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@lxo

Norway isn’t competition to capitalism, it’s capitalism done better than in some other places. The competition is Cuba.

Social programs are not “elements of socialism”. They’re elements of regulated capitalism. The point of regulation is to align the goals of private industry with societal goals. One way to do this is to tax them and use this money to create a social safety net.

America does it, too, just not as well, and there are specific reasons for this. I have another blog post about that, but the short version is that America is not a monoculture.

Marx claimed socialism was a transitional state towards communism, but nobody has ever transitioned. That’s why the USSR was run by the Communist Party but the country’s name identified it as socialist.

As I pointed out in that blog post, Marx never offered a recipe for communism, he merely described how it might be if anyone ever made it. Nobody has, nobody ever will.

So we need to compare apples to apples: actual capitalism vs. actual socialism. There is no actual communism, so it’s not in the running.

We could talk about how easy it is for nations to regulate international organizations, but it’s pointless because any such criticism ignores the alternative.