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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

You mean socialism didn't turn out to be a grand utopia where no one is poor and the government efficiently distributes resources? I'm totally shocked! Maybe they should nationalize a few more industries and throw more capitalists in prison

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Graft, corruption, and mismanagement will ruin any system: capitalism, socialism, or communism (assuming we can even agree on the definitions of those systems).

Graft, corruption, and mismanagement == Socialism

You think those things didn't exist before 1848 or so?

Socialism requires that the government has more resources and thus more power. Therefore socialist governments are more likely to become corrupted and mismanaged.

completely agree with this. Obviously nothing is certain but it's a strong factor and time brings this out.

How is this any different from capitalist oligarchies? In that case, the power and resources are not aggregated in a single government, but split over many private individuals.

It's a matter of degrees. At least in most capitalist countries the press, no matter how emasculated, still functions as a check on corruption to some degree.

Communist/socialist countries tend to control the press, and hush up exposés of corruption, which makes it much worse.

The Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/obama-has-sentenced-w...

Sure the press in the US is currently in a pretty bad state.

But after living in a communist country for the last five years I can tell you for a fact it can get much worse.

Capitalism has nothing to do with freedom of the press.

Why then is there no capitalist country that oppresses journalists to anything like the degree that all communist countries do?

Freedom of the press, along with trial by jury, is a quality of free (as in speech) societies.

Free Market Capitalism would be another one.

The more one centralizes power, the more opportunity there is for graft, corruption, and mismanagement to do a lot of harm.

Let's avoid a stupid "definition of terms" fight and just talk about why the USSR was such a complete disaster for a few minutes, whatever you want to call their system.

That system was one that centralized a lot of power. What jobs people did, what prices things sold at, where people could love, how much of what they would try to make or grow, and also who could say what, what ideologies were allowed, what kind of media people could see, what foreign ideas were allowed in.

It turns out that that's a pretty rich field for graft. All the graft opportunities that were available in other countries, plus a big slice of economic control, plus a big slice of ideology control made for some powerful government officials, and they could use corruption to turn that power into personal gain.

Where are the successful socialist and Communist societies?

Sweden, Norway and Finland are more Socialist than the USSR, Cuba, China have ever been. So yes there are some successful socialist countries.

All have extensive private ownership. Look at government spending. Sweden 51.2% of GDP, Norway 43.9.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending

How are they 'more Socialist' than the USSR or Cuba or China when it was poor where the state owned everything?

Sure, they are 'Social Democracies' which seems to mean market-democracies with a welfare state these days.

As I said elsewhere, Scandinavia seems to be doing all right, so that's Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden for starters.

(This is of course social democracy rather than "pure" socialism. But since most social democratic policies, e.g. health care and social safety nets, are called "socialism" by those who wish to demonize them, I think it's fair to put social democracy's triumphs under the same label.)

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.” -- Margaret Thatcher

Despite her being given recognition for reforming the British Economy, it is arguably still up for debate whether her policies were ultimately successful. The Scandinavian countries have continued to preserve many govt. controlled industries without being bankrupt.

The government of the Scandinavian countries is not so much bigger then that of other western nations.

In scandinavia they are not keeping companies alive that are literally consuming money, such a the British coal mines.

Before she took over Britain had very litte growth and was called the sick man of europe. Inflations was getting out of control and would have ruined Britain.

Certantly not everything she did was good, but Britain despretly need some of those changes.

If you look at indexes of economic freedom the scandinavian countries are actually quite high. Their are many extremly capitalist aspects of their society as well.

you need to read something deeply before give an oppinion about socialism, in Colombia 4000 children dies starving in the last 4 years and CNN and FOX dont say anything couse Colombia is a right wing country, and offcourse, this must be pass in silent.

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