User blog comment:Centrist16/SOMETHING EVERYONE MUST KNOW/@comment-3398633-20150809140026/@comment-1045231-20150810015124

"Let's not make excuses now. Cuba's economy is explicitly socialist, following the very tenents demanded of it according to socialist economic theory. You're making excuses for a system that has proven itself completely unreliable. You say that none of the parties I mentioned were socialist, even though the followed many of the ideologies of socialism. Different card, same pack." - Sorry, I meant to say that Cuba, revolutionary Catalonia, the Paris Commune, and a couple other examples were socialist or close to it. I would say that Cuba is only close to it, because significant portions of their economy are not democratically controlled by the workers.

"Capitalism is indeed a meritocracy, as merit gets you ahead in the market, regardless of how you get ahead. Outthinking a rival company by using tools the other wouldn't have lowered themselves to using is worthy of merit, since their actions got them ahead financially. You think any of the major corporations in the world were established though fair play? Only the strongest make it in the free market." - If that's a meritocracy, then kleptocracies are meritocracies. Either way, I'm not very critical of markets in general. Market socialism gives many of the advantages of capitalism while the people get the full product of their labour (rather than a significant fraction of it stolen by the owner of the corporation/means of production). Central planning is NOT a tenet of socialism, but rather just for the central planning branch of it. Using tools that the other wouldn't have means the tool is probably unethical (e.g. not paying people a living wage).

"As for your second statement, textbook socialist defense. "Only those with money can make money", as is the case with anyl person looking to build a business. Plenty of people lacking funds make it big in the corporate world. Sam Walton came from a farming family, and had to work hard to build a business for himself. In the end, he died a billionaire because he worked to become one. That is merit; hard work and effort that turned Walton from a farmer's son to a multi-billionaire." - Many people in this world make millions of dollars during their life (such as doctors, lawyers, etc.). How can someone's labour be worth a billion dollars? They did NOT do a billion dollars worth of work. Rather, they stole it from their employees. Though owners can work as well (in which case they should receive a fair compensation for what labour they actually do - one person does NOT make a corporation "great"/"successful"), many owners don't even work at all, and rather just own the corporation and take the surplus value (profit) to add to their pockets. And then they get to "invest", which is them dictating what gets to be funded. None of that is fair. Even when owners do work, they don't deserve tens of millions. Some people do go from poor to rich, but that's a rare exception, not the rule.

"As for immigration, it is very valid to the conversation, as nearly all socialist parties (such as the US Socialist Party) make it part of their party platform to completely deregulate immigration, saying it is caused by capitalist "pig-dogs". From the mouth of the Party itself: "The Socialist Party works to build a world in which everyone will be able to freely move across borders, to visit and to live wherever they choose."" - Many socialists say that, but it's NOT a tenet of socialism. It's a social issue. I think that the economic problems of immigration are solved by increasing the number of jobs, and that the social problems could be solved by anti-extremist oaths. In fact, most groups of immigrants commit less crime than natives. This is my personal opinion.

"Laos, Vietnam, China, and Cuba were indeed socialist states. You cannot argue your way out of it. Many of the core tenants of socialism such as cooperatives, central planning, public ownership, workplace democracy, and common ownership were implemented by all socialist states mentioned. They all implemented some form of socialism. Just because it wasn't your form of socialism, doesn't mean that it still wasn't socialism. Facts are facts." - They (Laos, Vietnam, China) didn't ever have many of those elements, though, much less today. There wasn't significant workplace democracy in any of them with the probable exception of Cuba. They might have gotten a bit closer to socialism than capitalist countries, but they weren't socialist. Facts are facts. :o

"Decentralized planning as a concept in socialism only came about after it became clear centralized planned, the main part of socialist economics, was a failure." - Not true at all. Many socialist theorists talked about models like that, syndicalism, and market socialism long before the Russian Revolution (Proudhon, to start).

"Lenin, who pushed to build a truly socialist state, admitted that socialist economics didn't work, and developed the New Economic Policy which combined capitalism with socialism, because socialist economics was BS. It didn't work, and the biggest socialist of all time admitted that." - I think Russia just wasn't developed enough for it to work yet. He wanted the country to develop further so it would be successful. Lastly, if you hold socialism to these standards, you've got to hold capitalism to the same ones - it's caused poverty and death in many regions of the world (examples: Asia (British India), Africa (Belgian Congo)).