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Comment by dantheman | Hacker News Reader

I'll take the vast improvement of living standards under capitalism over those found in socialist countries.

Are you arguing that the rapid decline in poverty in China due to capitalism is a bad thing?

I'd like to add that there are different flavours of both capitalism and socialism. The kind of disaster capitalism practiced in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries in the 90s certainly didn't lead to an improvement of living standards for quite a long time, if even. China also presents a case of state capitalism where companies are strictly controlled by the government as evidenced by the recent set of regulations published a few weeks ago and many companies are owned by the children of party members.

I'd argue that what we see in terms of living standards in ostensibly socialist countries is much more due to corruption of office, which happens here too, vs the way that profit is shared among a business. Three of my city councilmembers have been indicted by the FBI for corruption in the last three years. Luckily in the U.S. the levers of power are pulled by more people dispersed across a larger bureaucracy, so corruption of office can only affect so many things, vs somewhere like PRNK or KSA where there is absolute rule.

There are plenty of businesses that run on a more socialist model even within capitalist countries. They are owner operated and share profit amongst the cooperative, are often successful and have motivated employees who work longer tenures than your average employee at a company where they don't see any share of the profit for their hard work.

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