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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
Soviets did not enjoy/suffer socialism. That's a cold war misnomer.
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And your idea of what they lived under is...?
Bullitt: yup. Party animals. What's even more fun is I can make the same joke in Russian.
Is beink Communist Party animals...
DanaC: that little exigesis moves me to paraphrase Edmund O. Wilson, who made this observation re communism, but this serves as well: Socialism: interesting idea, wrong species.
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Socialism, in its purist sense [sic], has never actually been put effectively into action; partly because in order for it to truly work it needs to be global.
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Any time you see a sentence like that about a system, it's a sure sign that
that system does not work. That kind of special pleading for other-than-market economy has been going on continuously since 1921 when the Communists actually found themselves in a position of responsibility for the first time, and it's
never worked. Capitalism, OTOH, has never needed a syllable of special pleading ever. You could look that up. Big or small, capitalism works, because it works with, not against, human nature. It is in the nature of humans, indeed in a way of all terrestrial life, to require a profit motive.
All you really need are two things: capitalism, and good ethics. You don't need socialism to make ethics -- far from it. Socialism, therefore, is simply an attempt by useless eaters and drones to secure a good income as members of officialdom. Better they should learn the mysteries of the backhoe and go dig ditches. Foundations and groundlevel pools too.
In a related topic, Castro's Cuba is sending cheap doctors to Chavez' Venezuela. The doctors are no doubt pleased to hear they will be paid ten times their US$15/month salary -- until they discover that the Cuban government is taking away eighty percent of it -- so the doctors/med techs are taking home the munificent sum of a dollar a day. The Cuban staffers have already had to resort to extreme measures to keep the medical people confined -- government minders, locked compounds, no one allowed out except in pairs -- and nonetheless, whole piles of Cubans are disappearing into the brush and reemerging in Mexico and the United States. Smart and wealthy Venezuelans are heading out of the country in droves too.