Latest experiment is socialism ending the same as always...

Another sad, 'old story' thing I'm seeing watching the news footage. The starving masses are all clad in T-shirts and shorts, throwing rocks at government troops armored up and carrying assault weapons, and trying not to get run over. Guys like Maduro only last as long as they do when his goons are the only ones with weapons.

America is currently the only country on Earth (except, ironically, a fair amount of Middle Eastern countries) where the citizens could show up en masse, armed, and shoot back instead of throwing rocks.

Stop and think about that for a minute. Really.

The only way it will change is if they get the supreme court, imo.

Yet you have the worlds' largest military and developed worlds' least effective healthcare system. Perhaps redressing that balance wouldn't be such a terrible thing, especially as death rates to disease remain far higher than to foreign invaders.

Which happens in many (if not most) forms of socialism.

You're trying to reduce concepts which have evolved over decades, if not centuries, to a single sentence and then pointing out when real world examples inevitably don't fit the artificially limited criteria which you interpreted.

If a system is 99% capitalist and 1% socialist it's a hybrid. Actually I'd go further and say that since there are no pure examples (never have been and I'd wager never could be) it's just a system, no other label required.

Bear in mind many forms of socialism developed down the years are actually mutually interdependent with a market such as the one you describe, but that's inconvenient to your selective interpretation of a selected definition.

Anything, it's cash deposited into your bank account.

The exception is people on cashless welfare card, a scheme which currently has a few thousand people in a national trial the current government has been running for while (but which will likely end up pulled back by the next government). Under that scheme 80% of someones welfare payments are quarantined and put on a debit card which can only be used at white-listed retailers (although the system doesn't track what is bought there).

Except a fair amount of Middle Eastern countries......I'm thinking about it.

Nope, not really a good thing on balance.

Amazing how you have to keep going back to Venezuala to make your point, yet you see nothing wrong with acknowledging the largely capitalist (and armed) countries of the middle east, despite their representing the most volatile region on the planet and being in no small part characterised by dictatorships, human rights abuses which go off the charts and incessant civil wars.

That's despite being the focal point for the worlds' most valuable free market commodity.

How about we look at Africa? Lots of capitalist countries, lots of diamond and gold reserves, lots of armed citizens. Again, not exactly working out too well. Where would you rather be right now, Venezuala or Somalia?

Which means in turn taxed transactions. A point conservatives often fail to consider.

If it happens at all in socialism, it is not the predominant mode of exchange. If it is the predominant mode of exchange, the system isn't socialist.

Words have meanings.

All of the countries I claim are capitalist are characterized by economic systems consisting mainly of private entrepreneurs with private capital seeking profit by offering products in a competitive free market. They are not characterized by state ownership or control of the means of production.

This is the "Anything that is 99% pure is 100% impure" argument and I totally reject it. Since you will find that every economic system throughout history has had some private and public elements, you're left either (1) concluding that nothing but "hybrid" systems have ever existed and are indistinguishable, or (2) allowing comparisons based on their constituent parts, such as private and public elements. (1) is absurd, and (2) gets you right back to evaluation of the relative contributions of private and public producers.

If an economic system is predominantly characterized by enterpreneurs owning private capital seeking profit in a competitive free market, the economy is capitalist.

If you consider a system where 95% of economic output is privately produced and 5% publicly produced to be indistinguishable from one where 95% of output is public and 5% is private, then your unwillingness to label is indicative of an inability to distinguish between two systems with vastly different structures, incentives, outcomes, etc.

Again, if the means of production are predominantly privately owned, it's capitalism.

America is certainly on top, but got a citation for the rest of that sentence?



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

In a medieval country where the monarch owned most of the productive land and essentially acted as a landlord for farmers was that capitalist?

As the monarch was the state and owned all the capital, it was closer to socialism.

Then I suggest you do some homework about what socialism is or isn't and the various forms which have existed down the years. You're taking a single sentence definition arbitrarily assigned by a dictionary used in an education system which is not only sub par but explicitly biased and claiming that represents the sum total of history on a subject.

So you've said. Doesn't mean they have the meanings you think they do.

An awful lot of the worlds' most prominent economists would disagree with you, which we've covered before, including many who helped shape and define the concepts we are discussing.

No, it's an acknowledgement of complexity and nuance which is done a disservice by reductionism for the sake of simplicity.

Which would make Venezuala a capitalist country then?

Okay, so your argument is that since we're taxing the taxpayer money being paid out to the needy, it's all okay. Got it.

How about Afghanistan and Iraq where we've faced a rifle (or IED) behind every blade of grass? (Okay, or maybe behind every grain of sand.) Really?

Except that isn't what you said.

You said that the US and a fair amount of Middle Eastern countries are the only place where that could happen (also Afghanistan technically isn't a Middle Eastern country, but that's a pedantic point).

