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Comment by fasquoika | Hacker News Reader

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

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I am a multimillionaire. Came here with a negative net worth, by way of skilled immigration. Born and raised in the USSR. Don't bother trying to convince me about the virtues of socialism. Unlike you, I actually lived it.

Sometimes the exact opposite of a profound error is also a profound error. We certainly have established that socialism can be implemented in a catastrophic fashion; it's harder to prove a negative (that nothing resembling socialism can work.) I share your skepticism, though.

There are always theoreticians who don't really know what they're talking about, but do offer their utterly worthless advice. I'm not talking about you, or anybody else on this thread in particular. Without sufficient pushback, sooner or later these people screw things up for everybody, including themselves, and the poor are hit the hardest by the fallout 100% of the time. When it becomes obvious that they screwed things up, you get people like me telling you just how fucked things can get if you head in that direction, de facto, because we've been there. When you don't have people like me, you head in that direction, because let's face it, most people think that if we just take all the wealth and spread it evenly everyone will be better off. That's not how the world works, however, but it takes decades to go through these cycles to find out for yourself. Greed is good, inequality in outcomes is good. What's bad is inequality in opportunity, and there's less of that here than in most other countries. If you were just born here, you already have the golden ticket. The trick is to not wipe your butt with it.

There is no point in trying to convince the masses of liberally-inspired, rich privileged people who have never had the courage to face and understand the arguments of the other side, or the masses of liberally-inspired poor people who rather than work to improve themselves see themselves as victims and see the others as the source of the solution to their problems.

Here is an interesting point:

http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-problem-w...

Ironically, the lack of ability to blame someone else for one's misfortune was the only good thing about USSR style socialism. When everyone is poor, you can't blame the rich for anything.

> What's bad is inequality in opportunity

Agreed.

> and there's less of that here than in most other countries.

I've seen evidence that the US is actually not doing that well on this scale, particularly measured against other wealthy democracies.

What's particularly painful for people is that there's less equality of opportunity here than there was 40 years ago. I do think we need to do something about this, though it's not entirely clear what.

Priority one: Federalize educational funding so that primary schools are all decently funded. Other countries do this as a matter of course. Obama didn't lift a finger, so far as I know, to get equal dollars to black and predominantly black classrooms in poor districts.

Socialism is a bit of an over-loaded word. Most people use it to speak about market economies in western Europe with heavily funded public health, wellness, and education programs which intend to promote democratic constitutional goals such as equal opportunity for citizens.

Planned economies such as the USSR clearly impinge on human liberty, tend to be undemocratic, and are usually very inefficient, and I think almost everybody would agree with you that they aren't a good alternative to the current U.S political and economic system.

>Planned economies such as the USSR clearly impinge on human liberty, tend to be undemocratic, and are usually very inefficient

I disagree that they impinge on human freedom, at least I don't think they do compared to capitalist economy. I see no reason why they should be undemocratic. And you'll find nobody in favour of a 5 year plan as the USSR had; there have been massive advances in economic planning methods, as elaborated by Cockshott et al.

I love the irony of saying it is "inefficient" especially when we compare it to how currently under capitalism firms compete by doing the same research, repeating the same mistakes, often extremely inefficiently, in the name of profit. This is one of the most inefficient things I have heard of.

The USSR planning model isn't a good alternative. But I think that some economic planning model, whatever it may be, should not be ruled out, especially as it can feature as part of lower-stage Communism.

It's hard to determine how much of something to produce in a planned economy. It's inefficient because the market is incredibly good at figuring this out through the price mechanism.

Lots of pre-1917 Russians weren't fond of socialism or any form of wealth redistribution. They have lost all their wealth and their lives as well.

Some levels of inequality are healthy and motivating, extreme social inequality with large groups of population feeling left behind by the social system is undermining stability and a recipe for revolution.

When poor have nothing to eat, they eat the rich.

Or, I'd modify that to say they eat the upper middle class, because the truly rich just bolt at the first sign of trouble.

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