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Comment by adwn | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting that the reason socialism doesn't work is that the CIA regularly kills, well, who exactly? The proponents of socialism? Hardly, they'd be assassinating 24/7 without making a dent.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not claiming that the CIA didn't murder socialist leaders. My point is that you can't look at all the failed socialist experiments and conclude that socialism would have succeeded if only the CIA hadn't murdered any socialist leaders.

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Short story: in 1953 Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala initiated a land reform program. Large uncultivated holdings were expropriated, the owners compensated as per the value they themselves declared on their tax forms, and redistributed to the landless peasantry. Previously, 2% of the population controlled 72% of the arable land (with the United Fruit Company alone owning 42% of arable land!), poverty was widespread, but at the same time much of the land was unused. Practices such as labour-as-rent meant that much of the population, especially indigenous persons, were effectively serfs in a feudal system. Health outcomes were also very poor.

After the reforms poverty was slashed, The government also created a line of credit for the newly landed farmers to get their things going: it dispensed $3,371,185 in loans during 1953. By July 1954 $3,049,092 had been paid back! An success almost without parallel in history.

Cutting to the chase, the US didn't like that, so they initiated one operation to boot him out and install a sympathetic dictator. It failed, so they tried again, and it succeeded. The new establishment proceeded to revert all those reforms, give back land to foreign hoarders. The US also placed death squads through the countryside to enforce the change, paving the way for decades of civil war.

Look, I don't want to defend or deny the many, many atrocities and crimes the US committed in the last 100 years, far from it. However, one year (or even five years) is much too short a timespan to judge whether a socialist reform is successful or not.

Zimbabwe had the exact opposite experience. White farmers lost their land and then the Mugabe regime gave it to people who didn't farm on it. Food has to be imported and paid with loans denominated in a foreign currency. Zimbabwe can't print US dollars, so it obviously ended in hyperinflation.

You seem unaware of the history of US foreign intervention.

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

There's a very unfortunate reason only the strongmen last.

Oh no, I'm very much aware of it. What I'm saying is that your insinuation – that socialism only failed because the CIA murdered socialists – doesn't make sense, because socialism has been tried several times in different countries. It would only make sense if the CIA had exclusively murdered the competent socialist leaders, while leaving the incompetent socialist leaders alive to try out socialism in their countries. This would also require the CIA to have the foresight to know beforehand which leaders will turn out to be incompetent.

I suspect you are using the word “socialism” wherever it would be more honest and clearer to use “communism”. Firstly, your definition of socialism makes it a strawman or tautology - socialism is that which has failed.

Many other people in the world use the word socialism to also have positive meanings where society shares its wealth with everyone in that society.

Most every wealthy first world country has a significant taxation system that is inherently “socialist” IMHO. The individual is taxed, and the tax income is spent for the weal of all: on infrastructure, defence, social benefits, health benefits, etcetera. What word do you use for that concept?

I am from New Zealand, which is definitely not a failed state, where: “Total core Crown revenue for the 2018/19 financial year was $119.3 billion. Tax revenue [] totalled $86.5 billion in the 2018/19 financial year.” and “The three largest areas of total Crown expenditure for the 2018/19 financial year were: Social security and welfare: $34 billion, Health: $18.7 billion, Education: $15.3 billion”.

That is, in NZ, 3/4 of tax income was spent on “socialist” welfare state expenditures of education, health, and social services for the majority.

I know that is off-topic, but I just find how you frame your arguments to be severely biased.

| This would also require the CIA to have the foresight to know beforehand which leaders will turn out to be incompetent.

First, as I said before, when the CIA targets socialist leaders, only the strongmen survive. It's my belief that strongmen are not great leaders, they're just the best at not getting killed. This is why people associate "socialist" with "authoritarian", because the crunchy, hippy Bernie Sanders types get shot and their supporters get thrown from helicopters.

Second, killing socialist leaders isn't the only thing the CIA does. Look up any CIA counter-revolution manual and part of their cointel is to do as much as possible to destabilize the politics and economy of the country. Any socialist leader (or even just mildly social democratic leader) has to contend with this in a way that a capitalist leader doesn't. Even under these circumstances, we still have relative success stories like Cuba, which while not great from a first world perspective is a much better place to be an average citizen than Haiti or Dominican Republic. Or Bolivia, which got coup'd but popular support was able to oust Añez and whose economic reforms have increased GDP per Capita by 50%.

You can't state something as definitive as "socialism doesn't work" when history includes the greatest empire the world has ever known doing everything in its power to crush it.

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