2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Please, Democrats: Don’t Attack Bernie Sanders for Joining Your Party - Joan Walsh [View all]PosterChild
(1,307 posts).... who has been elected to represent and speak for his country has the knowledge, experience and authority to correctly characterize and speak for it. If he didn't we would hear about it from the people he represents, just as if Obama were to incorrectly characterize the American economy as socialist we would hear about it.
It's pretty much absurd to characterize a country as socialist and at the same time characterize its PM as center right.
My problem with socialism, understood as the collective, political ownership of the means of production and distribution is that it doesn't work.
It doesn't lead to material prosperity, quite the opposite - it leads to impoverishment. This is basically because market mechanisms and price allocation of resources are necessary for rational, reasonable, and humaine economic decisions. This is why attempts at economic organization outside of a market ecology have been abject failures.
This is aggravated by the attempt to do away with any significant economic inequality. Without the incentives that material inequality provides an extreme free-rider mentality prevails and the result is a race to the bottom.
And finally, as an individualist and a liberal I am opposed to the supresion of personal freedom that generally results from collectivistic economic regimes and organizations.
Socialism is not a progressive ideology. Like other forms of illiberal collectivism, it has been relagated to the proverbial dust bin of history.