Harvard criticises Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher regimes

You're free, because you're very rich. I just hope it lasts. I'm sure you've seen Trading Places.

Thay were part of the communist slave empire,
accepted as such by the commies in the USSR.

Fascists are authoritarian collectivists very much like the commies.
There is not much of a distinction between them.





David

I liked this line. A repartee of Dave's style.

The USSR wasn't Communist either, not after Stalin had a go.

Izzy please read this:
Mao's Great Famine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao's_Great_Famine#Praise

45 million victims, and still today the government refuses to apologise.

America is not heaven, yet she's far better.

No. USSR was the base camp of commies around the world, esp. father of Chinese commies.

Reagan did a great feat to tear down the commie empire.

There was no Communist Empire. Communism was never tried.

I know all about it. Great Britain was at its most equal in the 1970s before Thatcher ruined everything by excessive privatisation. Now we've got a government of the privately educated wealthy elite.

No apologies for Vietnam either.

Yeah, and the 3rd Reich was not nazi, either.
Do u think we shud give them another chance to get it right ?

Don't be silly. Norway's a better example of how things should be done.

The big fight is between fony, artificial equality and the general welfare on one side
and
personal freedom, Individualism and hedonism on the other side.

The first side wants to use government as a weapon
to rob and subjugate the financially successful.

I am for Individual freedom and I don't give a damn
about the general welfare.

Everyone is free to contribute as much as he chooses to the general welfare.
I prefer to do it on an INDIVIDUAL basis. That 's fun.

Freedom is more important than life.
From its inception, America was crafted to be a free country,
by crippling the jurisdiction of government in the Bill of Rights.





David

Live off oil exports?

No true Scotsman was ever a Communist...

The Russian Bolsheviks called themselves socialists during their revolution, and the Soviets called themselves socialists during their reign. So it's all well and good to say that you can't judge "real" communism or socialism harshly because we've never experienced them, but the world's experience under regimes calling themselves socialist or communist has been pretty bleak.

Like the Socialist government of Chile that was deposed by a coup? What about Atlee's Socialist government that gave us the NHS/

Those are definitely better examples of successes than Norway.

But in Chile's case, socialism never had the chance to turn bad, because the government was deposed. In Atlee's case, I've heard that he put in place a number of reforms which stuck and a number of others that the government after his undid. (I don't know British history that well, and my info comes from a passing remark in a 12th grade comparative government class.) If that's true, Britain may have lucked out and gotten just enough socialism to help it along and not enough to turn it into an oppressive dictatorship.

Then again, the difference between those success stories and the USSR may be just the difference between socialists who come to power democratically, and socialists who come power through revolution.

That's the point, America wasn't prepared to let Socialism succeed, so they organised a coup.

The ordinary peasant was far better off under Castro than Batista, yet the embargo, which only a handful of countries observe, is still used to collectively punish an entire people.

We had our most equal society in the 1970s before the Tories stole our utilities and rail network and sold them at a knock down price to their chums in the city.

Yes, there was the de facto commie empire!
They were trying communism and ended in catastrophe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#cite_note-dikotterxii-5

Of course! We were in the middle of the 3rd World War.
We needed to fight it as earnestly as the 2nd World War.
Freedom (worldwide) was at stake, as the commie world empire
sought to metastasize, to extinguish Individualism, hedonism and liberty.

Our efforts prevailed. Freedom won. Slavery lost.
Glory to Ronald Reagan!





David

You weren't at war with democratic Chile. That was somewhere where freedom was cushed under a fascist jackboot, and thousands of innocents were slaughtered. Every bit as bad as worst Communist regimes.