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Comment by cmahler7 | Hacker News Reader

Socialists/Communists not satisfied with 200 million+ deaths, must want to hit an even 1 billion.

Blows my mind people can even be calling for socialism while we have a real time implosion going on in Venezuela right now. It's ending like every other socialist regime in history, cannibalism, famine, riots, and murder. Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous.

Actually I'm not surprised, just look up Yuri Bezmenov's talk on ideological subversion he foretold everything 30+ years ago

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You mention Venezuela, but what about India? France, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Finland, and Denmark are all arguably socialist -- certain much more so than the US.

Any economic system fails when practiced by corrupt or incompetent governments. There are many failed capitalist states, too.

Edit: if you want to talk about scaling, China and India are debatably doing well (or at least improving rapidly), and both countries have 1.3B people.

China had an interesting idea with special economic zones: let people opt out of socialism if they want to, but stay within the country and get basic protections.

None of those countries are communist. They have large social welfare states, and tax rates that might push 50%, but essentially rely on the free market for most economic decisionmaking.

In many ways China is closer to pure capitalism than most countries on the planet. The vestiges of "socialism" primarily live on in their authoritarian government, restrictive social policies, financial repression and massive state-owned-enterprises. China is slowly moving away from the latter two as their massive problems are uncovered.

I wasn't talking about communism.

> authoritarian government, restrictive social policies, financial repression and massive state-owned-enterprises

None of these are key tenets of socialism as the article formulates it.

As I've said elsewhere, historical socialism is not the socialism anyone is advocating. No one is suggesting Stalinism.

I don't know about a lot of other countries but India's economic boom started after liberalisation[1] in the 90s, before that India was far poorer.

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

Capitalism has caused hundreds of millions of deaths as well, without the same military interference that socialist countries have experienced. Your analysis needs a lot more nuance.

Another required nuance is the difference between modern socialism, Marxism, and Stalin-Leninism. Lumping them together is like suggesting that the US has the same form of capitalism as Saudi Arabia.

No one is proposing anything remotely similar to Stalinism/USSR-esque or Nazi socialism. When people bring those things up, it's a straw man.

Can you give me examples that come anywhere close to Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao's China, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc?

Sure!

America did it twice: native genocide and African slavery.

if this were reddit..I'd say "Username checks out...".. but this isn't reddit.

One thing I'm curious about...Trump says Let's make America Great again--was he talking before white people came and before the genocide? Or after? Was he talking about Slavery? Or the lynch mobs of the KKK? What about criminal enterprises and suffering during Prohibition and the Great Depression?

Damn, I long for the an FDR style leader to come along, well at this point we need quite a few to fill congress and start making America about the people again, not corporate interests.

Wow, you really have a lot of things mixed up here. How can you make such strong claims about socialism when there are so many factors involved, e.g. we did not see socialism implemented without a dictatorship. Also, why didn't you try to compare deaths caused by capitalism.

> Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous. This blows my mind. You think that obesity is due to prosperity, when all those poor people who cannot afford decent food and physical exercise are the ones who are getting obese.

Please, consider refraining from posting before trying to understand correlations and connections between multiple factors from which you draw such strong (and very misleading) conclusions.

While socialism/communism were good excuses to concentrate enormous amount of power and dictate every aspect of people's lives, the ideas were never the problem. It's just those concentrating wealth want you to believe otherwise, so they can keep get wealthier and wealthier. It's not that hard to help the poor without a dictatorship, the system is already in place in every country in the world, just one small law and there will be no more homeless, poor and unhealthy, only slightly annoyed and less rewarded rich.

Thats an incredibly unfair comparison. You're judging communism based on the merits of its intentions and ideas, meanwhile condemning capitalism for its failings in practice.

Oh of course. Next time when we implement socialism, nobody at all will be interested in concentrating power and abusing it for personal benefit. How silly of me to think that might happen for the hundred and first time after a hundred times in the past.

People will always do this.

The goal becomes to leave the power in a democratized space, as socialism dictates. When labor members own their fair shares of the companies that are interacting on the market, they will make decisions socially and profit proportionally. Exploitation in its current form will be greatly reduced. Naturally any economic system bears its own unique issues to contend with, but these can be addressed in time for what seems at this point to be a net improvement in inequality.

