What have you shown other than the Castro family are capitalists who follow communism as a political system?

Incidentally, communism blows as a political system. As an economic system it's not bad if it's run properly. No country has been able to do so.

"You believe there should be a class of people in society that basically don't have to get an education and they can make minimum wage. "

A blatant lie.

"All they ever have to do is show up for work or at least apply for work."

Another blatant lie.

"The government subsidizes them so they can get by with enough food, shelter and health care and no restriction of how many kids one can have."

Blatant lie #3.

"If one decides not to get an education in a field in demand, you can still survive. There is no fear for one's survival without an education."

Blatant lie #4.

"So you can call it what you want, sugar coat a pile of shit. But this is what the policies amount to. I'm just cutting through the BS of socialist propaganda and calling it what it is."

Blatant lie #5.

"What socialist policy do you support that does not amount to this?"

I told you already. But you just put your fingers in your ears and yell "LALALALALA".

We're listening. What is it? The silence is deafening.

Hypocrisy? Isn't that a capitalist virtue?

Why are you chastising Castro? you should be congratulating him for making loads of money in a system that is against such things.

Seems like a good Repub/libertarian to me - not letting the government get in the way of his freedom.

And here I was expecting EXC to jump on that. Fucker....

"Please enlighten me. What is the true definition of socialism?"

From Wikipedia, ironically:

Socialismrefers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources.

From your link:
"This is a combined map of all countries who declared themselves to be socialist states under any definition"

Important text in bold. Self declaration does not equate to truth. Furthermore, the nations identified (which was not easy to discern, I might add, I could only identify four, not five) as socialist:
China: Socialist Republic: Single-party communist state: Dictatorship: Not Socialism.
North Korea: Socialist Republic: Single-party communist state: Dictatorship: Not Socialism.
Laos: Socialist Republic: Single-party communist state: Dictatorship: Not Socialism.
Vietnam: Socialist Republic: Single-party communist state: Dictatorship: Not Socialism.

Your argument is meaningless.

So the USA must be a socialist state then because there are no laws against the workers owning a business and administering the means of production of a business. There are pleanty of single proprietorship and small businesses where the owners do all the work. Others sometimes offer stock to the employees. No Libertarian I know of has a problems with people entering into these socialist economic organizations voluntarily.

Now now, lets not assume he is intentionally desiring it. It is entirely possible that he is just confused and lashing out at everything around him.

Maybe the people calling Sarah Palin a liberal that uses socialist terminology?

So your only problem is you're not the guy with the gun?

Excuse me for not making it context-friendly enough for you. China is a big country and a player in a very complex world system. Naturally, not all rich Chinese live in Hong Kong, since someone has to run the government in Beijing and others have to run provinces, industry etc.

When you take Hong Kong out of this context, you get this "jewel in the jungle" libetal narrative, which of course is complete and utter bullshit. It's like looking at their Olympic grounds and assuming that nothing but Greek nobility live in that area of Beijing. Many paid dearly with their livelihoods and freedom for that "jewel in the jungle", and same is the case with Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is not "to blame" for slavery, its just a part of the system run by people who are to blame for slavery. Just like we are a part of the system run by people who are to blame for keeping African nations on the brink of war and starvation, middle eastern nations in constant turmoil, south american nations in dictatorships and poverty, etc.

Dude, there is no law against eating chairs in the US, yet no one would call US the country of chair-eaters. Direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production is only a fact if the laws on the books MANDATE worker ownership and administration AND society institutions IN PRACTICE SECURE this relation.

Now, as far as possibility to organize business in this manner in the US, a group of workers can do so, if they want to get fucked up the ass by the private industry. There is no way private business will condone any kind of worker organizing and will do anything they can to destroy it. The history of destruction of unions during the last 40 years in US is evidence of this. In south america and other parts of the world US and other private big business goes beyond just ordinary lawlessness and conducts instead assassinations, large scale community opression through bribe and cooperation with criminal govenments, terrorisation of indiginous population and even murder of entire villages.

I understand it can be hard to step out of the libertarian economic narrative, but looking at the big picture helps. If you want free trade, you first have to ensure everyone has equal access. Somehow this is not at all the focus of economic theory tought at the universities - I wonder why. Maybe it's because every auditorium in every major university carries the name of some huge international conglomerate that financed it's creation. Universities, much like the church back in the day, don't want to dissapoint their sugar-daddies. In US this has only gotten worse lately, simply because of the push for privatisation of educational institutions. You can look at the curious case of Norman Finkelsteins denial of tennure for info on this little marvel of private enterprise.

Luckily, all is not lost. Just like the church back in the day, universities produce odd-ball community conscious leaders. It is just as tough to organize as it was in the worst time of segragation, but challenges are different today and people survive them. And although you need a lot of money to study, you don't need a lot of money to learn.

I understand perfectly your doubt about "socialist theory", but we can come closer to common ground if we focus on priorities, rather than some overall "theory".

So, what are our priorities? If the answer is "profit", I bet you close to 100% of people will find this unacceptable as our common mission statement. So how do we justify allowing institutions that explicitly have this as their purpose for existence and even grounds on which they defend themselves in court (yes, common defense for a private company in a large number of court cases is simply that they exist to create profit and nothing else), to have huge influence on our government and even run all our vital community functions?

