

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Sincere question: is there a way to implement socialism without major centralization of power and a disregard for the rule of law?

Do you consider Sweden to be socialist?

Sweden is at best Social Democratic, and not all of its political parties subscribe to that. It certainly hasn't been through mass nationalisations of industry or utilities.

Socialism is the workers controlling the means of production, not anything deemed vaguely left wing by American standards.

Fair enough. It's hard to remember the actual definition of "socialism" when in the US it's used to slander whatever vaguely progressive policy someone don't like, even when you know they're not using the word correctly.

Free market~ish as of now. But yeah at some point the government has to either abandon all social programs or become totalitarian and increase taxes. I don't see a good future for Sweden. The brainwash goes deep.

That's the idea behind democratic socialism. Socialist programs within democracies work all over the world in Europe and Canada (those countries are albeit more towards capitalist on the spectrum than socialist).

I'd also re-examine the degree to which our representative democracies centralise power.

So we get to elect someone that disregards the law and centralizes power. This will still be inefficient and cost us many freedoms.

In most countries in Europe, for example, it's nearly impossible to start a company without lots of capital. This is because of the crippling amount of taxes and restrictions, which results in an economy comprising of near government and big corporation monopolies. You can see this in most of the nordic countries.

The problem with going the socialism route is that the system will need to take more and more income as new generations completely rely on it. At some point, you don't have enough money to fund it, and it collapses.

With the ability for any company to move to any country, there is also the real possibility that companies will just go elsewhere.

Everyone knows that pure socialism and pure capitalism is both evil. The good ground lies somewhere in the middle.

I would say that's not an universally accepted truth

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Not-Capitalism-Jason-Brennan/dp/04...

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Not-Socialism-G-Cohen/dp/069114361...

No, at least its never been done on a country level. Socialism requires group decision making and that can only be accomplished with a centralization of power. Of course the quote "The goal of socialism is communism" by Vladimir Lenin applies.

I know Switzerland isn't a socialist country but for a very rich country they seem to implement a lot of socialist ideas.

Along with the usual social programs they use a very decentralized goverment and are or were thinking of a guaranteed basic income.

Look at the Paris Commune/Revolutionary Spain, the Ukraine Free Territory, the Zapatistas in Mexico, etc. There's lots of examples of socialism working on large enough scales to be relevant but so-called "socialist" Leninists have crushed successful, ground-up socialist movements time after time.

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