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[Sergarr]

USA is more corrupt than Europe (and Russia IS an European country, like it or not)? Look who's talking, Sergarr.... pfft.

Don't mistake partianship for corruption though. The Republicans are terrible in general however, so, there's that.

It's not particularly controversial, most of European countries are ruled by, more or less, reasonable people, while America has always had about half of its politicians (mostly from the South of USA) be bugfuck-crazy-what-the-fuck corrupt tier.

[Reelya]

I think calling government run healthcare "capitalist medicine" because it's more efficient is in fact a cop-out. The fact is, from whatever raft of causes, China has much better health outcomes since 1950 than India. It's not just healthcare it's the aggregate result of all the things they did compared to India. You can't really put deaths at the feet of socialism then label lowe rates of death in socialist nations as being nothing to do with socialism. It's not a consistent argument.

For every North Korea or Russia you have a China or Cuba, who have very low rates of infant mortality and high life expectancies. Saying Socialism causes famine is all well and good, but then you have to explain those fairly hardline socialist nations which have notably good health outcomes, despite 57 years of economic blockade in Cuba's case.

Cuba's infant mortality and life expectancy rival the wealthiest developed nations in the world. But they shouldn't be so good. The most fair comparision would be against similar-sized nations in the Carribbean, e.g. Dominican Republic / Haiti.

Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti are the three most populated nations in the Carribbean, with about 10-11 million people each. When talking about whether Cuba succeeded or not, those are the two relative comparisons. Cuba's expected trajectory should have been in that vicinity.

Haiti is a complete basket case, so we could count them as a fail of market economy in delivering a good life. But let's discount that for the sake of argument and compare health outcomes in Dominican Republic (often lauded as a success story) vs Cuba. Dominican republic has infant mortality of 25 / 1000, compared to 4.7 / 1000 in Cuba. The free market kills 2% of all Dominican babies compared to your chances of survival in Cuba. And that's not even taking into account that Dominican Republic has much more access to export markets than Cuba, which has been under a blockade since 1960. How would Cuba be if they were not artificially blockaded?

[Sergarr]

I think calling government run healthcare "capitalist medicine" because it's more efficient is in fact a cop-out.

It's not when almost every first-world capitalist nation has one. USA is really the big exception here.

The fact is, from whatever raft of causes, China has much better health outcomes since 1950 than India. It's not just healthcare it's the aggregate result of all the things they did compared to India. You can't really put deaths at the feet of socialism then label lowe rates of death in socialist nations as being nothing to do with socialism. It's not a consistent argument.

For every North Korea or Russia you have a China or Cuba, who have very low rates of infant mortality and high life expectancies. Saying Socialism causes famine is all well and good, but then you have to explain those fairly hardline socialist nations which have notably good health outcomes, despite 57 years of economic blockade in Cuba's case.

Cuba's infant mortality and life expectancy rival the wealthiest developed nations in the world. But they shouldn't be so good. The most fair comparision would be against similar-sized nations in the Carribbean, e.g. Dominican Republic / Haiti.

Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti are the three most populated nations in the Carribbean, with about 10-11 million people each. When talking about whether Cuba succeeded or not, those are the two relative comparisons. Cuba's expected trajectory should have been in that vicinity.

Haiti is a complete basket case, so we could count them as a fail of market economy in delivering a good life. But let's discount that for the sake of argument and compare health outcomes in Dominican Republic (often lauded as a success story) vs Cuba. Dominican republic has infant mortality of 25 / 1000, compared to 4.7 / 1000 in Cuba. The free market kills 2% of all Dominican babies compared to your chances of survival in Cuba. And that's not even taking into account that Dominican Republic has much more access to export markets than Cuba, which has been under a blockade since 1960. How would Cuba be if they were not artificially blockaded?

From what I've heard, Cuban (and Chinese) statistics are heavily edited by the government. Because, you know, the polling is run by them. There's no independent oversight in Cuba/China to prevent this, after all. And no reason for them to release true information - they've got to spread the message of how wonderful socialism is!

More so, why are you only looking at the statistics of life expectancy and infant mortality? Life is pretty useless if it's spent in slavery or slavery-like conditions - and that's what the majority of people in socialist countries face.

