You think that's funny? I would bet a week's pay that there are already five pages of regulations about the type of ink you can use on eggshells.

Yeah, it's amusing about the eggs, but multiply this kind of crap by fifty thousand pages of similar regulations and you start to see a real drag on productivity. The response, of course, to the moribund economy is for the government to insist that they need more power and money.

But, Tom, I take issue with your observation about socialists and micromanagement. I've worked for micromanagers myself, and none of them were socialists except the nuns. Micromanagement isn't a political movement, it's a mental condition.

Watch your logic...just because all socialists want to control everyone's lives doesn't mean that all control freaks are socialists. Still, I wonder how many of the "micromanagers" you worked for were Democrats. Those of that type that I have met and known--the "neighborhood association" type we are all familiar with--were Democrats down to the last one. Again, this does not imply the inverse: that EVERY Democrat thinks like this, but the principles of power and centralization that the Democratic Party currently stands for does tend to attract such types.

I'm sure if you look you'll find results-oriented socialists who allow for independent initiative. Without them, those socialist governments not relying on police excesses to stay in power would have collapsed long ago.

Oh, there are grudging practical exceptions to the beautiful theories of socialism, like allowing some farmers to grow food on their own plots in the old Soviet Union, but this was a matter of raw, pragmatic survival, and not any enlightened thinking on the part of the socialists. A nation that ran itself on pure, unalloyed socialism would indeed collapse eventually (which some people might take as a clue about the benefits of this philosophy) but such collapses are long, and hideously painful for the citizens. North Korea is a good current example.

They don't make for fun headlines, though. They fall into the same category as fair and generous capitalists: impossible.

Cute. Bullshit, but cute. There is almost a century now of hard experimental evidence to compare nations run on capitalist/individualist principles with those run on socialist/collectivist principles. I think the verdict was in a long time ago on which societies were more beneficial for its citizens.