I think we can safely assume that a broader consensus would come up with better goals and methods to move in the right direction. I don't think that there is an end-game state of affairs or some overall sucessful theory as it were, but there is a myriad of things we can try and make it a work in progress type of thing. This only gets hampered by profit-for-the-sake-of-profit mission statement. We could for instance go for a perception of a "matter of course" on a lot of things that today are extremely contentious BECAUSE of the profit-based decision system. We could push healthcare debate into background, if we adopted the policy of healthcare-equals-water supply. We don't debate whether everyone should have water in their focets, we just find a way to make it so. We debate minimum quality of water, effects of impurities and how we can improve the pipelines, but not whether water should be a matter of pay-per-person. Putting healthcare into the background like this would allow us to focus on other more important issues. Leave healthcare policy to a mix of health worker representatives, people representatives and experts in the field. Keep a steady rotation on the representatives and hold economists in the mix ONLY as the enablers excluded from the decision process - how can we make decisions a reality, not whether we should. I don't see how this can be contestable, since economist track record as policy makers is one disaster after another. Worse yet - they think that's just fine.

This is just a suggestion and is far better than declaring profit as the #1 goal. As soon as you understand the absurdity of our predicament today, I think we can agree that first is first - get money out of politics right now and reconsider whether huge resources should be the domain of a few white golf enthusiasts.

"Others sometimes offer stock to the employees."

Few and far between.

"No Libertarian I know of has a problems with people entering into these socialist economic organizations voluntarily."

Except you I guess, since I've told you at least a dozen times that the Socialism I speak of is voluntary. No guns to heads, just help society or society won't help you.

Stock is such a good deal too. The execs do their insider trading things and sell out just before the company goes into the toilet. They reap the rewards, the price plummets and the employees who hold stock get raped.

So nice of those companies to do that.

True enough. Even if management is caught, employees are never compensated, and management spends a forced year or two in hotels before being released to do it again. Transparency could greatly impact such strategies, reducing their effect significantly. But not all such companies do that. I work for one that gives shares, and is only foreseeably likely to have such a problem if all income taxes were rescinded.

 Iceland's problems was the result of criminal activitiy.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Iceland:_what_ugly_secrets_are_waiting_to_be_exposed_in_the_meltdown

"I think I would rather segregate or deport them rather than watch people too stupid to help themselves suffer in front of me. I don't think I like the idea of people dieing on the streets out of their own stupidity. Put them in their own society/hovels if they don't want to participate in the one they are in. Maybe we can deport them to South Carolina."

There are a number of possible scenarios. One thing for certain is they would not be permitted to live on streets paid for by society. The remains of abandoned capitalist cities may be a good place to start.

A hilarity quote from the website you just posted: "But Dr Jon Danielsson, an Icelander who teaches economics at the London School of Economics, believes that while the timing of the crash was dictated by the global banking crisis, the scandal is unique among European financial institutions. He believes the root of Iceland's problems that have now decimated its economy appear to have started when the government decided to privatise the banks in the early 1990s."

And the criminals are the few "free men" I mentioned. Free to move capital as they please, free to speculate on currency, realestate and business, free to be unbridled capitalists. For years before the crash they hooked up with foreign speculators and were called visionaries and business promises of Iceland, the land on the rise.

You call them criminals. I call them capitalists. Same thing.

And as long as you are looking into "extraordinary meltdowns", take a peak at Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala and a host of other capitalist rape victims of the Chicago school projects for the past 50 years or so. I am sure you will agree that free-movement capital and speculation really are pretty ordinary after all and that criminal activity is an essential part of each of those collapses.

You don't even have to take a detailed look at the money flow during the crysis we are not even half way through at this point, and you will see that its nothing different - build a bubble, cash in on the down side - mergers, buyouts, zero regulation free-for-all. Some of the "investors" are even blatantly speculating in the open, like Goldman Sachs pulling out of realestate an mass just before the crash, even though they knew bailout would not be denied. After all, H. Poulson was the secretary of treasury, fresh out of GS.

Yes but it seems that only in conservatism is criminality considered a virtue.

What "seems" and what "is" are distinct. Conservatism clearly does not envelope criminal behavior any more than liberalism does.

This is going to confuse anyone who actually goes by the real definition of these words.

Conservatism being status quo and tradition, and progressivism being changing that. Those two are opposing ideologies.

The only part that could be said of conservatism that is opposing to liberalism, is social conservatism (In the United States).

I am also curious how people believing others should have the rights to do what they please with their own personal lives so long as it does not directly harm others, is an ideology that supports criminal behavior the same way capitalism (which I'm assuming is referred to by conservatism, since it is the traditional status quo) does (Which with public goods, puts self interest in a direct conflict with public welfare).

I can't wait to see how these are linked.

There are no purely conservative people any more then there are purely progressive people.

Part of the definition of conservative is "to limit change". There are ironically progressive conservatives.

Then why are the current crop of conservatives not interested in the status quo but regression?