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Comment by ozlikethewizard | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of your actual views on the systems, as a non-american it's absolutely insane that so many people are incapable of thinking of one positive of a socialist economic system. I wouldn't describe myself as either a socialist or a capatalist, but with just a cursory ponder I can think of several benefits to both. The complete inability for critical thinking is quite saddening, and quite worrying considering america's influence.

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I'm convinced most Americans have no idea what socialism means, or even what capitalism means.

I'm convinced the vast majority of people use the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" to mean whatever is convenient in the argument they are having.

Capitalism and socialism are about ownership of the means of production.

While most economies are mixed. Nations typically associated with "socialism" like Sweden and Denmark are mostly capitalist. Nations like Bolivia and Venezuela are the ones that are actually mostly socialist.

It's entirely possible to have a highly redistributive capitalist country, with a strong social safety net. It's also entirely possible to have a socialist country with extreme wealth inequality and a terrible social safety net. It just depends on how things are structured.

The other reply certainly supports this view

That also includes self-described supporters of socialism, who almost always mean something closer to social democracy. They tend to point to places like Scandinavia, who are absolutely capitalist. They just have better social safety nets.

They're misusing the term, but at least they're reasonably consistent about it. The opponents of "socialism" tend to point to places like the Soviet Union as proof that "socialism" cannot work. And when supporters point to the success of Scandinavian-type policies, opponents insist it cannot work because it's socialism.

We could have had some kind of honest discussion about which social safety net policies are worth having. Instead we're stuck in arguments about dictionaries.

It doesn't help that we've been drowning in propaganda that says "capitalism = freedom" and "socialism = oppression" since forever.

Socialism is when the government does things I don't like. It's really not more complicated than that. People stating these things are some of the most ignorant in modern humanity. But they also represent like a third of the population in the US as depressing as that is. They are literally why we cannot have nice things.

What I think is "absolutely insane" is how oblivious of recent history people are. Up until the 1980s half of Europe was socialist, and it is at that time that China started moving away from a socialist economy, too. It was abandoned everywhere.

Not entirely sure what that has to do with what I was saying? Unless you're trying to provide an example of a lack of critical thinking? China is an excellent example, while they have moved to a state managed capitalist market style economy now (one in which you get the best of both worlds, the average person is ground under the wheels of capitalism at the direction of the state), their flavour of socialism was incredibly effective at modernisation. Whether you consider that conceptually good or bad is personal (healthcare, literacy, poverty uplift, etc vs the many negative externalities of industrialisation), but you can't say it wasn't effective.

The point is that they became effective when they abandoned socialism as the economic doctrine. So there is no such thing as "their flavour of socialism". The 20th century showed that socialism does not work and fails dramatically.

As for healthcare, unfortunately that has been a collateral victim of this. Benefits used to be tied to the "work unit" in a very traditional socialist style (soviet, commune, etc) but this disappeared when socialism was abandoned and now either you can pay or you die.

This is just provable false though, China's economic revolution, for better or worse, happened under Mao. Humanitarian crisis were aplently, (but is that really any different from capitalist states, honduras anyone?), but the intended goal of rapid industrilisation and modernisation was successful. I'm not trying to white wash how bad of a humanitarian crisis the great leap forward was, but China is a manufacturing giant today because of the ground work laid down by Mao's reforms. To argue that socialism served no economic purpose is just false.

What?

No, the economy was destroyed at the time of Mao's death and it was the market-oriented reforms that came afterwards that started the economic boom.

HN always manages to produce extra strange posts.

Words in American politics have lost their original meaning. Words in American politics mean whatever the national committee say they mean for that week.

Communism means everyone who opposes Trump.

Freedom means parroting whatever nonsense Trump says today.

Socialism means everyone who rejects the current corporate oligarchs.

> Freedom means parroting whatever nonsense Trump says today.

But even more contradictorily, to them "freedom" means violently eliminating all freedoms (of press, assembly, protest, personal liberties) that don't align with worshipping the current president.

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