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Yeah, Europe's economy is really falling apart.

• Quarrelsome 9y ago
  Socialism != Social Democracy Its a common misconception. Europe does Social Democracy but most governments do not exercise the sort of direct control you see in purely Socialist governments.
  • craigsmansion 9y ago
    > Its a common misconception. No. It's a particular American hang-up where everything related to "socialism" must be portrayed as "communist" and bad.
• AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  European socialism works. Bolivarian socialism totally does not. I think the critical difference is that Bolivarian socialism believes something that European socialism does not. It's something like "all profitable companies are stealing from their workers" or "companies don't deserve profits" or something in that neighborhood. Therefore Bolivarian socialism regarded it as justice to expropriate profitable companies, so that the profits would go to the people via social programs. But they didn't know how to run those companies that they took over. And even for the companies that they didn't take over, the expropriations that they did destroyed incentive to invest any further in Venezuela. The net result was that there wasn't enough money coming in to fund the social programs. European socialism, in contrast, merely taxed profitable companies, and only taxed a fraction of their profits - something around a third is typical, I think. This left employment, profits, and tax income operating normally. The lesson seems to be that if you go into socialism with too much of a victim mentality, placing too much of the blame on "them", then you take so much that you destroy the economy.