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I'd include personal freedom and democracy in the definition of success.

• sudosysgen 6y ago
  Billions of people disagree with you, though. Personal freedom and democracy are both weasel words, by the way. Liberal personal freedom is based on the idea that only negative rights are valid (except when they are necessary to enforce the violent relations of the existing system, of course), for no reason besides the fact that it legitimized a property-based system of politics and power. That is, you don't have the personal freedom to walk where you want, but you do have the personal freedom to kill people that walk on the land you gained through theft and theft profiteering, for some reason. As for democracy, you have the choice between two people - primaries aren't constitutionally required and can be done however the last guy to win the primary thinks they should be done - which both are funded by the same set of donors. Which is why there is no statistically significant correlation between the will of the demos and that of the kratos.
• pvaldes 6y ago
  The two problems in this interesting conversation are that 1) there is not such thing as a communist country, only countries that "wear communism" for a while, in the same way as people wear mullets, and 2) Capitalist countries didn't performed better necessarily. Not in some aspects that we correctly criticize in communist countries but accept as perfectly okay in friend countries. If freedom is the definition of success, we could take a look to the countries with highest ratio of their population jailed. Be prepared for a nasty surprise, they are not exactly communists. Not at all...