Socialism will never work because it’s founded on emancipation, and you can’t force people to emancipate themselves. That would be the opposite of emancipation.
I’m not sure if this is a quote, I can’t remember where I heard it.
“Emancipation” in this case meaning emancipation from wage slavery.
That doesn’t make any sense as a statement. It sounds like you can’t force freedom on people, but yeah you can make them free without consent but I don’t get how that makes sense in this context.
Multiple countries show socialism works perfectly fine for essential and shared services and other things a society needs. It doesn’t work for everything, which is why so many countries are a blend of socialist public stuff like universal healthcare, free education, and those kinds of things whle still having capitalism in the firm of private for profit companies for non-essential stuff like restaurants and clothing stores.
Note that if the country has socialist in the name it probably isn’t actually socialist in practice.
This is a really important take that not enough people understand.
Very few people are asking for universal socialism. Capitalism works fine for some industries, Socialism works great for some industries. The government needs to figure out which ones are which, and implement rules around that.
The big one right now that people are just starting to figure out is that capitalism sucks at real estate. The free market failures there are significant and causing a lot of problems.
IMO land should be strictly owned by the government, and only rented to citizens. This should be the primary source of tax revenue for a country, not income taxes. Use more land, pay more taxes. Use less land, pay less taxes. Land taxes also benefit from being the only thing you can never hide, because you can’t put it under a table or move it offshore.
No. Socialism is not when the government does stuff.
Socialism refers to workers owning the means of production. Free education and universal healthcare are not socialist in themselves.
Technically free education and universal healthcare are more communist than socialist (as in, they achieve communal control/ownership over them instead of just social ownership). But broadly, communism is a form of socialism so…
And before anyone says that either of those examples aren’t controlled/owned by the government, let me point out that having a monopoly on who pays for something is an awful lot of control over it. You even see this with (nongovernmental) health insurance; they exert a lot of control on what doctors do by saying what they will and won’t pay for. Ownership is just the end game of control.
Sure they are: production is undertaken to fulfill a social need.
Not exactly.
Socialism is defined as:
Essentially, the workers should own the means of production. This would involve workers having democratic control over their workplace, and have control over their produce.
Universal Healthcare and free education is not socialist, it’s just government funded.