From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!ariel!hou5f!npoiv!npois!houxm!5941ux!machaids!hocda!spanky!ka Newsgroups: net.politics Title: Re: What IS wrong with socialism Article-I.D.: spanky.214 Posted: Sun Feb 20 19:05:06 1983 Received: Mon Feb 21 04:08:50 1983 References: genradbo.1415 mitccc.349 I think that Zig is confusing the difference between capitalism and socialism with the difference between democracy and totali- tarianism. "One's life is not one's own ..." describes the difference between the latter two ideas, not the former two. The best argument for this [Zig's] position skips over the never ending theoretical debates on political systems and looks at the fact of the matter in the world today: Socialist countries are the least free, the most oppres- sive, and the most imperialistic in the world today. "The fact of the matter" is that many countries are oppressive, some of them socialist and some of them not. Russia is imperial- istic (and was before it became communist), but how many other imperialistic countries are socialist? Making accurate comparis- ons between socialist and nonsocialist countries as groups re- quires a lot more work than I am willing to put into the task. If anyone wants to rate each country on a scale as to how social- istic it is and how oppressive it is, I would certainly like to see it. Even that would only show the existance of a correla- tion, rather than proving cause and effect. ... people no longer own the means of their livelihood or even their homes. Their lives are not their own in all material respects. How many people own the means of their livelihood in the United States today? Many people do own their own homes, but that is at least partially due mortage rates artificially lowered by the government--the sort of government intervention in the economy which conservatives are supposed to despise. More to the point, what really is the great advantage of owning your own home rather than renting it? And to maintain this hold over their people most social- ist states wind up abandoning democracy and taking away from their people even more control over their lives. I cannot think of a single example. Off the top of may head, I can think of two cases where democracies have been replaces by dictatorships: the current government of Argentina, and Hitler in Germany. Both these were non-communist--in Reagan's terms, merely authoritarian rather that totalitarian. In other words succesful socialism is the tyranny of the many over the individual... That's a good definition of pure democracy, not of socialism. Replace the word tyranny with a less loaded word, and you accu- rately describe definition of the social contract theory of government that is reflected in the Declaration of Independence. ... and most socialism in practice is just plain tyranny. If you have a dictatorship, you probably have tyranny no matter what philosophy the government nominally follows. Do you think that thing such as laws granting unions the right to strike, or the social security system (both bona-fide socialist programs which were in the platform of the American communist party) are examples of tyranny? Kenneth Almquist