Bowser, this is really sad. I didn't think it would be this short a time before the left in this country had sanitized the history of communism to this degree. Maybe you have forgotten that communist nations had barbed wire, mine fields, machine guns, and "death zones" to keep their "contented" people in. No one crosses the ocean on inner tubes to get into Cuba.

Tom, you might be happier if you could get a bit more precise. Marx proposed an economic system.



A dictatorship is a political system.



Every single communist nation, without exception, WAS a dictatorship. I suppose you think this was bad luck, or an odd coincidence. The fact is that you cannot totally control the economic behavior of your citizens without controlling every other behavior as well. Libertarian philosophers like Hayek knew this in the 1940s and earlier.

Capitalism can have slavery, too. The US did, the Bible sanctioned it, and employers used it. Slavery was banned not because it was regarded as immoral or wrong under capitalism, but to deprive an enemy of workers. Capitalism cannot take the high, moral road about slavery. Slavery prospered under capitalism. They are not antithetical.



Slavery in the United States was an aberration, a pathetic leftover from an older agricultural society that would have been left in the dust eventually by the industrial free states even if there had been no Civil War. Good grief, how much of America's overall productivity and GNP in the last two hundred years has come from handpicked cotton and tobacco fields? How long do you think slave agriculture would have lasted in the face of industrial agriculture, or even a simple steam tractor?

Under communism EVERYONE is property. This is an improvement?

More recently the "company store" of mining companies is a great example of economic slavery under capitalism.

Not that recently. An aberration, like slavery. Not a national policy.

There are military dictatorships in largely capitalist countries...

Agreed, there are nations with oppressive or single-party political systems that have a hands-off policy toward economics and a prosperous economy. I think Singapore falls into this category, but I haven't kept track of it lately. Some Latin American nations too, although again it's been a while since I studied such things. In my opinion, such a balance is precarious, and the exception rather than the rule.

...and there are democracies in socialist countries.

Really? Where? Most democratic European nations do have a socialist party as one part of a parliamentary system, but it rarely gains total power and is constantly balanced by other parties. Sweden isn't really all that socialist anymore, having turned around before the inevitable collapse.

Here's a list I found of socialist countries in 1987, before the Berlin Wall "fell down." Check off the ones that were democracies, or held elections with more than one choice on the ballot:

Soviet Union, Mongolia, Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, North Korea, China, East Germany, Vietnam, Cuba, Congo, Somalia, South Yemen, Benin, Ethiopia, Angola, Kampuchea, Laos, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe.

Nicaragua was the only one I have ever seen where an election was held and the socialists shown the door without violence, and this was under duress.

I've spoken to people who were your basic, average citizen in Russia under their communist regime. They weren't any different than you or me, to be honest, and were content there. Didn't "have" a lot, and nobody did.

(There are people who don't need a lot of stuff. I think that trait is partly a product of Western advertising, designed to make one unhappy unless they had everything manufactured.)

(Where we talked about political repression, they talked about how minorities were treated here. Listening to one fellow, a municipal cop, the Japanese internment camps sounded like the German concentration camps. They knew their political extremes, and some ethnic groups were maltreated, and we overlook our treatment of our political extremes and some ethnic groups.)

Were as brainwashed about the US as we were about them. It worked both ways. Though theirs seems so much worse, to be honest. I think half of what we heard was BS, and the other half just B.

Yeah, your typical Eastern Bloc citizen was tickled pink to live there. None of them really wanted any of the "stuff" Amercians had, and were delighted to live in concrete apartments, sharing bathrooms, lining up for toilet paper, and crapping themselves every time there was a knock on the door. This contentment was no doubt the reason that they fled to the West like crazed lemmings when the Berlin Wall "fell down." The residents of the worst ghettos in America lived twice as well as they did, and many of them knew it, despite what their government pumped into their heads.