Socialism, Should we give it another try?

"free enterprise socialism"
is an oxymoron , once you have free enterprise , and free elections , it is no longer socilism, by my definition . a rose by any other name , USA defines it's self as a capitalist nation , yet dose take part of the peoples money to pay for social programs. there is no 100% socilist or capitalist country . It is a matter of degree , most of the money should , in my opinion remain in the pockets of the privet citizens , if a government follows that policy , it leans toward capitalism , no matter what you choose to call it . History has taught us that socilism is a very slippery slope , as cold as it may sound , money is power , i'd rather have most of that money in the hands of the people than the government.

BYW i have just been wondering , dose most of Europe really hate Americans as much as they seem to on TV , i don't mean to start a whole new debate , it's an innocent question?

Norway has been blessed for the last two decades with enormous income from the North Sea oil fields. This has made the difference in prevailing living standards there - not the high tax, social welfare policies of its government. Thirty years ago Stavanger was a pleasant, but slightly rundown, picturesque little town. What a difference the oil money has made!

It is true that the Scandanavian countries generally have succeeded in developing successful social welfare programs that have not yet choked off economic activity. However I doubt they are a useful model for the rest of the developed world. They are very homogenious societies that have worked hard to exclude foreign cultural influences. Immigration policies in Sweden and Norway are highly restrictive, even by European standards. Greenhouse flowers.

Einherjar, yes. Those policies are which i would cosider those socialist policies and which make a country not socialist in terms of completely government run, but high government involvement, progressive tax and high spending on healthcare and education. I know it is a vague and not all encompassing definiton, but it is just how i picture it.

It is a common misconception , that the extreme right wing control american politics . what is really going on , in my opinion , is that the center of our country feels that the left wing has gotten out of control , so we are voting for the right inorder to bring things back into balance.

to Answer "how much de we seem to hate the US on TV" . well , i do realise that the most extreme actions always make the front page , So if you look to the most extream antiamerican protest and statements comeing from Europe , that is almost all that we see right now . It is important that both sides know what the center is thinking , something the world media ignores allot of the time . looking at the common ground between nations is what makes peace possible , not looking at extremist on either side.

I'm one of those big on distinguishing socialism from communism. Socialists are indeed typically for free elections, for example (in re: to a post just above). But since any discussion of socialism with Americans tends to often get to be about communism, instead, I just found this quote that I thought represents communism perfectly ... thought I'd post it here ...

Communism is a social order where people are organised in a number of communities, "communes", with territorial borders drawn between communities. These communities are free to trade with each other. Within each community work and benefits are distributed according to the "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" principle.

Socialism is used both of the governmental structure of the USSR and the economic policies of the USSR. This regime styled itself socialist, and considered itself a prelude to a communist social order. Socialism is also used by some to describe policies aimed at wealth redistribution, and improving workingconditions. It is used by others to describe govenmental social security systems, and by others yet again to describe high governmental spending in areas such as of healthcare and education.

I gave up pinning down the definition of socialism a long time ago, and have instead taken to parroting "how do you define socialism?" whenever the topic comes up.

Perhaps Einherjar is making a distinction here without a difference. Apart from the government-controlled petroleum industry, Norway is a capitalist country, but with substantial social welfare programs and high taxation after the Scandinavian model (for all I know the oil revenues or income from the petroleum fund may significantly reduce the level of taxation relative to Sweden and Denmark.} Moreover I believe the government has been divesting itself of industrial properties in an effort to grow the private sector of the economy.

The Petroleum Fund which last year had assets equal to about 50% of one year's GDP will, as Einherjar noted, reduce the impact of the lost oil revenues when that resource is depleted in a couple of decades. Currently the GDP per capita in Norway is about equal to that in the United States, though some sources in subjectively rating the overall average quality of life rank Norway as a leader in the world. .Standards here in the USA are more variable, but overall I would prefer a Month in Monterey California to one in (say) Bergen, though I would prefer Bergen to (say) Cleveland.

The relatively generous social welfare systems that prevail throughout most of Western Europe, generally face serious and immediate financial and demographic problems due to declining working age populations, inflexible labor markets, and stagnant economies.

Relative to their European neighbors, the Scandinavian countries appear to have far less of these problems, although the reasons for this are not clear to me. Norway has a decidedly younger population and a higher birth rate than Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy - that may explain some of Norway's advantage.

The United States has a population that is younger than Norway's by about the same margin as Norway's relative to the European average - the same applies to birth rates. On a per capita basis the United States has more than three times the rate of legal immigration as Norway and substantial illegal immigration in addition. Our social benefits are less generous, our labor markets much more flexible, and our GDP growth rate is several times that of all the major Western European nations, Norway included.

The conclusion here is that a comparison between the United States and Norway does not demonstrate anything about Socialism, because neither country is Socialist.

Moreover I do not see in all this a convincing basis on which to conclude even that the generous social welfare programs, inflexible labor markets, and higher taxes that prevail in Europe generally and in Norway in particular, are necessarily a superior way to produce and distribute wealth. I'm not claiming that our system is necessarily better - only that we have evaluated and chosen the tradeoffs differently. The overall differences between Norway and the U.S.are very small compared to others that exist in the world.

Though I can't prove it, I strongly suspect the relative lack of immigration has indeed been a factor in the maintenance of stable social contracts in the Scandinavian countries. This and the reduced initial burden on social welfare systems could well be significant factors in their relative success with their welfare systems.

Overall I must note that from Russia to Eastern Europe, to post-colonial Africa, India, China, and many other places, the economic (and social) performance of Socialist systems have been so uniformly bad that it is truly remarkable that anyone would seriously consider even another look at it. "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" was the cynical joke in the USSR. I think that says it all.

Based on your description, I believe our Social Security System is funded similarly to that in Sweden. Our relatively open immigration practices have admitted large numbers of people who immediately claim benefits, long before they have paid in to the system - hence "initial burden". (We are now becoming stricter in controlling immigration, however, compared to most developed countries our borders are open.)

As a result [of being diverse and individualistic] we have chosen different approaches to many of these social and economic questions. It is worth remembering that the United States is largely the creation of Europeans who fled Europe seeking an alternative to their own history. The residue of that state of mind still lives here. For all of it we are a good deal more creative, adventurous and youthful both in spirit and age (4 years) than Europeans. That has both good and bad effects, but overall we have not done badly at all.

I can think of very little that was good about the USSR. Their science was, except for metallurgy and a few areas of mathematics, quite inferior, and even their military technology was quite substandard - often brilliant in conception, but always shoddy in execution. Their submarines had extremely high power densities, and were very fast, but they broke down frequently and we could hear them hundreds of kilometers away. When we finally got our hands on a MIG-25 we were intensely interested to find how they had packed so much engine thrust and power in an airframe of that size and capable of such speed. We found that the service life of the engine was about 20 hours!! (We considered 20,000 hours a practical minimum.)

I tend to want to lable people and movements what they lable themselves.

Arguments over definitions are useless, and I will adapt to whichever terminology is preffered by those with whom I am discussing.

The measures you propose for education would make the state the effective parent of all children. This is not particularly new. Sparta tried it and Plato advocated it. Neither was the highest achievement of classical Greece. Mankind is not perfectible. Those who undertake to try this end up as tyrants.

Throughout most of Europe and most of the twentieth century, that has meant that "communists" - ie, those who organised in and voted for Communist parties - were those who were loyal to the Soviet Union and the Soviet model. ...