12/28/2019
Excerpts from: Hugo Newman
… I’m willing to grant, for the sake of argument, that all historical cases of in-name-only socialist or communist states—among them, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, East Germany, North Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Cambodia, and Ethiopia, to name just a few—were not, in substance, socialist states. At best, they were flawed and failed attempts to implement socialism. …
… Now consider the following list of countries: the United States, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands. …
… All of these countries certainly manifest their own internal flaws and failures which socialists are only too happy to publicize and criticize and then lay at the feet of capitalism. …
… none of these countries is really capitalist in the ideal sense. In fact, they’re all some admixture of state intervention and imperfectly liberal markets. … capitalism is no more “debunked” by these in-name-only cases than socialism is by its own list of in-name-only cases.