Id like to know your opinions on this, but also if you can find any reliable sources can you let me know|||Yes, countries like Swedan, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and France are all doing very well. Swedan is especially doing well. What other countries are socialist that are not European. Cuba is a communist dictatorship so that rules out Cuba as a socialist country. Israel is pretty socialist and it is doing better than it has in decades past.|||Sweden was going bankrupt until they initiated pro-capitalist governmental policies. This is always the case. I wish you folks would do your homework (and learn how to spell Sweden).
Report Abuse
|||Socialism is a failure in other nations like France, where the unemployment and suicide rates are double that of the U.S. This suicide rate is typical of other Socialist nations. Whereas capitalism in the U.S. creates more wealth and higher quality of life|||Socialist Democracies seem to work pretty well in some of the Scandinavian countries.|||Socialism lulls people into a sense of lethargy. They do enough to get by, but their nations will never advance.|||The health of the economy of a country is related to multiple factors. There are very few countries where pure socialism exist and whose economies could be evaluated purely on the basis of that system. Western european countries are far from being socialistic.
Some countries in Latino America have started to experiment with socialistic ideas and China has something they called market socialism or "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Time will tell.
A country like North Korea is an economic mess but so is Haiti and the Dominican Republic.|||Socialism and communism require extreme controls from the top down, and these forms of government have resulted in over a billion murders in human history.
They do not work in diverse populations.|||There are no countries practicing real socialism. Socialism is government by the working class which promotes the interests of society over those of capital. Real socialism requires a global revolution of the working class since the capitalist nations will attempt to undermine socialism with sanctions and military efforts. Europe is a capitalist society.
The Soviet Union and China were not socialist either, rather they were Stalinist dictatorships, as is Cuba and North Korea. Venezuela and Chavez is Bonapartism rather than socialist. Stalin was the counter-revolution. In fact, it was Stalin who had Trotsky and the other leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution imprisoned and executed. Trotsky wrote extensively on this topic in The Revolution Betrayed which is available in its entirety on the Internet.
A good source of daily socialist commentary can be found on the World Socialist Web Site at www.wsws.org|||I think the only way to find out is go live there awhile.|||Socialism as a political system is where government employees forcibly take property "from each according to his ability" and redistribute it "to each according to his need." The government employees have total discretion in deciding how much to take and to whom it should be redistributed. Sometimes these God-like government employees are democratically elected and sometimes they are dictators. Either way, an elite, small group makes critical life decisions for the rest of the population.
As to whether socialism "works" one must first define whether the justification for such a coercive system of redistribution is utilitarian or moral.
The utilitarian justification for socialism is that it creates greater economic prosperity for the greatest number of people, even though it reduces the prosperity of the minority of people whose property is seized and redistributed.
The moral justification for socialism is that it is more "fair," or more "just," even though it may make everyone less well off than they would otherwise be.
The advocates of socialism usually switch between the utilitarian and moral justifications depending on the circumstances. In a poor socialist country like Cuba, the moral argument is used to prove that socialism is "working." In better off countries like Sweden, the utilitarian argument is used.
Your question most likely is asking if socialism is working in the utilitarian sense, meaning does the socialist system actually create more wealth for more citizens than a pure free market, low-tax economy. The answer is probably not. It is not enough to show for example that Sweden is doing better than some other country that is less socialistic. The question is all other things being equal, would most Swedes be even better off than they are now with less Socialism. This is a difficult question to answer with direct proof, because it requires speculation about what Sweden would be like without socialism. However, past experience has shown that overall people do better under conditions of freedom and private property than they do under coercive, confiscatory systems like socialism.
Of course, some people would argue that this does not matter because socialism is "social justice" and hence more fair. But this is simply a switch from the utilitarian to the moral argument when it becomes clear that the utilitarian argument is being lost.
Therefore, to finally answer the question, I would say that socialism works in the utilitarian sense for the government elite and their favored contractors who get to play God and take a generous cut from the redistribution of property from the haves to the have nots. For all other citizens, it is a net loss, even for the poorest citizens who receive some of the redistributed funds because they are still more likely worse off, even with the extra funds, than they would be in a free market economy.
Either way, the socialist system seems immoral in that it permits a few elite people, who are generally no smarter or better than the rest, to play God and seize property from those who earned it and to pass it out to whomever they please. It does not seem to matter whether these confiscators are elected democratically or not, because during their term of office, they are allowed to play God with other peoples' lives and property.
Because of these issues, there is actually no pure Socialist nation. Every nation seems to want to have a little bit of socialism, which proves the point that socialism is a net negative. Because if socialism was a net plus, why not adopt it 100%?|||To get people to perform to their peak there has to something in it for them. Socialism creates dependents.|||Do a search on their tax burdens, that will give you a good indication.
No comments:
Post a Comment