I guess you're replying to me. First: you need to qualify your usage of "socialist". I mean no insult, but you sound like you are very inexperienced with political and economical theories and models, and you use words and terms very loosely, inconsistently and erroneously.
Back from the test.
Anyway...
I thought about it, and my thoughts are:
A) You said "There are some socilaists economy conutries that do well, therfore all other cotunries will do well in a socilaists economy". Which is a fallacy.
Strawman, I made no such claim. Fact: The social-liberal economies of the world, including Scandinavian countries and Germany, and some others, are generally strong, stable and consistently rank much higher than the US in measurements of life satisfaction, education and quality of life indexes, while USA ranks around the same place as Mexico. Sources for this abound. Speculation: given the state of the US and its current trajectory, claiming that the country would have been better off under a regulated social-liberal system is a no-brainer since there is almost no way you could have a
worse situation. In fact, changing to a lottery-based system controlled by Scientologists and reruns of Twilight Zone and Sesame Street would be better.
B) You have brought some measurment such as GDP per capital or something in which the US is behind European countries. It's just one metric and it doesn't tell the whole story like neglecting the fact that the US is still the strongest economy in the world. And is capitalist.
We could argue that there is a difference between being the largest and the strongest economy, that is tangential, though. However, economic strength of a country should benefit the country's members: its citizens. In this case the median US American fares rather poorly, while those of by your words "less economically strong" countries fare much better.
C) Last but not least, even if the US would do better with a socialist economy, many people(me included) would hate to have their wealth nomralized with massive taxes. I would hate to have to earn the same as someone who just finished high school and started selling vetables, even though I have years of industrial and academic experience.
Even if I would make more in that socialist economy, I would still prefer to make less, but with better compensation than a high schooler.
It's the principle.
First, having higher taxes and a progressive tax system does not mean perfectly equal income; work more or educate yourself and you generally earn significantly more in social-liberal markets too. Secondly, the average American pays private health insurances, saves for education, etc. In social-liberal economies among other things health care and higher education are free for citizens. After taking such post-tax private transactions into account the disposable income of the medial US American is actually lower than that of the median Swede, and significantly lower than that of Norwegians.
Blindly screaming "principle!" is the common denominator of tools, zealots, fundamentalists, fanatics and terrorists. I wager you would rather not belong to any of those categories?
Player
