The question doesn’t need to be hypothetical. I am moving to a country exactly like that. From the US.

Lack of modern health care coverage alone is enough to justify it. A bonus is that the quality of life across the board is significantly higher.

That is objectively not socialism (any definition of socialism that begins by defining it as a form of capitalism is fundamentally confused)

That said, I’d agree that it is a widespread misunderstanding today. And what people mean when they say socialism is usually actually social democracy (which despite sounding like the word socialism is a mixed system based on capitalism)

Using that misunderstanding as the definition I would definitely live in many of those countries. Many have some of the highest qualities of life in the world, low rates of poverty, universal access to good healthcare and education, and good social mobility.

E.g Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Germany

Provided there is an appropriate amount of technocracy (decisions made by experts rather than politicians), it’d be hard for me to think of a better form of government.

Anyway, this was largely the US until Regan. Social safety net could’ve been stronger, but that had to evolve. Same as in Europe.

Except , racism. Addressing that is not a part of any definition of socialism that I’m aware of. Equality is certainly going along with the spirit of this definition of “socialism”

“Socialists of Lemmy, would you move to a country that someone who has absolutely no idea what socialism is thinks is socialist?”

Lmao.

@nodsocket @PetDinosaurs > OP: what socialist policies would you implement?
> commenter: what do you mean by socialism?
> OP: let’s go with an incorrect definition of socialism. what social democrat policies would you implement?

When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy

Lol. Lmao, even

I would love to.

No, “most people” do not consider that to be what socialism is. Particularly those of us who live in countries with the aforementioned policies. Here we’ve had real socialists who wanted to take away our fundamental individual rights, amongst them the right to ownership, which frankly is a scary idea.

A lot of our regulations and limits on the free market don’t have a socialist bent at all, but are intended to defend our individual liberties against large corporations, which if left unchecked can become corporate institutions, something the US has fallen victim to.

I’d consider these policies as important, if not moreso than our social welfare systems. The social mobility and safety provided by these are meaningless if an arbitrary decision by google, amazon or some bank can singlehandedly ruin your life.

It is, the term for this type of system is called Social Democracy which is not a synonym for socialism, but people (Americans at least) confused and conflate the two terms to the point that they’ve become one and the same in the minds of many people who don’t really understand the terms or their origins.

Because we’re too busy categorizing this stupid shit into bins of “good” and “bad” when reality is a greyscale between these two. These are fairly reasonable points and should be viewed as a more centrist POV, but since we (read: primarily North America) have a tribal “us vs. them” animosity about it we lump many reasonable ideas together on each end of the spectrum. Things like not having to go bankrupt when you or a loved one needs an emergency hospital visit somehow automatically gets lumped in with the other extreme “socialist” ideas just to solely argue against it and not budge from their end of the extreme.

Words, used in non technical contexts, mean what people mean when they use them.

Descriptive. Not proscriptive.

I’m not sure if spending more per capita means “socialize” healthcare. Isn’t the problem with US healthcare is that “accessing healthcare at any time without the worry of financial burden” is not currently true for everyone?

Socialism isn’t a welfare state, socialism is when the workers own the means of production.

Don’t forget the farmers who are subsidized.

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Yes, they have a tiny, insignificant amount.

An entire country has to have workplace democracy for the country to be socialist.

This is kinda like saying “doesn’t any country with a slice of bread have food”

Yeah, they’re really indoctrinated by chinese propaganda, I can’t stand them, and I’m a damn communist.

Workplace democracy can work a vast number of ways, and I can’t claim to have figured out what the best way of doing it is, and this is one of the most contentious areas in socialist theory, but I’ll give a relatively easy to understand example:

A business running democratically, instead of having a CEO who decides everything, could have weekly meetings where everyone gets together and decides what is needed, pay structure, schedules, etc, building decisions through consensus, and then falling back to a vote if people disagree, they could also work like a modern democratic republic and have the workers elect people to various positions, and then maintain heirarchy, if the business is far too large for consensus building to work.

The way a business works currently, under capitalism, is often with a CEO at the top, who controls a group of people directly below him, and so forth, this results in bad divergent incentives, due to the keys to power problem (if you’re not familiar, watch this: https://invidious.asir.dev/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs ). One such example is if i’m a walmart employee, do I give a fuck if walmart does well? No. As long as they don’t go out of business, i’ll be paid the same, who gives a fuck how well the business does if I’m not a partial owner and have no say?

In what way? I have yet to hear of a single socialist policy from cuba.

Do note: socialism is worker ownership over the means of production.

Well, that is a pretty ridiculous interpretation.

Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.

An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn’t pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say “workplace democracy”

It’s quite simple, right now businesses are structured in a totalitarian manner, socialism seeks to overthrow that totalitarian regime within your workplace, there’s a number of ways to do this, nobody is suggesting the janitor should decide how a surgeon does his job, we just want to eliminate the useless position of CEO, and replace it with democratic systems managed by the people who work the jobs.

