From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Oct 24 2002 - 16:59:03 MDT
Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/24/2002 3:32:31 PM Central Standard Time,
>charleshixsn@earthlink.net writes: The problem is that saying "Socialism is a
>system like that of country X" isn't a well-defined definition. It "sort of
>" points you in the right area, but if I abstract feature A, while you are
>abstracting feature B, we will be thinking very different things, and when we
>try to decide whether another country is, or is not, socialist we will come
>to different answers.
>
>Charles,
> Is that really important? No one has ever pointed to a country B and
>said now here is where socialism works really well, I wonder how it is
>different than Country A where socialism is downright lethal.
> Instead it is a case of looking at ever how many countries and grading
>them by how lethal they became.
>Ron h.
>
>
Umnh ... without a good definition, how do you know? Were any of these countries "socialist" in any way that the people who believe themselves to be socialists would accept? Do you believe that the US is capitalist? Why? I can point to many (small) social groups that might have been socialist, depending on what one means. The groups that I am thinking of were all small and peaceful, generally too much so, as they were generally overwhelmed by agressive neighbors. Who, then, is the one with the lethal system? The ones who did the killing, or the ones who were killed? (And which did you mean in the prior paragraph. I may have read that incorrectly.)
Interestingly, many of these "socialist" groups also had strong beliefs about private property. In some areas they were quite competive, and perhaps more properly described by the term "capitalist", but again, without a good definition, it's hard to know.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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