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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

> Socialism makes every other person a potential enemy and a potential victim. Resources are scarce. People come to hate one another.

You're taking a look at countries that have implemented 'socialism' and ended up with what amounts to dictatorships. Do you really think that Communism as envisioned by Karl Marx included someone like Stalin, or the corrupt officials that inhabited governments in the Eastern Bloc?

For all of the rhetoric that the far-right sling around in the US about the evils of Socialism, even they have Socialist policies. The government regulates, picks winners, keeps companies afloat that are 'too big to fail,' Social Security and other welfare programs, etc.

Don't confuse situations where neighbors reports other neighbors who then 'disappear' as having anything to do with Communism or Socialism (or than that they have historically resided together).

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Do you think that the life, as envisioned by children, who want to eat only ice cream when they grow up, includes scurvy, diabetes and other effects of such a diet?

My point is that if you try to create a socialist country, but end up with a dictatorship, then you have a dictatorship, not a socialist government. Let's call things by their real names instead of trying to associate secret police and paranoia with the terms "Socialism" and "Communism."

Dictatorship is a form of government[1]. Socialism is an economic system[2]. One does not exclude another. The history shows, though, they come together alarmingly often.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

>Do you think that the life, as envisioned by children, who want to eat only ice cream when they grow up, includes scurvy, diabetes and other effects of such a diet?

Do you think that people are automata, and any attempt to build a system with X attributes necesarrily also has Y attributes, in the automatic way that eating only sugar leads to diabetes?

Just because there was an attempt to build X (socialism for example), under specific circumstances (e.g less technologically and politically advanced countries such as Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia), under specific forces (20th century colonialism, WWII, cold war etc), and with specific people at the helm influencing things all around (Stalin and Mao basically), doesn't mean any attempt to build X in different circumstance will end up the same.

Yes they will. The premise is flawed. Socialism (US term) or social-democracy (Euro term) can work in a democratic society but communism is flawed from the start.

Putting everything in one communal basket and expecting people to behave is a recipe for disaster. Don't make a system which works only when people do not make mistakes or are only driven by their purest feelings.

>Yes they will. The premise is flawed.

[Citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

So your response is to ban ice-cream forever and eat nothing but salads instead?

Because, you know, that's the analogous response to banning all socialism and social-democracy forever just because the Soviet Union didn't turn out well.

Karl Marx should have envisioned that someone like Stalin might exist in the future and will take over the power, otherwise his perfect Communism system is only applicable to perfect people.

Perhaps it is also not applicable to geopolitical co-existance with imperialist countries like Nazi Germany and the USA?

Communism is bad in practice, but it's also bad in theory. It's not like if people were more moral, or more rational, or if we had the government run by a smart computer, communism would be possible. Setting that aside, there's also no reason to prefer communism over a free market, or pretty much anything.

tl;dr don't grant it moral credit.

Regulation and Keynesian policies are not socialism.

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