= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
kilobug comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (513)
The survey defined socialism as "what is done in Scandinavia", which for me is social-democracy : free-market capitalism with wealth redistribution, strong social safety net, regulation to protect workers, customers or the environment, and some critical sectors (like education) more or less directly handled by the state.
My own definition of socialism is "socialized ownership of the means of production", which can take many shapes : government ownership is a form socialism, but cooperatives or mutualism are other forms of socialism. Socialism doesn't necessarily means centralized planning, even if it is usually described as such.
But anyway, since the survey defined socialism in the first meaning, I used under it the first meaning to answer "socialism" in the survey, and I think we can safely assume most people who answered "socialism" used it under the first meaning.
Actually, I answered socialism because I'm a libertarian socialist, the examples made clear that libertarianism and socialism were supposed to mean ‘American-style (i.e. capitalist) libertarianism’ and ‘social-democracy’ respectively, neither of which are anywhere near my position, the survey had no “none of the above” answer and that “socialism” is less unsatisfactory to me than that “libertarianism”.
Let the next survey have the same definitions for communism, conservatism, and liberalism.
Define "socialism" as "Sending children to cigar making factories and sugar making plantations instead of school, like in Cuba; sending suspected dissenters to a KGB prison in Siberia for torture, like in Russia; or sending baby Pandas to reeducation camps for torture, like in China."
Define "libertarianism" as "Rule by corporations, like in the United States; or beating chimney-sweeps to death with a cane while wearing a bowler hat and monocle, like in Britain."
I predict similar responses. You can't expect people to comply with redefined political labels.