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[–] killercanuck 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Most people have two sides to them so it's impossible to develop a purely socialist society, at least one that's larger than a few hundred members living in a tribal community. If you just base everything on selflessness to create your society it's going to go to shit. It doesn't matter if your rich, poor, a celebrity, some average working stiff you need a selfish struggle to fulfill your own needs. There are some things that get conflated with socialism like having law and order, roads, and a basic safety net for others that in fact are more for the market to reinforce itself. Even some basic access to healthcare and schools will mean you can create more selfish independent individuals. Universal state mandated services somehow manage to fuck up societies making people greedier out of desperation because they can't satisfy themselves. Worse is it turns a lot of people into thinking scarcity is a good thing so they can use it as a tool to promote their dangerous ideologies.

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[–] Charlez6 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Those examples are not conflated with socialism, they are fragments of socialism that we've foolishly allowed because we were naive and they sounded nice. A "basic safety net" is a distortion of the market, not "for the market to reinforce itself", whatever that means. It's about as directly as you can possibly follow the core tenet of the ideology: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Along with education and health care, you managed to nail the holy trinity of sweet-sounding socialist society-killing poison.

Even law and roads could be argued as socialist implementations while the government has a monopoly on the provision of those and claims the right to extract funding via coercion, but I'm sure most would agree these are relatively tolerable transgressions.

Charity, education and health care are important; many would say that's why we need government to oversee them, I would say that's why we need to keep government very fucking far away from them so they can't screw it all up.

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[–] killercanuck ago 

That's true. But I've seen too many quacks and fraudsters running trains on innocent people with shit like quantum medicine, holistic treatments, homeopathy, and a ton of other bunk products. The governments definitely shouldn't be providing these services for sure but having some type of fallback plan to make sure you're population isn't getting fleeced by criminals or dropping dead from treatable diseases does benefit everyone. Having something like a resurgence in TB because that 3% of your population can't see a doctor can't be a good thing. Neither is mandatory insurance or medical insurance schemes that run the coffers dry. There's also a lot to be said about unemployment insurance or pension plans in countries that have a strong economy but not a very diverse one where you're sole cash cow is always in flux.