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Have you been to Sweden or other Nordic countries, which Sanders openly claims as his models for many of his social-democratic (not socialist) ideas? They are f

Have you been to Sweden or other Nordic countries, which Sanders openly claims as his models for many of his social-democratic (not socialist) ideas? They are free countries and at the top of most measures of human welfare. Most of Western Europe embraces more social democratic concepts than the U.S., and their standards of living are at least as high as America's. The USSR said it was implementing communism (not socialism), but really implemented a brutal totalitarian dicatorship.

kamaal 11y ago
>>The USSR said it was implementing communism (not socialism), but really implemented a brutal totalitarian dicatorship. Its not really possible to be implement communism without dictatorship of some kind. The moment you seize power, the very first thing you will realize is you need money to run your schemes. But there is only that much available, and that pool too is dwindling over time. Anybody good is taxed beyond their share, so they are always moving out to greener pastures, reducing your spending pool further. Pretty much everyone else thinks, its everybody else's job to work and make for them. So no one's contributing, but expecting the party to continue. Its basically a giant negative feedback loop in a system that's amplifying what's coming in. And that is playing out at the scale of a country's economy. Now to control it all, you need to prevent people moving out(defectors), you need to continuously control what sort of information is fed to your masses, you need to control nearly everything there is to control because any deviation means people will stray away to create their own merit based islands. And if those islands get powerful, they can pull down the regime.
- hackuser 11y ago
  Interesting theoretically, but is there an event in reality that it describes (i.e., is there some empirical data)? I'm pretty sure it doesn't describe the history of the USSR or the Bolshevik Revolution; that was a brutal dictatorship from the start. I read in one history how Lenin controlled regions by keeping them on the precipice of starvation - anger him and rations would be reduced further. Taxes don't seem like they would be much of an issue to those people. I've never heard taxes discussed in regard to the USSR; when the government owns everything and provides all goods and income (or close to it) I'm not sure what would be taxed.

kamaal 11y ago

>>The USSR said it was implementing communism (not socialism), but really implemented a brutal totalitarian dicatorship. Its not really possible to be implement communism without dictatorship of some kind. The moment you seize power, the very first thing you will realize is you need money to run your schemes. But there is only that much available, and that pool too is dwindling over time. Anybody good is taxed beyond their share, so they are always moving out to greener pastures, reducing your spending pool further. Pretty much everyone else thinks, its everybody else's job to work and make for them. So no one's contributing, but expecting the party to continue. Its basically a giant negative feedback loop in a system that's amplifying what's coming in. And that is playing out at the scale of a country's economy. Now to control it all, you need to prevent people moving out(defectors), you need to continuously control what sort of information is fed to your masses, you need to control nearly everything there is to control because any deviation means people will stray away to create their own merit based islands. And if those islands get powerful, they can pull down the regime.

hackuser 11y ago
Interesting theoretically, but is there an event in reality that it describes (i.e., is there some empirical data)? I'm pretty sure it doesn't describe the history of the USSR or the Bolshevik Revolution; that was a brutal dictatorship from the start. I read in one history how Lenin controlled regions by keeping them on the precipice of starvation - anger him and rations would be reduced further. Taxes don't seem like they would be much of an issue to those people. I've never heard taxes discussed in regard to the USSR; when the government owns everything and provides all goods and income (or close to it) I'm not sure what would be taxed.