[philipallstar]

It never sounded cool and fun. It was government acknowledging its own limitations. Governments don't perform better if we all cheer them on. Right now a government (Russia's) is waging war on a country. Last century governments caused untold death in socialist countries (Venezuela, China, USSR) because they were trying to organise centrally.

[fragmede]

Then again, the British East India Company committed plenty of atrocities as a corporation, so if we're going to oversimplify to government bad, it seems corporations bad too. Don't get me started on religious either!

[amanaplanacanal]

As a counter example, a government (Ukraine) is defending against the Russian invasion and is looking more and more like it might win that fight. Would they be better off without a government?

[ExoticPearTree]

The governement of Unraine is sending its people to die on the frontlines while the elites party in Kyiev and their president is an entitled choosing beggar. How are they helping the prople again?

[watwut]

> It was government acknowledging its own limitations

No it was not. It was deliberately trying to make government sound as useless as possible, so that its useful programs can be dismantled.

You are ignoring all good things that came out of governments. That is also deliberate choice. If Ukraine government fell, they would be Russians now. Last century, we have see a lot of good coming out of governments - starting with new deal, human rights, historically unprecedented period of peace in Europe and prosperity. Science, education, healthcare all work better when governments work well.

[ExoticPearTree]

You're conflating issues: governments started wars, they lost, new governments did not want to repeat the war because the people that elected them opposed it.

Human rights, at least in the US, were the won by a lot of suffering from the ordinary people, not by the benevolence of any senator/congressman/president. They passed the laws to appease the people, not because they wanted to.

Science comes when governments do not impede research. Do you think SpaceX would have existed if the government decided to help? NASA has become a shell of its former self, launching rockets into space that cost more than who knows how many Falcon launches. Government at work.

I could go on, but we, as a species, need a government to kind of keep peace amongst our selves and not go overboard too much. But more than that, governments are a hindrance to human evolution and development.

[lenerdenator]

And now we've overcorrected and have people dying from a lack of government care.

It was indeed meant to sound "cool and fun". It was supposed to be a memorable slogan. That's why Reagan used it. Then people made it into a battle cry for letting the hyper-wealthy dismantle regulations that were often written in blood, or for explaining why we need to let people go into bankruptcy from medical bills.

Having some centralized/public ownership of some enterprises doesn't necessarily mean that the government is going to purge people or starve tens of millions.

[tempfile]

In the spirit of fairness I have to note the untold deaths caused by non-socialist countries in Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, pretty much every country in South America...

[squigz]

Or even Western nations like America and Canada? How many people die every year from preventable causes? To exposure? To suicide?

[ExoticPearTree]

I never understood this selfish desire to stop people from killing themselves. What's it to you if a person jumps from a building or shots itself in the head? Did you ever think that they might have had actually good reasons for doing what they did?

[squigz]

It's not seflish though - who has to clean that up? What about the people nearby who have to witness it?

[ExoticPearTree]

The coroner will take the body. Just as if that person was shot by a robber.

People nearby don't have to look if they don't want to.

[squigz]

You think that a coroner cleans that up? I'm pretty sure that's not the way it works.

[philipallstar]

Agree - the world has horrible things happening, although not on the scale of socialism. The thing that comes close is WW2, but that was an actual war, and not just starving millions of people due to central planning.

However, Cambodia:

> Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were supported for many years by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by Mao Zedong;[c] it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which the Khmer Rouge received came from China, including at least US $1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid in 1975 alone.[11][12][13] After it seized power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge wanted to turn the country into an agrarian socialist republic, founded on the policies of ultra-Maoism and influenced by the Cultural Revolution. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide

[tempfile]

In Cambodia I was referring to [1]

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal#Cambodi...

[soco]

Last century non-socialist governments caused untold deaths in many Western countries, starting with Germany for a better known example, but the entire list is quite long. So could it be that it wasn't socialism the problem?

[ExoticPearTree]

Socialism is always the problem.

If you're talking about the Nazis in Germany, socialism is in their name, you now? If you're talking before Hitler, the Kaiser was socialist. So socialism anyway you slice it.

[inigyou]

National is also in their name. Therefore, nations killed all those people. We need to ban nations.

[inigyou]

Capitalism has killed 100 million people, and that's just the verified deaths.

[throw10920]

Uh, the point was that a single ideology caused deaths due to socialism. Unless you think that there's a single ideology that caused all of the deaths in the countries you mentioned, then this isn't "in the spirit of fairness", it's just misrepresentation.

[tempfile]

All the incidents I mentioned were acts of US imperialism.