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Comment by geysersam | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of socialist countries in the world that are doing fine.

Pretty much every remotely developed country is capitalist. The wealthiest country with a non-capitalist economy is Cuba or Turkmenistan, depending on where you draw the line.

Uhh, China...

US has a higher government spending as a % of GDP than China.

Yeah our military is a good example of what a centrally planned communist US might look like.

US military spending is 3% of GDP.

This has me wondering, do people think the military is 1/3 of the US economy? That would explain a lot of discourse.

The context of this discussion is Brazil and the intentions of the socialist Brazilian government. Are you claiming that the socialist party in Brazil intends to dismantle capitalism? In case you are unaware, countries can have capitalist economic systems and still have significant socialist traits like: large public sectors, state enterprises for natural monopolies and important industries, subsidized education and healthcare, etc.

My previous comment came off as disagreement that I didn’t intend. Most countries in the world are both socialist and capitalist.

I don’t intend to defend the “socialism bad” argument. There are several countries (many in Europe) that have great outcomes while being about as socialist as left-wing Latin American governments. I think a fairer criticism is some of the Latin American parties have a track record of flawed implementation that caused distrust among a lot of the population.

For a system with subsidized education there’s a strangely high number of doctors from Brazil getting their education in Paraguay.

Also depends on how you define capitalism, and whether you consider Socialism with Chinese Characteristics to be capitalist.

Is this where we pretend a bunch of rich market-capitalist European countries are “socialist” or are you talking about China and Vietnam?

For some people, even the government interventions by those specific rich market-capitalist European countries are "too socialist" and get the exact same "didn't you realise Stalin killed millions?" kinds of responses.

It's just a motte-and-bailey argument. You say you're okay with social democratic policies when you're opposing anything stronger, but oppose social democratic policies when anyone is trying to actually implement them.

That's the point I was making, yes.

PRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy.

Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.

You can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.

> definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians

The US has generous social assistance, just less of it than some European countries. It has unions more powerful than many European countries. Meanwhile the most popular Dem-aligned politician in the US has recently introduced a bill to partly nationalise AI companies.

> You can’t have it both ways

You’re responding to my first comment in this thread

Small amounts of socialism on top of a solid base of market economy. I'm from Sweden, this is well known but yea, many are super confused about this.

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