Also, any country that builds infrastructure with taxes and regulates industry is socialist, including the US. The difference is usually that "capitalist" countries have safety net for corporations and the wealthy, while "socialist" countries have safety nets for everyone.
>"On this basis, let me agree with Adam that the damage done to the environment by the Soviet regime and its successor doesn’t remotely bear comparison with that in the West. It was, and remains, catastrophically worse. Particular countries elsewhere, especially in the developing world, have suffered one or another ecological disaster, sometimes of mind-bending dimensions. The USSR managed something in just about every sector of heavy industry to match the worst of them."
https://socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/ecological-di...
And how industrialized were the USSR and China in 1930?
When a larger part of your economy is agrarian you're going to be incapable of polluting the shit out of everything to the same extent as more industrialized nations.
Regardless, I find this discussion to be an unwelcome diversion. The USSR is dead, and even most communists don’t want that specific state back. The reality is that today in America we regularly let companies privatize their profits and shift their costs onto all of society. We don’t need to nationalize industry to fix that, and as you correctly point out that might not be sufficient, but we do need to regulate this.
All I want to see is industries pay according to the impact that they have on society. This isn’t an inherently socialistic idea, but it would require a change in the way that we currently conceive of capitalism[0].
0 - Economists generally think that removing these externalities are good for the market. But this runs contrary to the anti-regulation attitude currently in vogue.
No, I just think that most of your previous post was wrong.
edit: I see that you added to your post:
>"0 - Economists generally think that removing these externalities are good for the market. But this runs contrary to the anti-regulation attitude currently in vogue. "
Where have regulations decreased over the medium to long-term (5+ years)? I can't think of any (stable) country which has acted in an anti-regulatory way; do you have any specific examples?
This is genuinely quite baffling to me. Ignoring the fact that de-regulation has been an explicit plank of the GOP for my entire life, the US deregulated a ton of stuff since the Reagan era. Airlines, trucking, labor, and the financial industry all saw significant cuts to their regulatory rules. Anti-trust laws have been re-interpreted to be less aggressive[0] leading to more mergers, and regulation of various services have been weakened[1]. Environmental regulations have been a bit of a back-and-forth with executive orders changing things often, but at the state level de-regulation and willful non-enforcement is the norm in some areas. Texas is generally the go-to here, with willful non-enforcement of EPA rules around fracking and the (disastrous) deregulation of the energy market. Trump in particular made industrial de-regulation a goal, and tried to de-regulate a ton of stuff and lock out his successors from changing the rules back.
https://climate.law.columbia.edu/climate-deregulation-tracke...
The UK is now finally starting up their deregulatory processes again, now that they're no longer restrained by the EU. They've been greenlighting new pesticides for use, eliminating EU rules around used plastic exports, and allowing private water companies to dump their untreated sewage into the ocean. Personally I'd keep my eye on them the most for de-regulation, because their anti-regulation party has effectively no electable opposition, leaving them entirely without political restraint. Although given the current status of their import woes, I think they might end up not being sufficiently stable for your requirements.
0 - Anti-trust used to be about whether or not a company was "anti-competitive". The new rules determine whether or not a monopoly reduces consumer prices. Whether or not this is good or not, this is effectively a deregulation.
1 - I'm specifically thinking of the end of the fairness doctrine and the deregulation of ISPs.
I gave tons of examples and an entire decade with bipartisan deregulation as the norm. It seems that you're ignoring what I actually wrote, all while demanding more evidence I already gave and offering none of your own. I'm forced to conclude that you're not really acting in good faith, and that there's no point in continuing.
edit: look at this graph, which shows the total code of regulations expanding almost monotonically https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/za...