An easy to understand version of this would be if every company was transformed into a worker co-op, but that of course is only one of many models for socialism.

It is important to note that the government is not the worker, and therefore government control over the means of production DOES NOT COUNT.

hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.

I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.

I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?

I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.

It means the janitor has a vote on how their duties are done

In the way the words are being used here, it absolutely does.

There’s been a lot of propaganda for a long time that “socialist” countries are authoritarian, abusive, and usually dictatorships, so by that measure, of course you would have to make the argument you do, but the fact of the matter is that socialist policies are just policies where we pool resources as a group to provide a public good. It’s opposite would actually be free market capitalism, where you have to subscribe to a fire service to protect your house (it worked that way on the US once, feel free to Google it).

The methods of governing are a completely separate axis, ranging between power vested solely in an individual or small group, and true democracy.

It is absolutely possible to have countries that are democratically socialist, or free market dictatorships. Just because America is still mainly a democracy doesn’t mean we can’t look at it’s policies and see a clearly socialist component of public services. In my mind the truly perplexing thing is how people can label things like a tax to provide everyone access to free books and other media, taxes that support universal fire and police protection, and taxes that support free education for everyone (through high school only!) and say they are just normal non-socialist things, and then look at taxes that would pay for higher level education, for health protection, or for childcare so you are always able to go earn a living, and suddenly they are foaming at the mouth and screaming “socialism!”

But trying to derail an entire conversation by arguing about one word is a lot easier than trying to actually address the points of an argument, so we see that a lot.

No friend, I meant the opposite.

I live in the US, a gold plated dystopia. I would be very much prefer to live in the Nordic nations. I dislike the United States, I see the Nordic nations as role model nations.

The bulk of that immigration happened in the 19th and early 20th century when European countries were the most capitalistic and economically stratified.

I feel like a lot of redditors are joining because I see a lot of down votes but only one response.

Yes that is true, but the average person in those countries in the 1800’s was starving which changes things a lot.

I took your question as “people living in the US or Europe, would you move to a socialist country” so the average person in that would not be starving, so family and friends matter more.

Are you suggesting that improvement is impossible? If it can only get worse, then it is imperative to push back in defense.

How can we do nothing and still look our children in the eyes?

I love Japan’s bike roads. Anyway yeah we can do so much better. End corporate power.

To add to this, I can’t help but notice that pretty much all private sector businesses in control of quality of life have become extremely greedy. There was a time in the 70s where your home wasn’t that expensive, wages were comfortable, retirement was expected, and something like healthcare, with private insurance companies, was not expensive. Even hospital visits without insurance were still feasible.

This makes the capitalism model appealing. We have the freedom to run a business, the government is small, regulations are light, and everyone gets along. It makes sense that old folks are out of touch with how rampantly expensive everything is, because they have their $20k home paid off, they got their social security and pension, and they’re on Medicare (which is ironically a social program). There is little reason to change anything for your personal benefit if you are already retired.

However, the business model of making as much money as possible has caught up, and when you’re getting charged $70 for a Tylenol pill (but don’t worry, insurance covers it), you know there is a serious problem. “But my insurance covers it” is exactly what they want you to think to let this continue for a few more decades.

If I have a broken car and want to sell it to my neighbor, how can I do that if profit is eliminated?

I would argue that Germany is not a socialist country. Politics are targeted at the already wealthy and cooperations.

I’m not versed enough in politics and history to give detailed examples. I’m just a normal guy. However, I’m currently listening to the Jung & Naiv podcast on Spotify.

In episode 661 they discuss the development of the housing sector since the 1950s and very little in the 18th century. The important information is that the housing sector grew from being socialist to being a housing market.

I think they mention that in the 50s there existed a “Kostenmiete” (Cost-rent). That would only be allowed by law to be as high as it needed to be to cover the costs for building the house/flat. The owners were not allowed to make profit exceeding 3.5%. Any profit had to be put into housing again to keep the housing sector growing. Around that time the state was heavily supporting housing unions and other groups (not cooperations) to build housing. The state itself built 500.000 !!! appartments a year. Last year the interview says they built 6 appartments. Six, in case you thought you read a typo.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ At least in the housing market we are not socialist anymore and it becomes worse every year. Education becomes worse every year. The medical sector becomes worse every year. Public transport becomes worse every year. Loans do not keep up with inflation. Everything becomes more expensive.

Yes, we are better off than many. But are we not just richer slaves with more benefits than others? The interview says that there exist studies that estimate 11 million households to qualify for social housing. In some cities that is 60% of their population. 60% quality for social housing. Are we alright?

My impression is that Germany is considered a social democracy. Maybe it is towards the milder end of the spectrum but still fits the definition.

As an outsider I think Germany has got a lot of things right, and found a good balance. Not perfect, but good.

This is basically the million dollar question and also the source of confusion, when one person thinks of socialism they could be thinking of either social democracy, like modern Germany, or a communist state like the DDR… so depending on your point of view, you’ll have a different answer

Hahahahahahahaha!