@hitmyspot @GoodEye8 @solarpunk
And another thing 😀
How can you call the USSR a totalitarian state because of the Gulags and Stalin Purges but not say the same thing about the US? We lock up an almost identical share of our population as Russia did at the height of the gulags.
USA=2.4% at its last peak in 2008
Russia=2.5% at its peak in 1950

How about the killings done for economic or state building purposes by those uniquely evil “communists”? I won’t even bother gathering the statistics of Stalin’s Purges vs US genocide of native peoples. At least, Stalin stopped the purges, the US continues to immiserate the native populations and won’t live up to legally binding treaty obligations, see Arizona et al. vs Navajo Nation et al.

At the end of the day, the US and the USSR were/are colonial empires run by oligarchies. The results are going to be substantially similar. Yet the USSR was within spitting distance of US life expectancy on half the GDP per capita for most of the 20th century, until capitalism was introduced. A small amount of egalitarianism goes a long way.

@hitmyspot @GoodEye8 @solarpunk “Yet, every country that has tried communism has failed, often with devastating consequences for the people there.” This is American government propaganda, that shows a lack of investigation into the topic.

As people seem to frequently need to be reminded, words have definitions, “socialism” is workers/democratic control of the means of production. It is tough to call a system lacking democratic control of the economy “communism”. Still, I will play this game using the systems commonly defined as “communist” or “socialist”

How come ending “communism” in Russia knocked 10 years off male life expectancy?

Cuba has a per capita income around 1/7th the US, yet it has a life expectancy equal to the US, all while being embargoed for 60 years. That doesn’t sound like a failure. All while still not being “Socialist”, merely not letting rich people control the economy is enough to get these amazing results.

The Norwegian government owns 60% of the economy, 90% if private housing is excluded. They are richer per capita and have longer life expectancies than Americans.

The greater the social ownership of an economy the better the outcomes on metrics that actually matter; life expectancy, infant mortality, education, housing, free time. Frankly, it is common sense.

@hitmyspot @GoodEye8 @solarpunk UBI is nothing more than welfare, meaning the rich give it and the rich can take it away. Ownership is the welfare we give ourselves. Be a cool kid and check out social wealth funds, all the benefits of UBI none of class warfare. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/project/tackling-inequality-through-the-social-ownership-of-capital/

@ComradeKhoumrag @JacobCoffinWrites The US dollar became a fiat currency in the 1970s. Funny enough, US rate of growth starts to decline around that time. The first steam engine went into use around 1776, kicking off the industrial revolution.

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