10-31-2017, 10:51 AM
(10-29-2017, 12:20 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > It does not, however, make China socialist. Socialism is an
> economic system, and what's relevant is GDP and similar economic
> measures, not political repression.
I completely disagree. There's no such thing as socialism or
capitalism in the economic sense you claim. They're purely abstract
concepts. Neither China nor the US is pure socialist or capitalist,
because those concepts don't exist and can't exist. And there's
nothing in the definition of abstract socialism that even mentions
GDP. Injecting GDP is meaningless, and has nothing to do with
socialism anyway.
Going beyond the abstract to real life, controlling a business versus
owning it is a distinction without a difference. The real life
meanings of socialism and capitalism have to do with government control
vs freedom.
The whole point of Capitalism is that a person running a business can
make decisions based on his objectives and his view of the
marketplace. If his objective is simply profit, or if it's to use his
business to help minorities or Christians or poor people in
underdeveloped countries, or if it's to build a real estate empire, he
can do that in a capitalist society, and either succeed or fail on his
own abilities.
But if the government controls what he does, and forces him to make
business decisions based on government politics or ideology, then it's
effectively a Socialist economy, irrespective of the details of who
owns it.
This gets back to what I wrote in my article:
Quote:> I was in school in the 1950s-60s, I was repeatedly told that the
> difference between Communism and Nazism was that in Communism the
> government owned all the businesses (which was "good"), while in
> Nazism it was still a capitalist system (which was "bad"), but the
> government still controlled everything. That's exactly the
> economic system that China has today. It's pure National
> Socialism (Nazism).
So China and Nazi Germany share National Socialism, and to say that
China is a capitalistic society, while America is a Socialist country
just shows how moronic the political discourse has become.
(10-29-2017, 12:20 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > China is basically a capitalist dictatorship, not a socialist
> dictatorship.
The term "capitalist dictatorship" is an oxymoron, because capitalism
implies freedom to make business decisions. If you want a term to use
that's not an abstract fantasy or oxymoron, then use Hitler's term
National Socialism since that now has a well-known historical
definition.
