I personally feel the right answer is in the middle. Socialise whats required like health, education, emergency services, roads, pensions, etc And leave the luxuries of life as free market.
As an extra touch, I would make politicians and civil servants required to use public services rather than private alternatives. Because when they and their families have to use public schools and hospitals etc they will care a bunch more about how they run than if they are choosing private alternatives, which is common in Australia at least.
That said, there is a huge government ("public") sector and the taxation is high on most things. Especially income and consumption.
Basically, all of the socialist programs that's currently going on in the Nordic countries rely heavily on taxing free enterprises (private sector) and would work a lot less without them.
social, not socialist.
Quite a different beast.
Socialism works great until you run out of other people's money. Whether it's because the price of oil dropped, your most productive tax payers moved out, or your currency hyperinflates until it's worthless: somehow it's never socialism's fault. Reality eventually does set in, though.
If your economic system can't efficiently feed people, more complex industries will be even harder. Not to mention building new industries.
The failures of their socialist experiment go far deeper than simply a non diversified industry. The drop in the petro industry showed immediately how fragile the massive spending schemes and nationalization was.
As Thomas Sowell said (paraphrasing), the problem with redistribution is that you can only take someone's money/property once, you can't take their ability to continually produce goods. So when that well dries up the cracks in the system become apparent.
The wikipedia article on the Venezuelan economy is a good read about the risks of centralized planned economies.