The news must be covering up the ongoing massacres in Norway.

They seem to be covering up the amount of hand grenade attacks in Sweden.

Just a reminder -> social democracy is not socialism.

Why not? The state takes resources from the wealthy and uses them to provide services to the general population. That's socialism in a nutshell.

Try again. Socialism is where the government controls ALL means of production. They set how much toilet paper is produced daily, and they do it based on arbitrary means not supply and demand.

Social Democracy -- is capitalism with some programs added in, heck Police, Fire, and Roads maintained by the state are SOCIAL DEMOCRACY programs -- maybe you should have to pay if you want the fire truck to come put out your fire, call 911 what's your emergency? And can I have your credit card?

Dictionary definition: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole

Under social democracy you can still start companies, still own businesses, nobody's taking that away, we just want to make sure that those who earn the most off the backs of the people's work contribute to lift up those who are burdened the most at the bottom.

You've setup a strawman to argue against. Few people think that extreme is a good idea. History has proven that it does not scale well and is considerably less efficient at allocating resources than capitalism. It's also highly prone to corruption because the power is concentrated at the top, which is ironically exactly the same problem that capitalism has, even though those communist systems were built to solve the problems of capitalism.

In this US any talk about redistributing wealth will have your policy (and you) branded as a socialist.

>Few people think that extreme is a good idea

Unfortunately people has short memory. In the last elections here in Spain more people than ever voted far-left parties, including supporters of terrorist groups. Just the coalition between communists (Unidos Podemos) received more than 5 million votes.

Even convicted terrorists from ETA, and Terra Lliure won their seats.

Sadly, far-left and far-right populism is going up in Europe.

An option besides socialism though that looks interesting is the Venus Project, or Resource Based Economy -- where all goods and services are available to all people without the need for money, credits, barter or any other means.

1. Those countries are all capitalist economies, some with more economic freedom than the US. They can't be used to defend socialism/communism

2. We're on HN so we all now about scaling. There's a big difference between 5 million and 300+ million citizens.

3. The US subsidizes those countries in terms of defense and innovation in health care. Pharma makes their profits off us while they have price controls in those other countries.

http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

I think you meant to respond to me, but accidentally responded to someone else.

Great. Let's confuse socialism with communism yet again. At least it invalidates your argument from the start.

Socialism is government ownership of capitol. Communism is a hypothetical end state where everyone collectively controls the capitol.

In my mind they are fairly easy to confuse.

Sure, if that's your definition of communism. The only communism I've ever experienced or read about on our planet, however, is the opposite, where one or a few people control everything, not just capital, and subject everyone else to persecution. So really, it shouldn't be that hard not to confuse it with socialism if you look at the actual manifestation of the ideology instead of the bullshit that justifies it.

USA spends 50% of its budget on health-care and social security. Looks pretty socialist to me.

I agree, probably a big part of why the standard of living has dropped so much in recent years. We should reduce the budget significantly. Government massively missallocates resources

Keep up the good work. You are such a great example of Poe's law. I can't even

What's with the ad-hominem? At least in the healthcare market, There are good reasons to believe that the massive government intervention is a bad use of resources.

People on Medicaid claim to value the services at only 1/5 of their cost. If you taking that estimate at face value, if you shut down medicaid entirely and just paid each former recipient 20% of the price you'd been paying to provide health insurance, they would be better off. You can debate those numbers and methodology, but it's very suggestive, and very real.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/07/med...

As the article mentions, if you take away Medicaid people still have access to the prime mechanism for socialized medicine in the US: the law that prevents hospitals from turning away emergency patients.

This time they'll get it right. Don't worry comrade, ignore that in order to make it work, the government will take property from one person and give it to another at the barrel of a gun, whether they agree or not.

This is more equitable.

This sort of "analysis" is absurd on its face. There is nowhere on Earth that you would want to live that doesn't have a government that takes property by force and gives to others.

Taxation is necessary to live in a stable society. The question is, how much to take and how to spend it.

We've seen how our current path works out. The rich accumulate more and more wealth and with it more political power until such time that the masses are sufficiently poor and disenfranchised that they engage in a bloody revolt.

property is defined by the government. unless you can defend it yourself.

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