[Reelya]

Slaves don't tend to live long lives. Being in prison for example takes a heavy toll on life expectancy. For example it's estimated that each 1 year in prison shortens your life expectancy by two years:
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/02/05/prison-sentence-take-release/

Also other secondary statistics do validate that Cuba's life expectancy is high. For example median age in Cuba is 43 vs 27 for Dominican Republic, which is a more difficult stat to fake, because observers can in fact see the people who are alive. Similarly, median age is 10 years more in China than India. China's median age is very close to the USA.

[Sergarr]

Slaves don't tend to live long lives.

Well-maintained ones do. The people in socialist countries certainly weren't very free in choosing their lives, like, at all.

[Reelya]

People in dirt poor market economies have similarly shitty choices however. you're free to live by scraping poop out of the sewage pipe, dying it out and selling it as cooking fuel that kills people's kids. There are in fact many "free" societies with people who live on rubbish tips and collect poop for a living.

[Frumple]

I think calling government run healthcare "capitalist medicine" because it's more efficient is in fact a cop-out.

It's not when almost every first-world capitalist nation has one. USA is really the big exception here.

It... really kinda' is a cop-out, or more specifically just outright untrue. Government run healthcare is usually pretty specifically anti-capitalist, and heavily controlled by government specifically because capitalist systems break down and stop working right with certain industries (especially with anything approaching normal consumer/market interactions), healthcare among them. The optimization capability and advantages of capitalism requires market forces to be able to work appropriately to function -- customers have to be able to have choices, chances to deliberate on them, be interacting with a market that has actual competition, a legitimate choice to opt out, etc., etc. -- and there's a fair bundle of shit where they just don't, where it's very much physically impossible just due to the nature of the market for it to give the necessary signals for someone operating under primarily capitalist methodology to get a good results and often even a barely mediocre one. Similarly, there's quite a number where they do more than not and non-market interference is going to cause resource misallocation. One is where you curtail or eliminate capitalist economic implementation. The other is where you use it.

Trying to run a pure capitalist or pure socialist or pure just about anything in terms of economics is what is technically called by anyone in the field with two brain cells to rub together "massively goddamn stupid". You use what works for a specific economic issue. If that's capitalist economics and a mostly uncontrolled market, good, use that. If it's socialist/state-run control and a tightly controlled or non-existent market (so far as free market stuff goes), then you use that. Every major developed country is called a mixed market economy for a reason. Capitalism does not work on a national scale on its own. Socialism has serious problems as well. Most ideologically pure economic systems, or things very close in alignment with them, similarly fuck up. An economy is not a box of nails that can be drove into place with the same hammer. A suite of problems that cannot be solved with the same solution requires the use of a different solution or the problem is going to either stay or get worse.

[Reelya]

I think capitalism fails any time that something terrible will happen if you don't get the product. Because at that point the idea of freely choosing goes out the window, and now you're under someone thumb. So ... coke or pepsi is benign. You can pick one, the other, or neither and it's your choice. Whereas drug addiction or life-saving medicine. Leave those to "the market" and you suddenly have a crisis.

A slightly artificial example would be water. Charging some service fee for tap water in the city is one thing. Even if it's not a choice of provider, usually the government will heavily restrict the pricing, because they don't want a crisis over it. But how about free market pricing of bottled water to people dying of thirst in the desert? Suddenly you have a Lord of the Flies situation.

[Sergarr]

I think calling government run healthcare "capitalist medicine" because it's more efficient is in fact a cop-out.

It's not when almost every first-world capitalist nation has one. USA is really the big exception here.

It... really kinda' is a cop-out, or more specifically just outright untrue. Government run healthcare is usually pretty specifically anti-capitalist, and heavily controlled by government specifically because capitalist systems break down and stop working right with certain industries (especially with anything approaching normal consumer/market interactions), healthcare among them. The optimization capability and advantages of capitalism requires market forces to be able to work appropriately to function -- customers have to be able to have choices, chances to deliberate on them, be interacting with a market that has actual competition, a legitimate choice to opt out, etc., etc. -- and there's a fair bundle of shit where they just don't, where it's very much physically impossible just due to the nature of the market for it to give the necessary signals for someone operating under primarily capitalist methodology to get a good results and often even a barely mediocre one. Similarly, there's quite a number where they do more than not and non-market interference is going to cause resource misallocation. One is where you curtail or eliminate capitalist economic implementation. The other is where you use it.

