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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

In all fairness, the corrupting influence of big money interests from federalist countries does not help here. One can hardly argue that socialist reformers in Central America were the reason those governments failed. Political assassinations driven by the policies of capitalist nations caused those instabilities.

Not trying to argue that Chavez and now Maduro are not demagogues, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water here. No one ever said pure socialism worked, just like pure capitalism is a pipe dream. The world catches it's breath when moderates of both sides of the spectrum are in power.

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Yet another but it wasn't socialism episode. Nationalization of strategic sectors and currency manipulation had nothing to do I guess.

No, it's not that simple. Scandinavia has had a pretty good run with socialism. But Norway does the old college-educated trick of investing 10% of it's oil income. And Sweden has a much more diversified economy. In South and Central America, what we have are dirt poor countries with enormous export income. For sixty years the wealthy of these countries have been siphoning off the export income to make themselves rich at the expense of everyone else. When a charismatic demagogue steps up and offers to make you feel as rich as the countries export bank account suggests you should be, what are you supposed to do? Politely decline and tell them to invest in infrastructure and a rainy day fund?

Socialism in the extreme is a hazard to stable government. But so is capitalism, federalism, militarism, and any other -ism.

Brazil has a wealth of resources --unbelievable, more than Mexico perh but yet they continue to do worse than middling -socialists didn't improve Brazil one bit despite being in power over two decades.

They should look to Chile. A can do country. One which almost went socialist but avoided it and came out doing pretty well for itself.

The problem with those counties is that the whether they go communist or socialist or any dictatorship is that the caudilo mentality permeates everything. Same behavior in the Caucasus region. Mexico has been ravaged by this mentality --their economy was pretty much on par with European countries outside the big five in the early 1900s --but caudiloes happened.

Chile is ruled by their socialist party at the moment. The originator of the modern Chilean Socialist Party, Lagos, actually took the traditional Marxist socialist platform and moderated it to much success. Turns out moderation and not a black and white this OR that platform is more resilient. Who knew?

I think it's helped they are all pretty much centrists who favor free enterprise and don't go about nationalizing domestic or foreign companies --and don't engage in typical caudilo practices much of the southern cone suffers from. Bachelet resisted calls from her coalition to "redistribute" moneys from their copper mining ops to close income differences --something a certain bolivian would do no question for a little income "high" today.

Social welfare is not socialism.

It’s not?

I find it strange how people view socialism in black and white, but not capitalism.

I find it strange how countries with working social policies are real socialism and countries that collapse are not real socialism, despite how socialist or capitalist those working countries are. It makes no sense at all that Venezuela or the USSR is not real socialism but Scandinavian countries with private ownership of the means of production but a big enough tax budget to implement stable welfare are real socialism.

You missed the point

Give me an example of “real” capitalism.

I’d say the Scandinavian model is a pretty happy middle ground.

capitalism is a mode of economy. Any country that employs private ownership of the means of production coupled with market-driven trade of goods and services is capitalist. There is no purity spiral of capitalism unless you want to argue the libertarian angle but then you need to accept the belief that tax is illegitimate, which is not inherent to capitalism.

I can not think of a country that does not have a mix of private and public ownership of production/distribution. What should we refer to those countries as?

government does not equal socialism. Socialism is against private ownership of the means of production - an economy that permits private ownership of the means of production is capitalist. The few industries that are nationalised are not held in common by the people and managed democratically - they're owned by the government who try to manage it the way they think the people would want it. That's what's commonly referred to as state capitalism.

And capitalism is against public ownership of the means of production. Any country that does both, has an economy that is neither purely socialist nor capitalist. I personally would not want to live in a purely capitalist, nor a purely socialist state.

(Sidenote: State capitalism and market socialism are essentially the same thing)

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