These are the footnotes from the first page. They’re arguing like your average 20-something online troll.
1 Criterion a is from the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines socialism as public policy based on “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Criterion b further focuses the discussion to rule out state ownership or regulation for other purposes, such as fighting a war. See also Samuelson and Nordhaus (1989, 833), who describe “democratic socialist governments [that] expanded the welfare state, nationalized industries, and planned the economy.”
2 For classical socialists, “communism” is a purely theoretical concept that has never yet been put into practice, which is why the second “S” in USSR stands for “Socialist.” Communism is, in their view, a social arrangement where there is neither a state nor private property; the abolition of property is not sufficient for communism. As Lenin explained, “The goal of socialism is communism.” The supposed purpose of the “Great Leap Forward” was for China to transition from socialism to communism before the USSR did (Dikӧtter 2010). The classical definition therefore stands in contrast to vernacular usage of communism to refer to historical instances of socialism where the degree of control was the highest, such as the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, or Maoist China. This report therefore avoids the term “communism.”
On the one hand, this is what the dictionary says.
On the other hand, even a single socializing step is a trick towards communism. In other words, death camps.
The burden is on socialists to explain how their latest policy agenda would overcome the
undeniable problems observed when socialism was tried in the past. As the sociology professor
Paul Starr put it, “Much of [modern American socialists’] platform ignores the economic
realities that European socialists long ago accepted.” Marx’s 200th birthday is a good time to
gather and review the overwhelming evidence.
For some reason they’re freaked out that this is the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birthday?
Proponents of socialism acknowledge that the experiences of the USSR and other highly
socialist countries are not worth repeating, but they continue to advocate for increased
taxation and state control in order to help low-income people. Such policies would also have
negative output effects, albeit of a lesser magnitude, as is seen in cross-country studies of the
effect on real GDP of greater economic freedom. A broad body of academic literature quantifies
the extent of economic freedom in several dimensions, including taxation and spending, the
extent of state-owned enterprises, economic regulation, and other factors. This literature finds
a strong association between greater economic freedom and better economic performance,
suggesting that replacing U.S. policies with highly socialist policies such as Venezuela’s would
reduce real GDP more than 40 percent in the long run, or about $24,000 per year for the average
person.
It literally can’t get any better than now seem to be what they’re going for.
It then goes into a couple dozen pages about agricultural reform which, to be fair, was a deliberate disaster in communist countries.
