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Comment by RiderOfGiraffes | Hacker News Reader

The perception, rightly or wrongly, in the rest of the world is that in the USA people go "OMG !!! IT'S SOCIALISM !!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!"

Nowhere else have I come across people who dismiss ideas by saying - Oh, that's Socialism - and seem to think that that's enough.

Game Theory says that mixed strategies are almost always (in the technical sense) the best, so the instant dismissal of ideas simply being they have a flavor of socialism seems stupid, and yet it seems that it's the instant reaction of many, many people in the USA.

I could be wrong, it might not be the case, and it's interesting to see that the perception from outside the USA might be wrong.

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What you'll find if you get into more detailed discussion with public-utility internet before dropping the socialism bomb is that they're usually advocating a hybrid model: municipality builds out the pipes and then isps compete on actually providing internet service.

You're right about the loudmouths here, but it'd be a mistake to let your sense of public sentiment be overly colored just by volume.

Calling something socialism here is a pretty good debate hack, like calling someone racist or anti-semitic or whatnot; it's enough of a social taboo that the so-accused will usually feel compelled to defend themselves against it, thereby derailing the original course of discussion...this is a good strategy for winning unrefereed debates.

Really? I just laugh when I hear someone talk about Socialism in the US. We have been Socialist for years. Ever drive a car on the road? Did you buy the road? Did you pay a company for a subscription to the road network?

No, it's all paid for by the government. That, my friend, is Socialism. And it's a good thing.

(Actually, it's a bad thing; if people had to pay the full cost of using the road network, it would be a lot easier to get people to take public transportation. But I am just saying it's clear that Americans have nothing against Free Stuff From The Government, even if that Free Stuff is paid for with tax dollars.)

Actually, most of us do pay for access to the roads, in the form of vehicle registrations, driver's licenses, and tolls. On average, I pay about $600-$700 every year just to drive on the public roads.

The fact that the roads are owned by state and local governments does not inherently make them socialist.

The perception, rightly or wrongly, in the rest of the world is that in the USA people go "OMG !!! IT'S SOCIALISM !!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!"

This is true, but only because most of the people decrying "socialism" don't understand that many of the things they support are also socialist. Both the right and the left are already fairly socialist in the US; Norman Thomas, who ran for US President on the Socialist Party ticket a bunch of times in the early 20th Century, was asked why he wasn't running again at one point and replied that the Republicans had embraced all his major platform points, and the Democrats were already beyond that, so he'd accomplished much of what he'd set out to do. I can't find this in a minute of googling, so maybe it's apocryphal.

In any case, socialists on the right were discredited effectively everywhere by WWII, and in the US, socialists on the left were discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990 and/or the (perceived?) near-collapse of Britain in the 1970s.

In fact you are wrong socialism can never work because it doesn't have proper price signals. There's an excellent paper: Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth that details this problem from the 30s.

Also, it is very hard to have a mixed plan because eventually one will exploit the other. Game theory is great and all, but most of the time I don't think it applies to multiple trials -- which is what the real world is.

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