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Graft, corruption, and mismanagement will ruin any system: capitalism, socialism, or communism (assuming we can even agree on the definitions of those systems).
by xenadu02 10y ago
Graft, corruption, and mismanagement will ruin any system: capitalism, socialism, or communism (assuming we can even agree on the definitions of those systems).
- albertop 10y agoGraft, corruption, and mismanagement == Socialism
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoYou think those things didn't exist before 1848 or so?
- seibelj 10y agoSocialism requires that the government has more resources and thus more power. Therefore socialist governments are more likely to become corrupted and mismanaged.
- jbhatab 10y agocompletely agree with this. Obviously nothing is certain but it's a strong factor and time brings this out.
- pm90 10y agoHow is this any different from capitalist oligarchies? In that case, the power and resources are not aggregated in a single government, but split over many private individuals.
- cageface 10y agoIt's a matter of degrees. At least in most capitalist countries the press, no matter how emasculated, still functions as a check on corruption to some degree. Communist/socialist countries tend to control the press, and hush up exposés of corruption, which makes it much worse.
- SixSigma 10y agoThe Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/obama-has-sentenced-whistleblowers-to-31-times-the-jail-time-of-all-prior-u-s-presidents-combined.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/obama-has-sentenced-w...
- cageface 10y agoSure the press in the US is currently in a pretty bad state. But after living in a communist country for the last five years I can tell you for a fact it can get much worse.
- lhopki01 10y agoCapitalism has nothing to do with freedom of the press.
- aetherson 10y agoThe more one centralizes power, the more opportunity there is for graft, corruption, and mismanagement to do a lot of harm. Let's avoid a stupid "definition of terms" fight and just talk about why the USSR was such a complete disaster for a few minutes, whatever you want to call their system. That system was one that centralized a lot of power. What jobs people did, what prices things sold at, where people could love, how much of what they would try to make or grow, and also who could say what, what ideologies were allowed, what kind of media people could see, what foreign ideas were allowed in. It turns out that that's a pretty rich field for graft. All the graft opportunities that were available in other countries, plus a big slice of economic control, plus a big slice of ideology control made for some powerful government officials, and they could use corruption to turn that power into personal gain.
- sien 10y agoWhere are the successful socialist and Communist societies?
- zokula 10y agoSweden, Norway and Finland are more Socialist than the USSR, Cuba, China have ever been. So yes there are some successful socialist countries.
- sien 10y agoAll have extensive private ownership. Look at government spending. Sweden 51.2% of GDP, Norway 43.9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending How are they 'more Socialist' than the USSR or Cuba or China when it was poor where the state owned everything? Sure, they are 'Social Democracies' which seems to mean market-democracies with a welfare state these days.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoAs I said elsewhere, Scandinavia seems to be doing all right, so that's Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden for starters. (This is of course social democracy rather than "pure" socialism. But since most social democratic policies, e.g. health care and social safety nets, are called "socialism" by those who wish to demonize them, I think it's fair to put social democracy's triumphs under the same label.)