Younger people normally associate socialism with fairness and capitalism with selfishness, but these are not correct. There have been polls to show what people prefer and they show that a lot of people prefer socialism, but this could be because papers are only talking about the things that sound good and not the other bad parts of socialism. Also people are comparing socialism to countries like Denmark or Sweden whenever they are not socialist. Socialism is collective ownership of how things are produced (which is not how Sweden or Denmark are). Capitalism is better at coordinating ideas and prices and things like that which allow the market to do well. Socialism does not allow that because if you can’t coordinate everything together then if you want products, you need to know how to make them yourself pretty much. So with any advanced products, it will not work as well. Capitalism and socialism are a spectrum and all countries are somewhere on that spectrum with no countries being completely capitalist or socialist.
Venezuela is an example of once being capitalist and then moving closer to socialism. At first it seemed to work pretty well, but it was just because of the oil there. Once people looked closer, it revealed that things were actually declining during that time and once the oil prices went down the collapse of their economy was accelerated. People had to go to other countries such as Columbia just for basic needs like food or basic supplies. Some of the Venezuelans sold their hair just to get enough money to buy food. Countries that start as socialist usually turn into totalitarian dictatorships because once economic stagnation hits, which it will if the country is socialist, then the leaders need to do something to stay in power. Once the economic power is centralized, so is the power to punish opposition. So the person in power can maintain power. In order to maintain democratic freedom, you need economic freedom and if you lose economic freedom then you lose political freedom. If the country is socialist then you will not have either because the economy will stagnate. In Cuba, the properties that are government owned, which is how it is in socialist countries, are not well maintained and are rundown. The properties that are privately owned, like in capitalist countries, are much nicer and they are the same price. Any service is not cared about as much in socialist countries because why should they care. Why should the service providers care about making a good product if it does not benefit them at all. The only reason people would try to make a better product or try to make people want to use their product is if they have an incentive to do that and socialism takes away that incentive. An example of this is there are no signs put up to show businesses because they don’t care enough to put up the signs because it’s government owned. There are also few options and bad quality of products because there is no incentive to make it good or offer options. The state restaurants are bad and poor quality while the private restaurants are much nicer. Even the private restaurants still don’t have a lot of options for their food. Not because they don’t want to, but because the government limits what they can get. North Korea is even more extreme. At night there are no lights on because the government controls when you can have them on. The income of North Korea is much less compared to South Korea and that is because North Korea is socialist and South Korea is capitalist.
Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union but didn’t do a lot of reform at first. Then they started to reform radically to be capitalist. They had a flat tax, they had transparent privatization, a big reduction in government. Its economy is growing very quickly and it is now in the top ten in the world in economic freedom. The main reason young people are drawn to socialism in the United States is because of some of the problems in the US such as, environment, black lives matter, immigration rights, etc, but they don’t think about all of the implications of being socialist and the solution to these problems is not socialism. Some people do say they want collectivization of means of production, but they want to ignore all of the other examples of that in history and how they did not work very well.
