It’s an empirical question, contends the 72-page report The Opportunity Cost of Socialism.
It looks at hard data to evaluate among others the Nordic states that many on the left now hold up as models.
What about the Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland that are so often cited by the left? Our countries, the panel contends, also
support the conclusion that socialism reduces living standards.However,
in many respects, the Nordic countries’ policies now differ significantly from what economists have in mind when they think of socialism.
For instance, they do not provide healthcare for ‘free’; Nordic healthcare financing includes substantial cost sharing. Marginal labor income tax rates in the Nordic countries today are only somewhat higher than in the United States, and Nordic taxation overall is surprisingly less progressive than U.S. taxes.The Nordic countries also tax capital income less and regulate product markets less than does the United States.
Living standards in the Nordic countries, they note, are at least 15 percent lower than in the United States.
The report examines not only the track record of socialist experiments that once were vaunted in the West, such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela.
The raport begin by pointing out that with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth,
socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse.They reference a broad body of literature on the subject and delve into
socialism’s historic visions and intents, its economic features, its impact on economic performance, and its relationship with recent policy proposals in the United States.
We find that historical proponents of socialist policies and those in the contemporary United States share some of their visions and intents.
They both characterize the distribution of income in market economies as the unjust result of ‘exploitation,’ which should be rectified by extensive state control.so you are socialist.
Karl Marx's concept of socialism follows from his concept of man.
It should be clear by now that according to this concept, socialism is not a society of regimented, automatized individuals, regardless of whether there is equality of income or not, and regardless of whether they are well fed and well clad.
It is not a society in which the individual is subordinated to the state, to the machine, to the bureaucracy. Even if the state as an abstract capitalist were the employer, even if
the entire social capital were united in the hands either of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation,sais Marx. This would not be socialism. In fact, as Marx says quite clearly in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
Communism as such is not the aim of human development.Now we can ask then, what is the aim?
Quite clearly, by Marx, the aim of socialism is the coming man.
It is to create a form of production and an organization of society in which man can overcome alienation from his product, from his work, from his fellow man, from himself and from nature; in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the world. Socialism for Marx was a resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality.
Perhaps in our opinion, democracy is the idea that we can, and often it the only way, decide on almost everything in society collectively.
Karl Marx said that democracy is the road to socialism,
but the Socialist Party of the United States said that Democracy and Socialism are one and indivisible.