Trying to run a pure capitalist or pure socialist or pure just about anything in terms of economics is what is technically called by anyone in the field with two brain cells to rub together "massively goddamn stupid". You use what works for a specific economic issue. If that's capitalist economics and a mostly uncontrolled market, good, use that. If it's socialist/state-run control and a tightly controlled or non-existent market (so far as free market stuff goes), then you use that. Every major developed country is called a mixed market economy for a reason. Capitalism does not work on a national scale on its own. Socialism has serious problems as well. Most ideologically pure economic systems, or things very close in alignment with them, similarly fuck up. An economy is not a box of nails that can be drove into place with the same hammer. A suite of problems that cannot be solved with the same solution requires the use of a different solution or the problem is going to either stay or get worse.

Mixed economy is really just rebranded capitalism. Most of the supposed "socialist" changes they make are inherently capitalist in purpose - they maximize profit. It's just that, they maximize long-term profit, unlike the bog-standard "pure" capitalism, which focuses on short-term one.

Socialism, meanwhile, doesn't maximize anything at all, except for the degree to which the government is able to rule over the entire society. It's fit for control freaks, who get to be at the top. For anyone else, it's somewhat better than feudalism, but mostly only because of technological improvements.

[Frumple]

... no, serg. They're not just rebranded capitalism. Like, as someone from a (mostly) capitalist country with capitalist economic and business training. That ain't how it works. Words mean things and all that, and capitalism has a fairly specific meaning. It's not a synonym for mixed market, which is a term that was coined because it incorporates things from non-capitalist economic methodology.

And that's fine. Capitalism failing at points means jack-all if we have solutions, and we do. It's still got a lot of good stuff, but it's a failed ideology so far as a robust and well functioning economy goes.

I think capitalism fails any time that something terrible will happen if you don't get the product. Because at that point the idea of freely choosing goes out the window, and now you're under someone thumb.

Pretty much? The failure points of a capitalist system aren't exactly a mystery. Markets need a certain set of conditions to operate at peak optimization efficiency, and the more (and more important) conditions that are lacking, the worse it does -- and there's very much a point where it starts being a net negative. Most vital or emergency services, most infrastructure, and many activities that are valuable elsewhere but unprofitable for the producer are things rife with practical examples. Some things just can't really be turned into a functioning market, which is where a third party needs to come in and a market either controlled or prevented.

[Reelya]

There's also the fact that none of the previous communist states even qualifies as socialist, let alone communist according to Marx's definition. Lenin called his system "state capitalism" because it was actually a "rebranded capitalism". It was 100% based on existing capitalist management systems, just state-owned ones. The promise was "maybe socialism at some point in the future". But they didn't in fact claim that the current system was an implementation of marxism, because it blatantly wasn't.

In fact, Marx's idea of historical materialism requires you to let the current stage fully develop, and the idea is that changes in technology inevitably evolve that to the next stage. e.g. feudalism -> mercantilism -> capitalism. Marx proposed future stages that society would develop through in the end stages of capitalism.  But getting to the end stages of capitalism requires that you let the advanced capitalist society be developed. e.g. Marx wrote that the final stage would come about when production was automated to the point that wages for labor no longer made sense, then society would shift according to that basis, that a man's worth wasn't tied to his labor.

Enshrining a "worker's state" with a lower level of technology than that isn't "Communism" at all, because it's the exact opposite of what Marx said it would be. A worker's state resists the advance of automation, because a worker's state enshrines the relation that the only value is labor, when in fact Marx says Communism comes about when labor itself is obsolete.

In fact, if you look at the advanced capitalist nations they are in fact the ones that built the welfare states, and they are the ones talking about implementing minimum universal income. Those ideas are actually Communist in the sense of Marxist theory, and it backs up what Marx said about socialism->communism being an inevitable result of the development of advanced late-stage capitalism.

