Oddbean

Margaret Thatcher said and did quite a few dumb things, and this is prominent among them. There are no Socialist countries with anything like equality. By pretending there are (or were) we empower Socialists. Which can be an advantage tactically if you're Margaret Thatcher and prefer Socialists to more moderate opposition, but that's no reason to repeat it now. Socialism has inequality. Socialism has bosses, cronyism and coverups. Socialism is just regular authoritarian crony-capitalism, painted up with lies, and missing the coordinating information provided by even very imperfect markets.

It's all a matter of definition. Though I wouldn't say that it's poverty that's the striking feature of socialist (or ostensibly socialist) countries, rather the fact that, after a few years in action, socialist states nearly invariably go on murder sprees. Or Communist ones. But again, it's a question of definitions.

Truth. You can remove the qualifier from "socialist state" and it remains true. Rummel's "Death By Government" details the twenty most murderous regimes of the twentieth century - https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacecowyfyu2gxz4wwjdtthfv5cbsk5ar24o4k63er2dufcbrlngwet4?filename=R.%20J.%20Rummel%20-%20Death%20by%20Government-Transaction%20Publishers%20%281997%29.pdf Of the twenty, only six were Communist (and one National Socialist). Rummel found a trend towards less-murderous behaviour among democracies. I don't doubt it, but causality runs both ways - states strong enough to commit democide are strong enough to stop pretending to be democracies. Among countries with more than 100 million people (my cutoff for functional independence), only the USA and Brazil have not been involved in democide. I think its the privately owned guns not the check marks on ballots, but the sample size is too small to determine one way or the other...