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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (8247)	3/13/2001 4:29:28 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 82486

"Sometimes [communism] is even seen as a good idea that failed, either it was doomed to failure because of human nature, or it was just done wrong so it didn't work." That's about the size of it. Like many well-intentioned dreams, it went awry due to the abuse of power - a natural and logical consequence of centralization imposed by force. IMO communism is not a good idea that went awry. It is an evil idea that was implimented in an evil way. It's pretty hard to argue that countries that have no socialism are better off than ones that don't. How would you define "no socialism". It could be said that no countries have no socialism. It is not hard to argue that countries with an extensive amount of socialism are worse off then most countries with largely free markets. Do you know how many indigenous and Caribbean people died building the Panama Canal? A lot? Probably. Whats the relevance of this question? Do you know of any great enginering work built near or before the time the Panama cannal was built that was built by a socialist state without any significant loss of life? The Central American states faired significantly better under leftist governments than they did under right wing governments. Thats a questionable assertion with a limited sample (thus it is easily confounded by other factors). Besides most of the right wing states were not very capitalist either. The government might not have nationalized industry but the leaders either owned it as their personal property or granted exclusive licenses to their cronies. I think it would be hard to create a meaningful baseline from which to compare the relative merits of communism vs. imperialism. Imperialism seems to have more in common with fascism than collectivism. Who was arguing for imperialism? I was arguing against communism. If you can show imperialism is as bad then you have a good attack on imperialism but not a good defense of communism. I was not defending fascism either. Tim