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Originally Posted by sendler
"The Cambodian genocide (Khmer: ហាយនភាពខ្មែរ or ការប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ខ្មែរ, French: Génocide cambodgien) was carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime under the leadership of Pol Pot, and it resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's 1975 population (c. 7.8 million).[1][2][3] The Khmer Rouge wanted to turn the country into a socialist agrarian republic, founded on the policies of ultra-Maoism.[4][5][6] In 1976, the Khmer Rouge changed the name of the country to Democratic Kampuchea. In order to fulfill their goals, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and forced Cambodians to relocate to labor camps in the countryside, where mass executions, forced labor, physical abuse, malnutrition, and disease were prevalent. This resulted in the death of approximately 25 percent of Cambodia's total population."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
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Strict Marxist Communism has often started with mass murder and ended in a string of inefficiency and corruption.
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Democratic Socialism is not this and is already in place in different degrees throughout Europe. I am hopeful that the term "Democratic Socialism" can retain the current check on personal power through voting. "DEMOCRATIC"... Retain the efficiency and innovation of private ownership and a market. But begin to add in appropriate pricing signals to the market to reflect the cost/ value of inputs such as non-renewable resources that are being reduced from future (300,000,000 years) reuse by "entropy" ( a rough application of the concept can be stretched to include strategic elements, ie. Phosphorous, which is now mined from deposits at a certain, but diminishing ore grade, which will eventually become increasingly remote as the concentrated deposits on land are depleted and we are forced to try to get it back from river deltas and oceans after is passes through our food and biological systems). So again, improve the pricing signals for the sources. And phase in pricing signals for the costs of processing the wastes (ie. the other half of a Carbon tax)which are also currently missing. Ecosocial Economists have been telling us this since the 1970's (1800's?) but it is not expedient to right now to growth (then). And we find ourselves in converging crises. Complacency now, then panic.
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The SOCIALISM aspect would refer not to public ownership of everything and its attendant inefficiency, but to additional pro-social levers on the market to make the distribution of social surplus more equitable since right now the owners of production have all of the power to keep a vastly disproportionate amount of the profits (The average CEO of a corporation earns 380 times that of the AVERAGE employee. 1% of Americans take home 24% of the annual earnings and have acquired 40% of the wealth. And the numbers are obviously much more skewed on a world basis). Progressive taxation would provide essentially de facto maximum and minimum incomes with a job guarantee and collective labor bargaining, basic water, food, housing, health care, education, ect. For up to two children per female. Or whatever average the tecnocratic inputs to the decision making process that we already use for many other market decisions comes up with for a sustainable, steady state economy where the goal is to get to a place where nothing is used faster than it can be reused or renewed. |
*Europe use the terms 'Social Liberalism,' and 'Social Democracy.'
*In the USA they call it 'Liberalism.'
During the United States' 'Golden Age',we had Marx & Engels' Communist,progressive income taxes,and publicly-owned infrastructure services,and Adam Smith's 'Big Government.'
The United States is the wealthiest nation,yet most unequal.
There's a smattering of social democratic N.European nations with the highest standards of living in the world.
Historically,the only enterprises which are best served by free market capitalism are agriculture and retailing.