> Giving basic food, shelter, and health care is not socialism. If you believe that, then you are naively mistaken. Those are forms of non-market socialism, o

> Giving basic food, shelter, and health care is not socialism. If you believe that, then you are naively mistaken. Those are forms of non-market socialism, or central planning, they've gone by many names in the past. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism), and I would have no problems with socialism except the people pushing it completely ignore the structural issues which inevitably cause massive amounts of death to those least able to prevent it, in a cyclical mechanic massive amounts of people die, and that's solidly backed historically. If there is no self-sustaining market to begin with in an area, there's no problem with socialist structures there, but applying it to everything is just ignorant. Mao caused something like 70 million people to die in only a few short years. The economic calculation problem has been a longstanding issue, with no real solution in the absence of free-market mechanics. The impossibility of calculating how much you should be producing at a future date without any form of visibility (futuresight), you have to maintain an indefinite surplus and not make any mistakes at any level that can cascade. Any centralized power structure suffers from corruption, in fact corruption is what makes it work efficiently in the absence of a division of labor. Its a fine balance of corruption though, and eventually corruption leads to shortages through either greed or incompetence since there is no possible self-moderation of corruption, and human psychology and physiology dictates serotonin production which is altered in those with more power, there are significant biases and trends towards this inevitable failure, and only a limited number of people oversee the process preventing corrections when it might be less costly. Failures lead to shortages which lead to death. Inevitably, power structures get passed to the next generation, about every 20 years or so in a healthy functioning system. If those taking over are incompetent, or were not properly prepared, or ill suited to the task, then it leads to shortages which lead to death. Even if they were prepared, if something new (an out of context problem) occurs, shortages = death. Worse they are likely to hide their failures until its too late to do anything because of the shame of it all. Its human nature. Every single non-market socialist country today relies on a large group of the population for the means of production who have no upward mobility, merit, and are no better than serfs or slaves at least as far as I'm aware. Inevitably these people are mistreated, and they bear the brunt of the inadequacies of socialism, and eventually rise in revolt, or stop having children. In cases where the population has been culled repeatedly, the latter is far more likely, and predictable, slavery of indigenous people in the South Americas in the 1500s was so brutal the slaves that didn't die to the new diseases brought by Spain, took their own lives and the lives of their children rather than bear the brunt of the conditions. The decline was so stark that Spain at the time had to outlaw the practice. You make the mistake of associating capitalism with accumulation in general or various aspects that are unchangeable in any system (including socialism variants), and yet that is not correct except in the most narrowly scoped definition, and the meaning (definition) of words is important when you talk about something specific or make an improper generalization. You see oligopoly and monopoly, they happen in market and hybrid socialist countries more often than in capitalist countries with strong anti-trust law and enforcement. When tech started making the only effective means of interaction and communication with them through online, they gave those influencers more than just fuel for the fire, they gave them bridges to every single person that could be burned and targeted at will. That's hardly just 'a bit of fuel to that fire'. Your arguments, in fact, are contrary and against the public good. You claim its for the public good, but the public is everyone, and inevitably not everyone gets their fair share. The people concentrated in leadership roles in that system decide in their own view what the best interests are despite perpetrating and claiming its for the public good, when its often only in their good. Its a deceit caused by corruption. That hypocrisy ends up being a deception that you either knowingly or unknowingly are committing on the public good when you support it, while in the same breath ignoring structural issues that lead to a fundamentally unstable system that is a shortage away from falling off a cliff. Given the choice between two systems where you either accumulate money (some store of value), or you accumulate death, which is ultimately better for the public? The answer for anyone that values their own lives and their childrens lives is always the former, never the latter. Yet they are simply not given that choice... its compulsory. None of these aspects are ever brought up when people claim its for the public good, largely because the intention is never for the public good in the first place. Its some individual or group promoting a flawed idea of the public good, now or by their actions in the future, so that they can profit and accumulate personally through influence over those resources. Profit at the loss of the public good, and those people surely can't be called foreign capitalists as they were there from the beginning. They go by many different names, monopolists, fascists, dictators, oligopolists, ultimately anyone that seeks control over all others and all things through various machinations to the detriment of the many.