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Comment by jgamman | Hacker News Reader

NZ runs a proportional representation election system and since we had our election 2 months ago it would seem that 52% of NZers have chosen to temper the neoliberal flights of fancy.

Good? Bad? I dunno but you're in 'culture' territory here so be careful with your comments - NZers live on a giant farm and we have hungry kids underperforming in schools/employment and our beautiful rivers chock full of literal crap. Lot's of Kiwis are very unhappy about _any_ system that thinks this is an acceptable tradeoff for unevenly distributed $$.

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> since we had our election 2 months ago it would seem that 52% of NZers have chosen to temper the neoliberal flights of fancy.

And? 56% of Venezuelans voted for Hugo Chavez.

The only "flight of fancy" here is that Marxism can somehow ever be made to work. One would think that a hundred million dead bodies piled up over the last century would be enough to constitute persuasive evidence, but True Believers gonna believe, I guess.

Who's going Marxist? New Zealand is recovering from neoliberalism, and Ardern is signalling a shift back towards our social democracy that has existed since the 1930s.

Settle down with the extremes.

"Neoliberal" is a meaningless term of abuse. In practice, it just means "not a communist".

Regarding the "hundred million" thing...

http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

I'm old enough to remember when Chomsky was still defending Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe, so no.

Try this instead.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/

How about all the bodies that piled up in defense of capital and capitalism? It seems worthwhile to tell both sides of the story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Banana_ma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

There's a lot more where that came from.

> How about all the bodies that piled up in defense of capital and capitalism?

That's not a hundred million. Not by orders of magnitude.

There is no "other side of the story" here.

The point is blaming “capitalism” is throwing out the baby with the bath water. Look at Scandinavia for capitalist societies with a high level of social support and environmental protections. And on the other hand look at true socialist societies like Cuba and Venezuela where hunger and pollution still exists.

Let's maybe also consider the role of e.g. US interference and sanctions in your two examples, before we decide capitalism good, socialism bad.

The problem is there are too few socialist societies left because they’ve all failed. My parents lived through one (Poland) which had all the same shortages and pollutions. It’s the same story anywhere socialism has been tried in practice.

"Let's maybe also consider the role of e.g. US interference and sanctions in your two examples"

Or let's maybe not.

Cuba could, and did, trade with essentially every other nation on the planet, so blaming "U.S. sanctions" is not a realistic excuse for their failure.

The problem is that free-market fundamentalists look at even the Scandinavian countries and see nothing but COMMUNISM because in their minds, much like Thatcher, There Is No Alternative to neoliberalism.

I'm a 'free-market' type that believes in prioritizing liberty, and I do not see Scandinavian countries as communist. I just see them as small to medium sized states (wrt a given state within the USA), where implementing such policies is more viable. Only Sweden has double-digit millions, while the USA has ~310M. Scale is an important consideration, and the variety of view points/ lifestyles is greater among such a large population.

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