Well, several of those things are not true, and others have been precipitated by the United States decades-long attempts at subversion.
But if change is needed then Venezuelans should be the ones to decide on that, not the odious blood-soaked criminals such as John Bolton who are lining up behind this.

Let's not pretend that freedom or democracy are in any way part of the motiviation for wanting to overthrow the Venezeulan government when unconditional support is lent to regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere without raising so much as a peep from yourself or others baying for action here. The actual problem with Venezuela - as it is with Iran and Cuba - is that it is independent and does not take orders from Washington.

No, im making the point that many advocates of capitalism nonetheless overlook the economic impact of limiting the circulation of currency.

This isn't really an opinion, it's the basis of most economic models that dynamism is good.

And that strikes you as a dedirable state of affairs? Has it improved quality of life? Did it prevent Saddam becoming a tyrant?

What it did in fact do was lead to the formation of ISIS, with help from some atrociously incompetent decisions by the administrators of the US occupation.

Isis are (or were) arguably the most right wing "state" in the world, plenty of guns, religeous influence, hawkish policies and unregulated trade to boot. Pretty big on limiting movement at borders too funnily enough.

Not sure whether the US saw them as a threat to world peace or a rival.....

It was neither really. It was an entirely different system altogether and arguably the nature of monarchies is about as monolithic as capitalism and socialism, ie not at all.

They would be much better off if they did.

The U.S. military is not designed to deal with any kind of foreign invaders. And "least effective" means little as the differences between the "most" and "least" in the developed world are marginal at best.

Why?

I think you might be missing the point here, @RickDeckard isn't saying they are struggling without the US' guidance, but rather the US has a distinct habit of undermining countries which don't play ball and then pointing to them as instances of failure.

You know the migrant problem on your southern border? Those people are largely fleeing from countries with ruling classes that do take orders from Washington.

That's generally the accepted purpose for a military, hence the term "national defense" - unless, of course, you are engaging in power projection.

Of course that's exactly what the US does and it's a euphemism for imperialism. Hence the question, why exactly should the US be the dominant power in a remote part of the world (in this case the far East) where others have far more citizens and interests unless it is a case of imperialism?

I get we are crossing topics between threads here but, meh.

I promise you the region doesn't need the US there any more than the North Sea desperately requires a Russian fleet to maintain peace off the coast of Scotland. If China are the dominant power in the region , so be it. You won't see me losing any sleep over it. Yes China have been bombastic in their posturing towards Taiwan in the past few decades, but they are being allegedly "kept in check" by a power which has launched numerous actual invasions in that period, at least one of which was illegal.

So, just to be clear, what exactly is the US military designed to do again?

As for healthcare, I'm going to switch very briefly here from simply posting as a member to commenting as a healthcare professional who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, a professional who actually has some insight into the clinical and social impacts of competing healthcare systems.

So here goes, in my professional opinion.

US healthcare sucks donkey balls.

Got it?

It's shit.

Mexico takes orders from Washington? Tell me which Latin American countries take orders from Washington now a days?

The U.S. has interests around the world. A huge amount of the worlds tanker traffic passes through the South China Sea for example. It has close allies in that region such as Philippines. And it has a large number of citizens living and working in that area. And if you are talking about the Vietnam War as an "illegal invasion", the United States never invaded North Vietnam. North Vietnam did invade and conquer South Vietnam which the U.S. had treaty obligations to defend.

As a "professional" who has "some insight" into the clinical and social impacts of competing healthcare systems perhaps you're too close to the issue to see things clearly. A common problem.

Those people are coming from places like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, all firmly in the pocket of the US.
People there did try to pursue an alternative path in the 1980's of course, but were ruthlessly crushed. Plus ça change.

And China has more interests, such as their homeland and over a billion citizens, not to mention pretty much their entire infrastructure. So again, why should the US be the dominant power in the region?

Simply saying "but we have interests there" doesn't cut the mustard. I'm not asking why the US shouldn't protect those interests, I'm asking why the US should do so in such overwhelming force that it outguns the countries which actually inhabit the region. That's not protecting ones' interests, that's imperialism. We "protected our interests" all over the world, in India, in the Americas, in the Carribean, in Africa. We called it bringing peace, prosperity and civilisation too, but at least we used the word "Empire".

Let me put this another way, China has nationals living on US soil and companies trading there, it has interests on the US mainland. Does it follow that the US government should be ok with them placing an inordinately large fleet within a matter of hundreds of miles of the US mainland, one powerful enough to overwhelm the defences in place? How would it look and feel if the roles were reversed and what would the US response be?

I'm betting it would be rather more alarmist than a progressive build up of economic and military capabilities over the course of several decades. In fact I'm betting it would very quickly become an international incident with lots of posturing and threats of nuclear retaliation.

And no, I wasn't talking about Vietnam, although frankly they have done rather better without you than they might have been expected to if you'd have won. In fact they are doing rather well as a by and large heavily socialist economy which is booming.

As for healthcare, go ahead then, make your case for why it's up to par with the rest of the developed world.