: I really wonder if people with attitudes like yours have ever been to a "third-world" country, let alone a socialist one. I recommend a trip to, say, India and Communist China before spouting ill-informed nonsense about the USA being poverty stricken and socialism being the panacea of the world's ills.: You would observe that we who are lucky enough to live in Western democracies, even if we are poor by the standards of these societies, live a life of paradise compared to the vast majority of those from the rest of the world.
: Communism has been tried in case you have been living in a box all of your life: - it caused more misery than any other human construct in history (apart from religion). It might interest you to know that 170 million people have been killed, this century, by their own governments. The majority of these are in countries that were, or still are, communist.
: We now have a better standard of living than at any time in history (the average Westerner is now 8 times better off, in real terms, than they were in 1900). There is now universal suffrage, education and, to a very large extent, universal healthcare within the Western demoncracies. People 100 years ago would have seen this as a Eutopia. Capitalism has created wealth like never before. Of course it has problems, but this is no reason, given the prosperity it had brought, to bin it on the basis of some "golden age" that never existed - where people didn't have to work for a living as "slaves" to corporate entities.
: Presumably, you think that even if current inhabitants of communist countries often live repressed, fearful lives of little material comfort and less freedom, those of the pre-capitalist world, before the likes of the USA messed everything up, lived in some kind of Utopia? - probably in a beutiful garden pradise, loving one another and spending all day collecting berries, singing Druid chants and communing with trees. No need for mundane things like work or evil organisations like businesses that have the temerity to try to make a profit. (A profit without which there could be no schools, public heathcare or welfare).
: Wrong: life until very recently was brutal, joyless and short. The average life expectancy in the West in 1900 was 50, the working classes remained working class despite ability or effort and their jobs were universally hard and tedious. Our live spans are now approaching 80 and few people have to spend 60 hours a week putting the tops on jam jars.
: We have won jackpot in the lottery of life to be born in the West in the late 20th century. You obviously know nothing of history, politics, or the way of life of those from elswhere in the world. Your ingratitude, based on wilfull igonorance, is nauseating and would be unbelievable to a person living in, say, Nigeria.
: Go and live in Cambodia for 12 months (which had the benefit of a great "socialist" revolution a few years ago) and let us all know how you got on. I'm msure you'd find grinding poverty, disease, starvation, early death and the threat arbitrary arrest and / or violence a welcome change from the rigors political freedom and affluence.
None.
