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Re: Misidentification of capitalism and socialism, what are your thoughts?

Caley McKibbin — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 04:17:04 GMT

In America you count sheep. In Russia sheep count you. In Cuba hospital patients count cockroaches.

Re: Misidentification of capitalism and socialism, what are your thoughts?

vaduka — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 04:15:14 GMT

But Cuba is great, it has free healthcare, you can go there on vacation.

They also have a cool looking dictator, what is wrong with you people?

I know that this is a joke, but nevertheless I will write a reply. I live in a country where the so called health-care is so called free. This is what I call socialism on a small scale. Things are so bad that soon there will not be any health-care at all. BTW I am living in an ex-USSR block member.

Re: Misidentification of capitalism and socialism, what are your thoughts?

Drew — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 04:09:58 GMT

But Cuba is great, it has free healthcare, you can go there on vacation.

They also have a cool looking dictator, what is wrong with you people?

Re: Misidentification of capitalism and socialism, what are your thoughts?

vaduka — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 03:57:31 GMT

How could anything be helpful to a country? What is a country? More specifically, can the so called country be a property owner and if your answer is in the positive I would further like to let me know how does a country acquire ownership over a scarce resource?

Let's not quibble over the question whether or not such an entity is natural or not, and also in order to proceed with my writing I will give you the respective answer to my last question - it does so through the employment of coercion. And since there might be some sort of an utilitarian who might claim the following:

"Well, it does not matter how the property was acquired, because I like the outcome, I like what was made out of it (i.e. the hotels, the beaches)"

which means that he appreciates the way the country chose to dispose with the stolen property, i.e. he argues on the basis of this particular outcome, which he likes, that socialism can provide people with likable stuff, although

A) he does not make a comparison with the outcome the free market could have provided in case there was not a monopoly over the means of production

B) we do not know whether or not people like the outcome, we know from his statement that he likes it; maybe those who stole the property like it too, but this does not validate their action neither economically, nor ethically, for I can ask the question why are their subjective preferences more important and their actions more justifiable than those of the original factor owners?

A conclusion can be derived from A and B. That is the following: individual human actors would have been better off without their property stolen and what comes in a consequential way - without depriving them of the opportunity to act upon their subjective preferences using the non-stolen property (which means that they would have had much lower opportunity cost, since a want placed higher in their ordinal value scale would have been satisfied).

In a conclusion I'd like to say that he appeals to the consequences. He did not make a valid logical argument.

Re: Misidentification of capitalism and socialism, what are your thoughts?

Caley McKibbin — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 03:49:00 GMT

All you need to know about Cuba in one convenient location.

Misidentification of capitalism and socialism, what are your thoughts?

Drew — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 03:29:34 GMT

This is a pretty weird experience I had in Cuba 6 years ago. I was very young and we went on vacation there.

During my trip I met all sorts of other tourists, like myself, mostly Canadian, and one of them glorified the socialism in Cuba and how wonderfull it is. He said" Look how beautifull it is here, the hotels, the beaches, the dances, socialism has really helped this country.". Obviously at the time I was more economically ignorant then I am today so I didn't say anything.

Now , when I think of that incident, I realise that (~~getelman)~~gentleman didn't see the difference between how it feels to be a tourist and how it feels to actually live there.

What are your thoughts?