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Comment by wireprotocol | Hacker News Reader

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Getting a lot of downvotes for this comment, but could someone please explain where I'm going wrong? A lot of people think the way I do, so it would be helpful to explain.

A country with a bright future just a couple decades ago experienced a truly remarkable decline after a socialist was elected. I'm sure there are other factors, but surely this is going to be seen as yet another failure of socialism.

Whether this is because the socialism was not "implemented correctly" or not, clearly the socialist label has been used by a number of very bad people as a way to accumulate more power.

For anyone reading: HN encourages us to comment if we disagree, not silently downvote, unless the comment lacks any relevant content, and doesn’t add to the conversation.

This clearly is relevant, and it adds something to the conversation, whether or not you agree with it.

If you’re unwilling to question whether you’re correct, you’ll never be able to adapt your views and become more correct. There’s no shame in being incorrect, if it takes you closer to correctness long-term.

Please remember that, along with the principle of charity— very few people are here to troll. We’re here to critically think about the links and their meanings, consequences, and related debates.

It might not give you an answer but nevertheless quite interesting and might be enlightening to you, there’s a podcast called The History of Oil, it covers Venezuela among other countries.

I think you're being downvoted because specific questions about specific countries, like yours, end up being used as broad-sweeping scare tactics to avoid or shut down discussion of universal health care. In the U.S. even just socializing medicine is seen by some as total conversation to socialism, and in some of the more ignorant cases communism.

I think your questions are triggering that emotional response.

I think you pushed enough buttons and simplified the issues enough that people who disagreed with you downvoted you. No big deal...

It would be interesting to know the fraction of totalitarian governments that are socialist or communist. You could probably compile something based off [1] cross referenced with governance style. It is not clear to me that socialism is over-represented in the authoritarian set compared to the non-authoritarian states, but I haven't gone through the list rigorously.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

I think we should consider the despots that use the socialist label, rather than try to figure out who is actually socialist or not.

I'm not a socialist. However, the claim that socialism necessiates a central gov is not universally accepted. Furthermore most socialists envision socialism as anarchism, as in self-governing workers' collectives, etc.

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