Yet another example how collectivism and socialism works. In decade or so, they will start killing farmers for "hiding" and "price gauging" food.
We have a much lower mean wealth though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
If you're one of the top 1% in America life is great. But the 99% should not be going around saying socialism sucks. That to me indicates you're gullibility and mindless support of the 1% who have waaaay too large a share of the wealth. The 99% have a lot of room to increase their wealth in America at the expense of the average by leaning a little more into socialism honestly.
Australia is not socialist, period. Its a market economy.
LOL, love the tone policing. Do you realise some people actually lived under socialism? I am from East Europe.
Socialism sucks. The idea of "means of production owned collectively" tends to suck even in capitalism (too many shareholders), but if the owner is the state, it sucks massively. Any alignment of interests goes out of the window, massive white elephant projects get built in the name of ideology, "superfluous concerns" such as environmental damage are ignored, incompetent people get promoted to directors because their uncle is a Party bigwig. Nothing acts as a check on rampant corruption.
We should know by now that communism as a form of government appears to be better than average at enabling corruption, because the underlying mechanism of removing personal choice is so well aligned.
Not so; I’m not aware of this happening on a large scale in the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Mexico, for example (please point me to sources if I’m wrong).
Nepotism, corruption and waste of resources are well established even in non left wing countries.
True, and the problem gets worse with concentration of power in just a few hands; the absolute extreme is reached if all the power is concentrated in one person, or two (Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu come to mind, or Stalin).
This process is mitigated by the chaos that is inherent in markets and democracies; but classical socialism is an intellectual construct that seeks to avoid most of the chaos and replace it by central planning and predictable development.
Decentralized socialism might avoid that particular trap, but I suspect that in decentralized socialism, people in many jurisdictions would just vote for return to the older form of private ownership and so it would end.
People have forgotten the alternative to capitalism and communism proposed by Veblen and others was the technocracy.
Back then there were no computers which is why the movement failed. But there already existed a tension between the Engineer and the manager/luxury/leisure class.
Veblen said the natural instinct of the Engineer is to reduce waste (ie corruption). While the natural instinct of the leisure class is to signal power and status through how much they can waste and get away with.
This tension is very much alive and is what produces Snowden. With AI do not underestimate what the next bunch of Snowdens will attempt as a natural reaction to the injustices they see.
Steinbeck was one of our great writers and the Nobel Committee, which is hardly American-controlled, awarded him the prize in literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception."
It's just a question of how much, right? It's more than one woman can make, but I reckon it's less than one cow can.