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Originally Posted by JayJamJah
Sweden and Norway are not socialist countries, Norway's constitution and system of government are modeled after the United States and they are a free-market economy just like us, the difference being their governments admits to owning and being owned by major industry giants. As for thriving, if you just mean health care then yes they have but people also pay nearly 60% of their income in taxes which would not be okay with very many Americans who are in favor of socialized health care.
If you do mean the system of government:
The most significant examples of failure in the last century are the USSR and China of course, but you can also look at places like Vietnam, North Korea, Laos and Cuba which health care aside, I can't agree that it is an example of a successful government.
This is in my opinion why so many people look at socialism as a failure and are probably scared away from, perhaps wrongly, the concept of socialized health care (or anything for that matter) as a whole.
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I said Sweden and Norway are thriving because compared to the United States and every other country in this economic downturn they are thriving and it's because of the socialistic aspects of the Scandinavian Model. Which is closer to Socialism than is to the United States idea of capitalism - I don't know how you can argue that it's failed. Social Democracies seem to be weathering bad times (created by capitalism) far better than people who are all gung-ho about the free market.
You're talking specifically about Communist nations, not socialistic nations and in many cases those countries are mired in third world status (Cuba is a prime example of this) because of US intervention and economic sanction. I don't think I need to explain what we did to them - it's well documented in history. It has nothing to do with the validity of the ideas and flaws in the system but a superpower which loves to stick its nose where it shouldn't.
I think the notion that Marxist ideology has failed in favor of strict laissez-faire principles is silly. If you look at the key victories for the free market (the coup in Chile, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the soviet union, Tienanmen Square and Poland in 1989, and so on.) You'll see that the free market was never really the definitive victor. What did Polish voters want in 1989? It wasn't privatization it was for worker ownership. South Africans voted, in 94, for redistribution of their rich resources which were in the hands of a few elite. In the nineties Russians believed privatization should happen through worker ownership. Leftist ideology didn't lose because it didn't work it lost because of propaganda, economic sanctions, war, intervention, etc.