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Comment by supermetroid | Hacker News Reader

Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.

I disagree completely. Implementing socialism in disenfranchised states is by far a more streamlined process than implementing any brand of capitalism. What killed "hundreds of millions of people" was the coupling of fragile citizenries with malicious and self-serving leaders, not the establishment of socialism. I see correlation, but no causation, and I find hasty dismissal of socialism as the "disproved and damned" counterpart of capitalism as completely flawed--especially in a society where the two have been working together (I'd say successfully) for quite some time.

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This is the crux. Socialism/communism as implemented bears little resemblance to the utopian vision, instead of utopia the result is human tragedy on a grand scale. This has happened so many times that it's unlikely to be mere accidental correlation (Stalinist USSR, communist Eastern Europe, China under Mao, North Korea, Cuba under Castro, Myanmar under the Junta, etc.)

And yet, because the vision and practice differ so much this provides a ready excuse for every new generation of socialist utopians to put forward the theory that those historical examples were not really, truly faithful implementations of socialism/communism. Rather than the more realistic theory that utopian socialism is impractical and unstable, and when attempted to be implemented it inherently degrades into the totalitarian examples we've seen so many times from history.

My contention is only that this line of reasoning is dangerous and harmful, and that socialist ideas deserve far more skepticism in public debate than they typically receive.

[X] as implemented vs [X] as utopian vision

This is a powerful idea. But to cut to the chase:

How does [X] account for human nature?

The reigning tag-team champions of Democracy and Capitalism take human nature into account. They are both designed around the idea that people are self-interested. They do not function in spite of selfishness and greed. They function with it.

Unfortunately, no system is perfect, and any system can be gamed. Today, we see that this is true for Democracy and Capitalism as well.

Capitalism also bears little resemblance to its utopian vision. Perhaps the problem is following these as ideology instead of simply seeing these "models" as tools. National Parks and vast stores of natural resource leverage a communist model, Health insurance (really any insurance) leverage a social model, Growth, speculative enterprise leverage capital models. I see no reason why we cannot choose the right tools for each job.

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