Poll: Capitalism is out … and socialism is in

Hopefully they will realize that the best America has ever been outside of racial and social issues is when FDR was president who was basically a social Democrat, although he preferred the term progressive and new nationalist. The decades after his economic reforms were the greatest time in American history, and then the Republicans got power again with Nixon and started to dismantle all of it, by the time Regan was in office, he killed organized labor and cut taxes on corporations leading to the current situation of hyper Inflationary debt based economics.

The right didn't give us "social democracy". You're very confused.

But those rules inevitably fail because under capitalism wealth always consolidates under the psychopaths and sociopaths. Like, there’s no way to have capitalism and not have that happen. It’s part of the fundamental structure of private ownership of capital.

Fully agree. Capitalism with strong safety net and social oversight is a really good system.

• Social safety net promotes risk taking for businesses, grows economy and balances society against extremes
• Social oversight prevents entities from gaming the system. There has to be a human dungeon master behind every system as every system can be gamed and corrupted within the rules of it. So external oversight is needed.

People like to hate on capitalism but capitalism + social oversight is really the best system.

Personal property exists under socialism and communism.

Private property does not. A factory cannot be privately held under communism. Roads belong to the people. Workers own the farms.

It’s not “our toothbrush, Comrade”

But you also don’t need a totalitarian state to regulate every last thing. There can be independence for those who work and manage the resources; you can still create a restaurant and be paid a high wage for managing it, coming up with new and innovative dishes etc.

The point is to remove the incentive to exploit for profit. It’s literally the root cause of every scam.

Putting China and North Korea in the same booth shows how little you know about this subject.

Are you calling them socialists because of their name, particularly NK? That's part of the propaganda. They're not, at least not in practice. The Nazi party did the same thing.

Europeans asking why colonized countries don't have the riches they took from them will never not be funny.

You realise the comment you're replying to was targeted at Americans, yes?

Finland has social democrats / socialists who have been in power, right? And decent labor unions, I thought. Must admit, I assumed Finland was similar in politics to the other Nordics, but I'll stand corrected if not.

People in China and North Korea are somehow doing better than me here in Finland?

Depends heavily on who "people" are in either instance. There are absolutely people in China living happier, healthier, and more prosperous lives than folks out in Finland. There are NKians living better, too (although significantly fewer due to Finland's position as a global north energy exporter). There are Chinese and Korean folks living worse, too, of course.

If you expand the question to all of Europe, relative to China/NK, then the numbers look even better for the East Asian states. Certainly, folks living in bombed-out Ukrainian border towns are doing a lot worse than their North Korean peers. And significantly worse than the folks living peaceful and prosperous lives in Chongqing or Shanghai. Middle Eastern refugees scraping by in Turkyie and Romania, or getting surrounded by angry mobs of protesters in some shitty apartment in the UK or France, are doing substantially worse. Elderly pensioners working into their 80s in countries like Bulgaria or Moldova are far worse off than their Chinese and NK peers, comfortably retired in their mid-50s.

For some reason, westerners have their view of these countries trapped in the early 90s and refuse to believe the intervening 30 year span has delivered any kind of social or economic progress. You can watch full reel-to-reel videos of people touring these countries and all you get back is "Potemkin Village! Fake News! Everyone is secretly starving just outside the focus of the cameras!" in the comments. Pure denialism. But its necessary to believe a country like Finland is the best any nation on earth can possibly be when your government is in the process of freezing university funding, cutting social welfare benefits, and fattening up its national security budgets.