Week-07 Response: The Current Realities of Socialism around the World

Is it possible to have a socialist economic regime without an authoritarian state? In its implementation how can socialism be prevented from turning into communism?
by @dbruce

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I believe the reason there is such a large group of people that still advocate for socialism in America is that they believe the successful socialism will come from a governmental regime that only mandates economics but does not enforce other totalitarian ideals. I believe it is impossible for a country to have a ruling party that willingly takes only control of the production and regulations of the economy, but leaves behind the other tempting controls of the country. People, especially those in power, will always want more and more control because they have authoritarian problems, and any truly good person to enter into the government is either converted or eaten alive by the system for not being selfish enough. That is why time and time again we watch young promising congresspeople enter into the system only to slowly lose themselves to the greed and the party, and that isn't even in a socialistic country where the greed is even worse.
I personally do not believe there is a way to prevent socialism from devolving into something worse, whether communism or totalitarianism. Once you give the government free reign of the economy of the country you have lost all ability to control them. Money is the most important thing when it comes to keeping a country at peace with itself but when people relinquish their ability to control their markets, they are relinquishing the ability to buy weapons and support from other countries in order to protect themselves from being completely overruled. If a country truly wanted socialism to be successful in their country, they might have to implement two separate governmental regimes, one for general ruling and one for economics, however, the truth is we all know that those two regimes will never stay separate from each other but instead be feeding into each other's pockets. I feel that we will be circling in these what-if statements for the next 50 years until people realize that in theory socialism is a good concept for the general public, however, because man is selfish and hateful we will never be able to successfully create a regime of the magnitude to government millions of people and successfully uphold the socialistic ideals. In order to slowly see if it can be successful, we would need to start with a population of probably less than 20 and slowly grow it until we see where the breakdown occurs, but that idea is more of an experimental thought process, not something that will actually be successful in the real world.