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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Meh I'm from a nation way more socialist than the USA and we have 3x the median wealth per capita (Australia).

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.

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Highly misleading. Australian superannuation savings are counted but American social security entitlements are not.

The USA has 401k which is the same as super in Australia. Social security is another thing altogether comparable to the dole but you have to first pay something in to ever get a pittance out. I'm not sure you should count it.

Superannuation savings are mandatory like social security, to the best of my knowledge.

You’re not wrong, but I’d hardly wave Australia round as being a progressive social democracy!

I just see it as a scale. Both extremes are terrible and the middle is the answer. So Australia is more to the middle but that still makes a good comparison. Op said that he's from a socialist extreme but that's just more to the point. There's a balance to be found and criticism of socialism isn't that meaningful compared to criticism of extremes.

OP didn't suggest it was any of those terms.

The correlation that you draw between progressive social democracy and a good place to live for the average citizen, might not be the correlation that promotes your cause.

I was born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and it took decades to get rid of its awful legacy.

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.

I was born in the People’s Republic of Poland, and I think most of the suckage you’ve described are due to oppressive authoritarianism of the former Eastern Bloc countries, and have little if anything to do with collective ownership of means of production.

ANd oppressive authoritarianism is because «all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others».

They have to do with the mechanisms of the commune being used to produce a dictatorship or a bureaucratic upper class, which has happened in ever circumstance where communism has been implemented.

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.

> which has happened in ever circumstance where communism has been implemented.

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).

Socialism in Western Europe stopped to be about collective ownership of means of production very long before the fall of the wall. That was maybe the goal of sub 5% far left communist parties, not even mainstream ones.

Nepotism, corruption and waste of resources are well established even in non left wing countries.

"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.

AI will. Once we get past the hype and scam phase.

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.

Not an actual quote, but rather a later-paraphrased summary of John Steinbeck, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Steinbeck was a hack. There aren’t enough calories in breastmilk to sustain life for an adult male. Also, equal opportunities for your whole population is a noble goal. Twisting that into, “Americans are delusional to think they could ever succeed”, just makes it seem like you hate America. You could twist socialism into, “You were afraid that not everyone could win so now nobody wins”, and be equally wrong.

You lost me at the first sentence.

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."

> There aren’t enough calories in breastmilk to sustain life for an adult male.

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.

I see socialism like unions. Instead of addressing the underlying problem they seek to build a permanent detente with it. To that extent, people are much better off seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" otherwise they risk becoming the "permanently politically exploited underclass."

>Meh I'm from a nation way more socialist than the USA

Australia is not socialist, period. Its a market economy.

From reading that article (until the paywall hits) it sounds like South Africa is a libertarian paradise - private security, private road repair, private fire brigade.

SA still collects significant taxes and distributes them to cronies instead of using them for public goods. Not exactly a libertarian tenet.

Whenever folks like you denigrate 'lawless' libertarian shitholes, it always ends up that the reason such territories are so terrible is because of a government using its monopoly of violence to extract rent from business, either through outright taxation or currency inflation. Yet, every single time, people can't get the irony.

Yes the ANC have a monopoly on violence in South Africa

So SA doesn't qualify as libertarian then.

Australia is a social democracy, not socialist.

>99% should not be going around saying socialism sucks.

LOL, love the tone policing. Do you realise some people actually lived under socialism? I am from East Europe.

Then you know first hand how truly wonderful it was. I've heard nothing but good things.

Visit Norway.

They say they are not socialist. https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-tells-...

Norway isn't socialist. It's a social democracy like most other European countries. You're undoubtedly confusing it with democratic socialism.

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