What history, literally two comments up I was saying how the standards defense is that "it was not _real_ communism, let's try again and this time we'll get it

What history, literally two comments up I was saying how the standards defense is that "it was not _real_ communism, let's try again and this time we'll get it right". groan The goal of the system isn't to provide for people. That's the core fallacy that doomed pretty much any socialist system ever. Systems are shit - all of them. More you rely on one, more fucked you are. What you want is to let people to provide for themselves. Because yes, they can and they want to. And trying to say that they need a "system" to provide for them... ugh. It's offensive in so many ways. People are not children - children are children. Now, this being said, things are quite complicated. There are commons problems, which are very hard to solve by the free market. You do, unfortunately, need some system for those, with the inherent shittyness. But as a rule, the smaller it is the better. More you try to do centralized, worse results you get. Even the modern great success stories in social democracy (western countries, northern europe etc) - they either have a catch (like natural resources) or did most of their growth on a small system, and now are spending their success as social benefits. And yes, you do want a social safety net, for general principles. You don't want old people dying in ditches because an investment firm went bust with their pensions. But that's about it - safety net has nothing to do with treating perfectly healthy adults like they're disabled or children. They are the ones _paying_ for the safety net. Somebody has to.