If you want another, more benign, example, look at American military bases. You've got base housing, base grocery store, base furniture, base movie theater, base bookstore, base clothing store, base restaurants, base barber shop.

You are issued things like housing.

There's a pecking order based on rank. If ranks are equal, there is an alternative barter economy based on who owes who favors (instead of money).

Although all your needs are provided for (at massive cost to the taxpayer), it isn't a happy way to live.

It seems that the phenomena the parent describes were or are present in all instances of fully implemented socialism to date, not just in the USSR.

Since you edited to add your counter-examples, I’ll edit to point out that socialism is a system that has been deliberately implemented by its instantiators in each case I’m aware of. To compare it to capitalism, but only those capitalist countries that have suffered lawlessness or other calamity, is to compare apples to oranges.

You don't need to speak Russian to understand the nomenklatura. It's a group of privileged people who are appointed to positions of power based on their personal loyalty to the leader or to the party.

Seems like a very familiar concept ripped from today's headlines, certainly not restricted to archaic economic systems.

I usually find that apples and oranges are quite easy to compare.

You seem to have a habit of dramatically changing your comments after you’ve posted them, without noting that you’ve done so. In this case, you originally posted only what now seems to be your final sentence, the one about apples and oranges, then added everything that now precedes it. I have the sense that you are hoping for a political argument.

Not only are you not answering the parents genuine questions, you are trying to distract attention by attempting to be clever. You are not making an argument in good faith. Please stop.

> Therefore, market economies make nations poor.

No, because there's USA, Germany, France, etc. Which has much bigger market economies and not poor. But all major socialist economies has been a disaster (no, China is not a socialist economy and hasn't been for a while, neither is Sweden, Denmark etc.), and socialist societies has been even worse disaster in non-economic sense (see gulags, Pol Pot killing fields, Cultural Revolution, North Korea, etc.).

> Proof by example is a logical fallacy.

Some people call learning from example empirical research and scientific method. Others ignore all the examples and keep claiming the real perpetual motion engine just hasn't been tried yet.