[leonk]

>> It's been known for a long time that socialism always leads to extreme poverty

I don't think this is a well known, or even considered true. Take the biggest socialist countries, Russian and China. Compare them to what the conditions were like in those countries before socialist states took over. You will see massive improvements.

[phyller]

China, when it was actually socialist and redistributing wealth, took itself back 100 years and probably produced more human suffering than any other event in world history. So yea, perfect example. Then they reformed and decided to maintain the propaganda but in actuality become capitalist, they became the biggest success story in history. Today, China is more capitalist than the USA. They provide less social services to their people. A few wealthy people control the means of production, and use it to get returns which they invest in more production.

Russia hung on for a while, caused the second largest amount of human suffering in history (only second because they had way less people to start with), and eventually economically collapsed despite having incredible natural resources. They rebuilt along capitalist principles and were doing well until recently. I've read some very interesting articles which talk about how it is almost mathematically impossible to create a smoothly functioning planned economy the way Russia was trying to do it. I wish i could remember where they were. They had smart people who really tried. When the incentives are not lined up properly for the workers and managers to benefit directly from their own production, it is just too hard to control all the variables.

[ddnb]

Exactly. Not to mention the Soviets were able to beat the US in almost all steps of the space race, starting with the first satellite as soon as 1957! I'd say what the soviet style of economic development was very good for was rapid industrialization from the ground up.

[pasabagi]

I'm sympathetic to this position, but I don't know if it's the whole story. Russia, before the revolution, was a country of extremes. On the one hand, there were farmers who were living in a similar manner to 5th century peasants. On the other, there were some of the largest industrial complexes in the world.

I think the Soviets did achieve incredible things, but I think that's largely the result of abandoning profit as the sole criterion of whether an activity is worthwhile: capitalist societies tend to spend most of their productive labour on keeping profitable hamster-wheels spinning (like the housing market, for instance).

[candiodari]

I have yet to meet an ex-Soviet citizen who is not of this opinion.

It's only far away leftists/communists that are still of this opinion. They still preach that political decision making should be independent of economic and market factors (in other words: they should be elected/conquer power (social democrats/marxist view) and make decisions ignoring economic reality).

And of course, please ignore that they were largely singing the praises of Chavez and Maduro when this problem was just getting started. Sentences like "Finally a leader that stands up to big banks" and so on were common.

So not only were they singing the praises of these disastrous leaders. They were explicitly calling out the cause of this economic destruction as the best thing ever. And of course, now the consequences become more clear, they must distance themselves from it just like they distance themselves from the fact that the biggest communist state to ever exist voluntarily started a bigger holocaust than Nazi Germany ...

Not that I expect this will convince you of the problems with ignoring economics, but I do hope this can at least make you VERY careful in considering such ideas and give at least some time to looking for problems.

[megaman22]

China is an awful example. State-directed socialist policies led to one of the worst losses of life in human history.

[leonk]

Life expectancy went up during communist rule. See https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9... There are plenty of capitalist states and policies that have resulted in huge amounts of loss of life.