Tom, I already explained this to you once before. And I know you were paying attention because you hadn't attempted using your absurd historical analogy theory until you tried it on McFly a few days ago and he, being a historian, cleaned your clock with it.

Here it is again.

0) You have claimed that Socialism in any way shape or form is bad, because you can point to extreme Socialist regimes in history that are generally conceded to be very bad ones (such as the USSR, Maoist China, etc).

1) However, there are many other regimes in history and today which are also considered to be awful, which are NOT Socialist (I used Attila the Hun and Nazi Germany as examples, you dismissed the second as just another kind of Socialism, over my protests). I think you conceded the Huns were stinkers, but claimed the Soviets were even worse. Socialism is a relatively new invention. Awful has been around forever. If Socialism is indeed highly correlated with awfulness, then those countries which are awful must be Socialist. We know that is not necessarily true. The world is full of capitalist right wing dictatorships that will torture at the drop of a hat.

2) If Socialism is indeed highly correlated with awfulness, then the more Socialist a country is, the more awful it must be. This is not true either, there are many European and Asian Socialist states, which by your description, in fact, most of them have excellent human rights records and constitutional democracies as well as free enterprise economies. They are not even slightly awful, although by your description, they are far more Socialist than we, like the UK, Canada, France, and Japan.

3)Of the known Socialist states with admitted histories and reputations as brutal dictatorships, the vast majority were either governments set up by the USSR and the PRC, or were otherwise highly influenced by them. This includes all the Iron Curtain socialist countries, as well as the PRCs satellites and allies. IN fact, it can be argued the PRC owes its own system to the Soviet model too. So there is a causal relationship between the awfulness of these states, they are dictatorships because they are satellites or colonies of dictatorships, not because they are Socialist.

4) Both China and the PRC are now officially embracing capitalism, that is, at least partially rejecting socialism. So are many other states of the former Sino-Soviet bloc. Are not many of these states still not dictatorships and brutal autocracies? Shouldn't any distancing from doctrinaire Socialism immediately lead to a corresponding increase in personal and political freedoms? Although many former Iron curtain countries have indeed democratized, many have not.

5) In other words, there appears to be no correlation, positive or negative, between "Socialism" and
"Freedom". All you can really say with any confidence is that Both the Soviets and the Chinese were dictatorships. And guess what, they were dictatorships before they became Socialist.

6) We have demonstrated that there is no historical correlation between Socialism and tyranny. There only appears to be if you selectively pick your time periods and geographical areas.

7) A much more reasonable theory is the assumption that you seek to legitimize your own political ideology of Libertarian laissez faire Ayn Rand capitalism by pointing to patterns you have imposed on history by the careful selection of data from the historical record. And you get very upset when anyone points that out to you--that your proof is not proof at all. In fact, the very idea that history cannot be used to "prove" anything is terrifying to you, because your whole justification for what you believe is threatened if that crutch is pulled away.

8) One more thing. You will note that in the arguments above I have made no claim that Socialism is good, or that Capitalism (or whatever the "opposite" of Socialism is) is bad. That's not what I'm arguing in this post. What I'm saying is that your "patterns from the past" theory, no matter how useful or insightful it might be to detect general trends, (like avoid invading Russia in winter) proves absolutely nothing, one way or another. And I believe THAT is one pattern you don't like, because of what it can't show.

Santayana Good Bye.