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The USSR, China and North Korea are not/never were socialist! They may have had a Marxist ideology but they were dictatorships and not truly socialist. China is a capitalist country and is communist in name only. North Korea is an evil dictatorship to this day. Cuba is socialist.

Communism has never existed in any country!

tallowood wrote on Oct 6^th, 2008 at 8:17pm:


None of those places were or are socialist/communist.

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Mutual agreement and free association work pretty well when they aren't crushed

The USSR was only socialist in certain ways, it wasn't fully socialist, it was a dictatorship and a Stalinist state. I'm not interested in half socialism, only true socialism. Just because it calls itself socialist doesn't make it so, look at China today for example.

Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a whole lot different that a selfish dictatorship like was in the USSR.

Anyways, any self respecting socialist/communist knows the USSR wasn't truly socialist so I'm not going to argue with you about it.

I think Socialism is a better answer than Capitalism. But it should be Democratic as in Social Democracy. And secular is best.

There should be no private education, no religious school network, no private health care, no tax exemption for religions, nationalisation of natural resourses, no private ownership of strategically important infrastructure such as telecommunications, and a more equitable pay system ie more wealth sharing but I also think that it is not unreasonable to expect those on unemployment benefits to contribute something. For instance if you are recieving unemployment benefits you might be required to do one day work and one day training .....something along those lines.

Better wealth sharing need not necessarily be in the form of higher worker wages but better services and retirement policy etc.

Entrepreneurialism should still be rewarded but maybe not to the degree that it currently can be. News media ownership should be far more diverse and public TV and radio should be better supported (Go Briz31)

While I believe in social justice and civil liberties, I think criminal behaviour should be dealt with far more harshly, particularly white collar crime. White collar criminals have had it far too easy. If some banker is convicted of fraud or criminal mismanagement than all assets associated with him are sold to retrieve as much of the debt as possible or become part of a public trust. If the $14 million house is in his wife's name or children's name it is sold and the wife/children are then able to purchase a house at mean value in an average suburb. They should not be on the street but should not be enjoying the exploits of criminal behaviour while waitin for dad to finish serving his 2 years  for ruining hundreds of peoples lives.

tallowood wrote on Oct 8^th, 2008 at 9:01am:

Oh, of course, I'm wrong and socialism is bad, what was I thinking.

Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a whole lot different that a selfish dictatorship like was in the USSR.

So socialism requires some kind of benign dictatorship? Isn't that a bit naive? Do you think that just because only ideologues support socialism that self interested people would stay out of the dictatorship once it gained power?

There are hundreds of possible systems that would work fine if we could rely on a benign dictatorship that knows what's really best for the ignorant fools on the street. Unfortunately there's no such thing.