[tharne]

Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it.

A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.

[ClumsyPilot]

There is no modern state without collectively funded education, police, fire service, justice system, military, reseach, environmental protection, FDA,FAA, etc.

So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?

[stale2002]

The magic line would be when the majority of privately owned businesses are illegal.

Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".

Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.

Collectively funding some services has nothing to do with socialism.

[ClumsyPilot]

If that's the magic line, then it's a thousand miles away.

I can't find a single country (maybe North Korea?) still in existence, that has outlawed private business. We aren't just talking social democracy, even Cuba and Venesuela allow private business.

[stale2002]

> that has outlawed private business.

From my original comment: "the majority".

The examples you have given, have indeed outlawed many private businesses, in the past. Although, I agree that those countries have become significantly more capitalistic over the years.

You also skipped the most famous example of socialism, which was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union absolutely banned almost all forms of private enterprise.

But sure, socialism has significantly decreased in relevancy over the last few decades, to the point where basically all old socialist countries are becoming more and more capitalistic. Socialism is dying, all throughout the world.

[mc32]

Also _when_ socialistic government allow some controlled capitalism (usually heavily regulated-meaning it applies to small business and not just your sulfur emoting power plants), they do it as a temporary concession on the way to complete abolition of private business.

Before Stalin forced the kulaks out of their farms Lenin allowed private farming as a means to an end. Stalin lost patience and forced it.

[dragonwriter]

> Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".

> Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.

No, it's not. Private businesses executed through private labor applied to public capital which the business rents from the state are perfectly compatible with socialism in which private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.

It's true that there are “socialist” states and parties that have banned or sought to ban private business, but that's not essential to socialism.

Also, all of those collectively funded services listed upthread tend to feature public capital ownership of the means of delivering the service as well as public operating funds, and often exclude private ownership of some of the means of delivering those services and/or use of privately owned capital to provide the same service, resulting in a domain in which private capital ownership is restricted.

[stale2002]

> private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.

This is a borderline semantic argument.

There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.

Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital. And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.

Yes, code is capital. The value of almost all software companies, is not in the server racks, it is in the code that they produced.

As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital, and now that capital would be illegal for them to own, even if they produced it.

[ClumsyPilot]

> And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.

Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone, noone is coming for your code. Every half-sensible discussion of modern socialism is not about taking away all of your stuff. I am really tired of this bait and switch social democracy for communism.

Einstein, Heinzenberg and many other scientists have advanced the whole human race, but you can't have IP on ideas and on laws of nature, and on scientific theories. So have they produced capital?

The discussion of IP is very nuanced, and raises question for why code is covered by overlapping patents and copyright, how long it should last, what rights does end user have and how right to repair is affected, etc.

Anyway, this thread has been massively derailed. It started with a bizzare slippery slope argument of "for every Finland there is a North Korea" as if social democracies are in danger of turning totalitarian any day.

[stale2002]

> Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone

Correct, that is kind of my point. Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era. That does not change the definition of what "The means of production" are though.

I am not too worried about socialists taking over. They lost, and aren't going to take back the means of production from anyone.

> is not about taking away all of your stuff

Well yeah. That is because they are no longer relevant, because of how significantly they lost, and because of how much capitalism has become the defacto government system, all around the world, even in many places that used to call themselves socialist.

If socialists want to redefine socialism to be actually be just capitalism, but with a slightly more expansive social safety net, with more free healthcare and government programs, I guess that is fine by me.

But I am not going to call that socialism.

[dragonwriter]

> This is a borderline semantic argument.

There's no borderline, once the issue was raised of, to paraphrase “what does the term ‘socialism’ encompass”, the discussion was inherently one of semantics.

But that hardly invalidates a response once the term of the discussion are set.

> There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.

There's a very big difference, especially in the way socialists (who established the term) define “capital” (the definition is used in finance within capitalist societies is broader, expanding the original by metaphor, and useful for its purpose within capitalist societies, but it's not what socialists seek to abolisg. The socialist use is strictly limited to the physical, non-financial means of production.)

> Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital.

No, you didn't, as socialists define the term (whether or not private ownership of IP is recognized—on which socialist preferences may vary—IP is not capital in the socialist sense, being decidedly non-physical.)

> As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital.

Again, no, what in capitalists societies are called “capital goods” are not capital in the socialist sense until and except as they are used as means of production. Socialism doesn't mean you can't own capital goods, it means you can't own those goods while renting labor to apply to them in the course of production (and many schools of socialism have a principled carve out for means of production to which the owners own labor exclusively is applied, the prohibition is most centrally about the separated relationship between labor and capital, which does not exist in that case.)

And this is all strict-sense socialism, which much modern developed-world socialism is decidedly not, being largely instead mixed economy ideology with a preference for more restraints on the power of capital owners over others in society than the dominant status quo in modern mixed economies. Your precious code and capital goods are even more safe there.

[stale2002]

> means you can't own those goods while renting labor

And this is only slightly different than banning all private enterprises.

I do not consider "you can own some capital, but only if you are a single person, and you can't purchase labor from others for your business" to be significantly different than the slightly more extreme situation of banning all private enterprises.