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Comment by qwenda | Hacker News Reader

They also do not know, what socialism is.

Trying to sell the black/white view of capitalism/communism to millenials proves to be a hard sell. People travel, they see social democracies in europe and elsewhere and begin to doubt capitalism. I think american media is adapting very slowly to the underlying realities behind the rise of Bernie sanders.

They see social democracies in Europe, and cherry pick the policies they like (broad government spending), ignoring the ones that actually allow Europe to generate enough wealth to support their welfare states.

Also - something to realize about Europe: The poor in the US are RICHER than middle class in much of europe.

"A person at 60% of median income in the US still has a larger income than the median household in Chile, Czech Rep., Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and several others. And the poverty income in the US is very close to matching the median income in Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK."

https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...

While that may be true, I would speculate that due to higher spending on social programs, the European poor enjoy I higher quality of life than their American counterparts. Don't discount things like tax-funded transportation, healthcare, and education, and the luxury of not maintaining a massive standing military.

Hmm, lower incomes where health care and university is provided by the government, higher income where it is not.

And if you take the cost of health care and university out of the US statistics, do you think they would remain higher?

back of the envelope math says no:

Its less than 10 thousand dollars higher, US health care is estimated at 5k per person on average. Given that these are household incomes youd have to multiply that by average family size, which is like 2.3 people

Its 2.3*5000 more expensive to have healthcare per family in the US

That already has wiped out the entirety of the 10k gap.

If you include free university it is even more one sided.

You are comparing pears with apples, because you assume those numbers are net values after all taxes which is not true. Europeans usually pay ~80% of they gross GDP/capita at some form of tax (health insurance (personal + company level), income tax, VAT, mandatory pension plan, extras on petrol and alcohols, duty fee, etc.

totally fair point - i didnt take taxes into account at all, i just ran with my first thought after reading the linked source

Are you talking about the social democracies of Northern Europe? They wouldn't be possible without capitalism.

Who is this capitalism you're speaking of? I want to meet him.

Nor without socialism. There are no millennials advocating USSR style communism. They're advocating a move away from unbridled '00s capitalism.

What "unbridled '00 capitalism"? More like statist, crony-capitalism intertwined with kleptocracy.

So capitalism is supposed to exist in a vacuum in which it won't corrupt the government around it?

The government should not be involved in the market in the first place , other than ensuring fair play (through simple, enforceable regulations, primarily to ensure transparency and prevent monopolies/duopolies and). No government bailouts for anybody. No corporate "lobbyists". Etc.

But they’re a very different form – usually known as "Social Market Economy" from the Capitalist economy common in the US.

>>They wouldn't be possible without capitalism.

And that sort of capitalism wouldn't be possible without colonialism.

The article is about rejecting capitalism, not about rejecting free markets. Regarding europe at large, including france and even UK to some extent, the difference between american style capitalism and social democracy is whether the Capitalists or the Democracy have primacy in the society. It's not about choosing exclusively one of the two.

The capital gains tax is lower than the taxes on employment. Wouldn't this mean that owning is favored by the society?

But europe is struggling too.

Socialism is a stateless utopia

Communism is Full State capitalism

Most of the world have a State sponsored Capitalism system.

Pretty sure it's the other way around. Communist society is the ideal state that has never been achieved. This is the ultimate goal of socialism.

There's always gonna be endless debate about terms...

Let's just say that what I call communism is what happened in Russia. And that it was supposed to be an intermediary step toward socialism. The idea was State owned means of production ==> totally democratic ownership everyone is free no need for a state bliss

And this is why people "don't know what capitalism is" and "don't know what communism is". Different people take the words to mean something different.

For a lot of people, "communism" is little more than a synonym for "authoritarian kleptocracy".

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As the phrases are actually used in Leninist theory, the goal was stateless communism. Socialism was an intermediary stage between capitalism and communism accurately described by Lenin, who invented the concept, as "state capitalism".

A "dictatorship of the proletariat" would take over capitalism's economic and political infrastructure and support the citizenry until a transition to true communism was possible. To the surprise of nobody who owned a history book, it turned out the dictatorship came to be corrupted by a ruler with no real interest in communism, but plenty of interest in being a dictator.

It's worth noting that Marx didn't advocate any particular method of transitioning from capitalism to communism, because Marx wasn't, precisely, a revolutionary. He regarded the transition as simply an inevitable consequence of capitalism's failings.

There aren't many places in the world left where bona fide socialism now exists, thankfully. I can think only of Venezuela and North Korea.

There is also "capitalism" in Iraq, Syria, and Congo. There is "socialism" in Sweden and Finland.

There is "socialism" in Belarus and "capitalism" in Ukraine.

There is "socialism" in China and "capitalism" in Indonesia.

None of these comparisons obviously make sense.

You can own private property and run business in all these countries.

I was born in USSR. Socialism there meant that private business ownership is definitely not allowed. As many other things, too. It was impossible to buy and sell real estate, for example.

Exactly. I was commenting on how those are not real examples of socialism - you can own property in Venezuela for example. North Korea is more of an example of a dictatorship than anything else.

People who defend it usually don't.

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