User blog comment:Centrist16/SOMETHING EVERYONE MUST KNOW/@comment-3398633-20150809140026/@comment-3398633-20150812222844

1. Anyone willing to work hard and save for a period of time can make their own enterprise and control the means of production themselves. Look at the man who founded Chobani. He worked hard, moved to the United States from Turkey, purchased a factory, and built a multi-billion dollar industry making yogart. By doing this, he created thousands of jobs and opprotunities in areas where there were no jobs. Such success stories wouldn't be possible under your form of socialism. If he bought a factory, that would mean that he, an individual, controlled the means of production, something that isn't allowed under socialism. Therefore, he wouldn't have the ability to create jobs or profits, that socialism claims it wants to do.

2. If time spent working isn't how pay will be determined, nor the amount of you put into your work, then you have, but default, built-in inequality. The socialist model is the same as the capitalist model, the only difference being that you give the workers a choice to accept pay inequality. This is just hilarious. Also, if one group of people owns the means of production, then that means there will be another group which doesn't own the means of production. So there is also a built-in class system. I mean, you can't produce and waste resources just because some people need work. It's wasteful production. That's what the Soviet Union did to lower unemployment, and it didn't work. It just wasted goods nobody needed and destroyed the economy.

3. The Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Albania had no threat of rebellion for a long period of time, yet none of them succeeded in developing strong socialist markets. Yugoslavia tapped out of socialism by the 1960s, and the Soviet Union by the late-1970s. Real market socialist economies didn't work because they simply didn't work.

4. I already mentioned four nations that were under no foreign or domestic-related strains. Once again, you place socialism in quotes, but people who have studied these nations for decades, and even lived in or held political positions in these nations, classify them as socialist. Yugoslavia was the model socialist state, and for a period of time it had a good run, the only officially socialist nation I actually respected. However, it didn't work because the economy couldn't support all of the government-sponsored programs given to the people such as free healthcare, education, and pensions, forcing the government to adopt more capitalist policies to survive. Too little too late. Socialist states more often than not, collapse under their own weight.

5. Why would social democracy be classified as socialism if it was "capitalism-lite" then?

6. I'll go with what the peer-reviewed, time-tested observors have stated was socialism thank you. No offense, but I think that the information coming from actual economists and political historians carries a bit more weight.