[VvR-Ox]

Because there is no such countries until someone can prove otherwise (which will not happen because they don't exist).

Big capital put this idea inside the heads of many people living in the West and until today they really believe there is countries who are socialist/communist. Neither the GDR nor the UDSSR or China are examples for countries like that and people who know about politics, economy and society know this as a fact.

It is easy for you to criticize all alternatives at once because you have never seen any and chose to believe what the ruling party (=capitalism) makes you believe.

[ros65536]

The classic no true communist country fallacy. Have you considered that no such country exists because it is impossible, vecause it so quickly devolves into socialist hell like in USSR, north korea?

[ben509]

> Because there is no such countries until someone can prove otherwise (which will not happen because they don't exist).

It won't happen because you'll shift the goal posts.

A common dodge is that they're state socialism. The problem with this dodge: it's definitely true that state socialism is impure. But, it's 90% of what you want, and it fails catastrophically. Then the answer is, "well, it can only work if it's 99%!"

The regulated markets we have in Western nations, however, are 90% of an ideal "truly free market" and they work quite well. And we find that incremental reforms that deliver to people a little bit more of their economic liberties also improve people's lives bit by bit. Markets have the property that the freer they are, the more benefits they provide.

The other dodge is that "it wasn't socialism's fault," especially with Venezuela. Yes, they had an economy centered around oil and that was a problem. The issue was that socialist-inspired reforms made it worse, especially nationalizing the oil companies and price controls. Markets thus have an additional property that they are robust, they allow people to route around problems and mitigate them. Planning is brittle because it necessarily centralizes power, and it tends to fail because planners can't respond to crises in a decentralized manner the way a market naturally does.

The third dodge, common now thanks to Sen Sanders, is the Scandanvian nations show that socialism works. But their economies work because they took the opposite approach of 10% socialism. That's not great for apologia since it follows that socialism only works when you hardly do it.

> Big capital put this idea inside the heads of many people living in the West and until today they really believe there is countries who are socialist/communist.

No one who read the dictionary[2] is claiming that there were any communist nations, since a defining aspect of communism is the absence of the state. You can have lots of communists (persons whose end goal is communism) in a socialist nation, of course, since, as Lenin noted, the purpose of socialism is communism.

And Lenin introduced state socialism, not some mad capitalist, and he believed it was, if not proper socialism, a clear stepping stone to socialism. The nations definitely called themselves socialist, and socialists all over the world agreed and while things appeared to be going well, they were bragging about how this proved socialism worked.

But it wasn't working because the planners were lying. Socialists here lied and covered up tremendous deaths[1]. And it's only when the problems couldn't be hidden that they became not socialist anymore.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#The_Holodomor_(...

[2]: That does leave a lot of people claiming it, of course.