Thread by @estarianne

Remember I wrote a thread a while back about how the cold War generation was raised to fear the left and right equally? We were promised that we'd be safe in the center.

And now we are bringing up socialism again and that scares people. I want to clarify a few things.

When you mention socialism most people think... What? USSR, China, and Venezuela? Guerrilla warfare? Cuba? I don't know, I didn't really have a clear idea of what it meant, but I knew everyone in socialist countries was miserable.

We don't really think about thinks like social security, Medicaid, disability, and public infrastructure. We don't think about things we could have like public daycare or free vocational school, because socialism is an all or nothing thing right? A slippery slope?

No, it's not a slippery slope. Democratic societies can mix economic strategies. It's called a "mixed market economy."

Most of the strongest economies, including our own but also even better systems, are mixed markets.

But what about the soviet union? What about China? VENEZUELA?.

Well none of those 3 are/were democracies (Venezuela is a troubled democracy) but let's talk about where they ran into trouble so we know what to avoid in our own democracy, which we are totally going to save.

First of all, we all see how Venezuela is struggling, but do you know why?

Venezuela, like the US, had a colonial government that doled out land to people who would use it to produce income for themselves, rather than food for the country.

Now we talk a lot about capitalism and free markets. But resource rights in capitalist societies are often concentrated with a very few. Those people have outsized control over who can and can't access jobs, housing, food, etc.

And especially in colonized countries with large indigenous and descendents of enslaved people populations, those rights are often held by... White people. They control the land.

This is true in the USA where white people own 98% of the agricultural land, and in South Africa where white people still own over 90% of the agricultural land. How do you fix that?

Well in Venezuela they decided to just redistribute the land. They took the rights from the capitalists who were running corporate ranches and gave it over to the rural and indigenous people.

This disrupted their food supply but it also meant they needed to add a lot of money to the economy to keep people afloat. This set everything wonky.

And when you look at the famines in the USSR and China, you find land reform major factors there as well.

What you don't see is countries starving to death from having a nationalized healthcare plan or a basic safety net ("dole"). Most developed countries have those and are not, in fact, miserable.

Now I'm not saying land reform isn't a thing that should happen! I think it should. But how? I'm not sure. Venezuela's method was not well planned at all.

I believe that we could do a lot of redistribution of access just by properly taxing wealth and investing the proceeds in marginalized communities.

But knowing how socialist reforms are going to affect the economy is impossible without knowing what type of reforms.

I found this short article super helpful in understanding what happened in Venezuela. theglobalamericans.org/2017/04/seizin…

And I do want to point out that people are still hopeful that they will recover.

But the important thing to know is that mixed markets can take a lot of different forms. And once you set a goal for the market, there are a lot of different paths to get there.

China is now a mixed market - there is private land and corporate ownership. However it's still a single party system, now with an autocratic leader. There is no democracy to control the shift from communism to a mixed market.

Russia is now an oligarchy with the majority of resources controlled by a very few people and only the appearance of a democracy.

If you don't think land reform sounds like a good idea, you have a lot of company. But what about mineral rights reform? Water rights reform? There are a lot of steps we can take to distribute control and access over resources.

And we don't need to disrupt our food supply to do it.

But the only thing on the Dem agenda right now is healthcare reform, so we all have access to healthcare, and wage reform so everyone has the right to a living wage.

That's it. No land grabs or nationalization of groceries. Nobody's suggesting that we seize Target. Just implementing some solutions to real problems Americans have right now.