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Comment by general_ai | Hacker News Reader

As someone who was born and raised in a communist country, I too "fear" communism, as well as its harbinger: socialism. Unless you're Norway (a tiny country with massive natural resources and an enormous sovereign wealth fund) that shit has been shown repeatedly not to work, and millions of people have died conclusively proving this point. No, thanks.

Edit: folks, before you make fools of yourselves, _please_ read the textbook definition of what socialism actually is. Thanks.

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... Yes, just like millions of people are dying on the altar of democratic socialism in Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and in the United States (Social Security is socialism. Welfare is socialism. Food stamps are socialism. Medicaid is socialism.)

Thank you. *thought i was going crazy

These things play out on much larger time scales. And social security is not socialism, all the countries you've listed are firmly capitalist. To quote Wikipedia: "Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production; as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim to establish them." This is the part that never did and never will work. Note that socialism by itself does not guarantee social security of any kind. You can still starve or die of disease. Millions of people did exactly that.

If you read a bit further down in the Wikipedia article, you'd see that there are different forms of socialism. Market socialism has a track record of working pretty well - certainly far better then the Dickensian societies it replaced.

The free market is an amazing mechanism for optimizing resource allocation... As long as you have money.

Paraphrasing Bane: "You think Socialism is your ally? You merely adopted Socialism. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see Capitalism until I was already a man." :-) Sorry, couldn't resist. You theoreticians crack me up.

The wealth fund is enormous only in part because of the massive natural resources. The real trick is not pissing it away like other oil producing nations do.

In fact oil is the only substantial natural resource that Norway has that most other countries don't. Forestry is not terribly profitable because of the terrain, most of the valuable minerals are in the north (and mostly on the Swedish side of the border), large scale hydro has been built out to close to the maximum possible already.

Was your communist country really socialist before it became communist or is the word communist here simply shorthand for Soviet Russian style dictatorship imposed by an external power?

By what "external power"? There's some evidence that Germans aided and financed the initial stages of Russian revolution, but its pretty weak, and its effect is unlikely to have been decisive. The revolution was largely a consequence of the war, weaker government, pissed off populace, and the fact that people didn't really know what they _really_ were signing up for. Now that several regimes have gone through the proces, we do very much know where these things end. Except for maybe the folks in their teens and mid-20s who don't study history and therefore might be doomed to eventually repeat it.

Socialism can be viewed as communism-lite, and there is the idea out there that socialism leads to communism and its problems.

Yet, no example comes to mind of a society has turned without a forced internal/external takeover to socialism, then onward to communism. Could you point me to some?

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