Some of the fracturing in the West e.g. Trump are probably the last throes of the old-way of doing things. It's probably not a coincidence that people who want old-school manufaturing back elect a "Trump" at the very point we're talking about a complete automation of production and how to allocate resources in such a world. That's what Marx called socialism/communism.

[Sergarr]

-snip-

I'll just say that "mixed" is really not a descriptive word.

-snip-

Can't we get a better word for that, free of associations with some of the worst regimes on the planet? I'd like to spread good ideas in countries like Poland and Estonia without a risk of getting misunderstood as a defender of tyrannical regime that oppressed their countries.

[Frumple]

Regardless of being descriptive, it has a fairly specific meaning. Refers to economies that mix market and state-run/non-market solutions, the latter of which is pretty much inimical to capitalist ideology and most of its methodology. Usually it's an economy that's mixed capitalism with the aspects of socialism or communism (if often more the economic ideologies than the practical implementations we've seen) that work to offset the areas where the former fails. Generally just functionally means the government has taken control in practice if not explicit law of certain major industries, to (attempt to) ensure their goals are specific results rather than profit.

If you really want to avoid using the term socialism 'cause it's as poisoned and largely devoid of substantive meaning as it is in the states in whatever context you're involved with, just replace references with "state-run", "non-profit", or "non-market solutions", stuff like that. You can talk about safety nets, infrastructure building, curtailing excesses, etc. You're still functionally talking about socialist or communist economic ideology, but it's not like you necessarily have to use the specific terms.

E: Though all that said, part of the point is that capitalism also has some rather bad ideas. Part of being a good advocate for a set of ideology and methodology like capitalism bundles up is being aware of its failings and limitations. And capitalism definitely has some. Do remember that if you're going hard for capitalism you're also defending stuff like the east india company, the business end of banana republics and whatnot, or all the shit businesses get up to environmentally if left unchecked (I'm pretty sure there's still parts of the US that are literally unliveable due to industrial pollutants, decades after the dumping was stopped). There's plenty of nasty shit going on with the stuff, and glossing over it does whoever you're discussing with no more favors than speaking of socialism without acknowledging the major implementation attempts have trended strongly towards bloody atrocity.

[Reelya]

"Social democracy" is a good enough term for the purposes. It's actually far closer to what Marx wanted than any dictatorship.

"Post-automation society" could be another useful term, because you can use that to describe Marx's post-capitalist phase in a way that people are going to get. e.g. you can say that "in a post-automation society we're going to have to rethink how we allocate resources in a way that's fair to everyone in society, since wages for labor will be an obsolete idea".

This boils down what Marx said, but without much fear of being misunderstood as wanting to create some sort of retro worker's state.

[Sergarr]

E: Though all that said, part of the point is that capitalism also has some rather bad ideas. Part of being a good advocate for a set of ideology and methodology like capitalism bundles up is being aware of its failings and limitations. And capitalism definitely has some. Do remember that if you're going hard for capitalism you're also defending stuff like the east india company, the business end of banana republics and whatnot, or all the shit businesses get up to environmentally if left unchecked (I'm pretty sure there's still parts of the US that are literally unliveable due to industrial pollutants, decades after the dumping was stopped). There's plenty of nasty shit going on with the stuff, and glossing over it does whoever you're discussing with no more favors than speaking of socialism without acknowledging the major implementation attempts have trended strongly towards bloody atrocity.

If you haven't noticed, I'm mostly against short-term profit related stuff like that, so you must have misunderstood me somewhere. It seems that there are significant differences in how different people use the word "capitalism".

"Social democracy" is a good enough term for the purposes. It's actually far closer to what Marx wanted than any dictatorship.

"Post-automation society" could be another useful term, because you can use that to describe Marx's post-capitalist phase in a way that people are going to get. e.g. you can say that "in a post-automation society we're going to have to rethink how we allocate resources in a way that's fair to everyone in society, since wages for labor will be an obsolete idea".

This boils down what Marx said, but without much fear of being misunderstood as wanting to create some sort of retro worker's state.

I'm not sure if "post-automation society" is all that good, either. For different reason, though - propaganda in capitalist corruption-infested countries have been working pretty tirelessly to make people fear the automation more than they fear working their entire lives on shitty wages, and it has mostly succeeded.

Social democracy's pretty okay.