Was the economic collapse in Europe the fault of Socialism or the fault of the bad economy? (World wide economic collapse). I am putting this in IMHO instead of Great Debates so we can have a poll. Please also give the best explanation if you can. Hopefully it will be a good discussion.
I am going to enable the option to display who voted for which choice…
“Too complex.” Socialism works just fine in other countries, so it’s hard to blame it in Greece. I’d say it’s a shaky economy overall, compounded by the massive tax-dodging problems. (Greece has a long cycle of huge tax dodging, meaning rates go up to absurd levels to try and generate enough revenue, meaning yet more dodging, and around and around.)
But didn’t Iceland have problems and a few other countries as well, a few years ago? Follow up question, do you think Socialism works better in a country with less than 50 million or 100 million people? (I assume that is most countries in Europe, right?)
The OP needs to first define socialism. European countries are not homogenous; the type of “socialism” practiced in the Netherlands is different than that practiced in Greece, or Germany, for that matter.
Socialism isn’t a very good descriptor for Greece’s woes. The things that led to their collapse, like not collecting taxes and not having a land registry, are not left-wing ideas.
I would probably attribute Greece’s current crisis to a lack of will to succeed combined with external conditions that enabled the country to muddle along. Genuine socialism is certainly a major cause of the crisis, but I would put persistent mismanagement and corruption as more significant factors.
Greece lacked the will to succeed, and consequently their country failed. They are now paying the price for their weakness, and they will continue to do so for years if not decades. As they say, “the wolf is always at the door.”
How can you remotely try to separate the performance of an economy from the structure of that economy. There was an outside shock in the form of US economic problems. The net effect of that shock filtered through the structure of those economies. That structure is partly based on political decisions driven by philosophies like socialism.
The OP is too ignornat too do that. I come here to learn from you good people…
But didn’t Iceland and other countries have problems too?
The first considering no country in Europe is “socialist” as opposed to “social democratic”.
I think your answers as a whole were very good but could you elaborate on the comments above, if possible?
Socialism works best in a country with a unified ideal that includes individual welfare as a concern of the society as a whole.
It becomes a scary swear word in a country committed to the idea that success comes only from personal hard work without a “handout” from anyone, because those who “succeed” on this basis live in the terror that someone is going to come along and take it away from them to give to “unsuccessful” (== undeserving) others.
Most “socialist” countries are far more politically/socially socialist than economically, but from the US perspective, any country that willingly provides a social net for everyone is obviously hard-S Socialist to the core.
Which still has nothing much to do with a poor, drastically mismanaged country with horrendous tax and property issues basically gambling away its food money.
This is why I put “socialism” in scare quotes in my previous post – I don’t want to speak for the OP, but reading his post gave me the impression that his view of socialism is that I often see from some of the more conservative-inclined Americans.
It’s rare to find any modern country that is not “socialist” to some extent. Even the United States provides a social safety net to some degree (Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, etc). But the way the word “socialism” is used by some posters, you’d think it will lead to the collapse of society.
Is there a socialist country in the EU, in the narrower Eurozone, or the wider Europe? I can’t think of one.
In other words, OP, define your terms. Feel free to consider the ownership and/or control of the means of production.
Thanks for your answer, the whole thing was good. I wanted to focus on the part above. What about population, is that a confounding variable? Most of the Scandinavian countries have between 5 and 10 Million people. Most of the other, larger countries, still have only between 10 Million people and 65 Million. The USA has 318 Million people and we are not “unified” in our ideals. How does this play out in both ideology and in logistics/ infrastructure?
Populations of Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_population
Look, please forgive me but all I know is I’ve been to Canada like, twice, briefly, and been to Europe 2 or 3 times on “vacation” and then in 2006 I stayed with friends in Finland for a couple of weeks. Two weeks and a handful of trips is not extensive but it did let me know that people can live happily in other economic systems slightly different the one we have in the USA.
I think “social” socialism can work with any population size, and with some care, economic socialism can work just as well. It’s not just that these countries have smaller populations, it’s that they have largely homogenous populations and cultures. For good or bad, they tend to share a more consistent worldview than does the population of the US. When everyone is “one of us,” it’s easier to make decisions to share wealth and burdens; when a country is a mix of cultures and prizes its sense of individualism, particularism and cultural distrust mean no one group is likely to want to share either its wealth or another group’s problems.
The US could easily go much further down the socialist democratic road without losing any of its unique qualities except the rather false-to-fact notion that “successful people do it without no help from nobody.”
Well, that’s the thing isn’t it. It’s only slight differences. The US and Europe are both broadly social democratic entities, with some variance in the constituent states/countries, within an overarching capitalist consensus.
Was the economic collapse in America the fault of Capitalism or the fault of the bad economy?
Cute, but the bad economy was the result of the collapse. Which might have been due to capitalism or… something else.
French public sector spending is around 56% of GDP. If not a “socialist” economy its probably the closest Europe has to having one.
I asked a very similar question here once. I got back some hostile answers from Europeans that blamed the whole thing on banking failures but I am still not convinced. Money fundamentally only represents a share of resources and I truly believed that they over promised in the long term. That combined with low to negative population growth makes it inevitable that most European countries except the best run ones cannot live up to their promises of social welfare and generosity. Western Europe had a good run post WWII but is now fighting reality. Greece may be the canary in the coal mine. I don’t expect anything but future trouble from the PIG countries either in the mid to long term. Germany is now stable and competent enough that it can do whatever it needs to work. The UK has been wise to largely stay mostly out of the whole mess that has been created and they will continue to do fine as well.
In the long view, Europe is about as stable as the Middle East and that is not a good thing. We happen to live in a time of unusual stability but that isn’t normal. Anything could trip a new standoff and the current Greece/Portugal/Italy/Ireland situation is approaching that.