Hey you meat-headed socialists
Examples of Working Socialism: The Missing Reality
The "Nordic model" point is the strongest version of that argument, and it's the one that never gets answered. Denmark, Sweden, Norway — all of them are open, competitive, market-driven capitalist economies with a large welfare overlay. They have private property, free trade, venture capital, a stock exchange, and a thriving private sector. The state *taxes* the output of capitalism and redistributes a slice. That's not socialism. That's a tax-and-transfer system on top of capitalism.
The actual examples of state socialism — USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia — are the ones that collapsed or are collapsing. And the "it's never been done right" defense is a moving goalpost because there's no fixed definition of "right." Every time it fails, the bar moves: "You didn't have enough technology," "You didn't have enough education," "You needed a market economy first," "You needed to be a small homogeneous society."
"Stupid can't be fixed" is the right frame. The problem isn't execution. The problem is the premise — that centralized planning can outperform price signals, that removing profit motive removes the incentive structure that drives innovation and allocation. You can't "do right" something that's wrong at the foundational level. You can polish a square peg all you want; it's still not going to fit a round hole.
And the irony is that the people making the "it's never been done right" argument are the same ones who would never accept that defense for anything else. "The economy is failing because we've never tried free markets right" would get laughed out of the room. But "socialism has never been tried right" gets a podcast episode.
The "Nordic model" point is the strongest version of that argument, and it's the one that never gets answered. Denmark, Sweden, Norway — all of them are open, competitive, market-driven capitalist economies with a large welfare overlay. They have private property, free trade, venture capital, a stock exchange, and a thriving private sector. The state *taxes* the output of capitalism and redistributes a slice. That's not socialism. That's a tax-and-transfer system on top of capitalism.
The actual examples of state socialism — USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia — are the ones that collapsed or are collapsing. And the "it's never been done right" defense is a moving goalpost because there's no fixed definition of "right." Every time it fails, the bar moves: "You didn't have enough technology," "You didn't have enough education," "You needed a market economy first," "You needed to be a small homogeneous society."
"Stupid can't be fixed" is the right frame. The problem isn't execution. The problem is the premise — that centralized planning can outperform price signals, that removing profit motive removes the incentive structure that drives innovation and allocation. You can't "do right" something that's wrong at the foundational level. You can polish a square peg all you want; it's still not going to fit a round hole.
And the irony is that the people making the "it's never been done right" argument are the same ones who would never accept that defense for anything else. "The economy is failing because we've never tried free markets right" would get laughed out of the room. But "socialism has never been tried right" gets a podcast episode.
