Wouldn't that be a very different complaint, focusing on what judges reward vs what the actual arguments are? The original article touches on that more than the comment here.

Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.

That premise is open to debate, there are Western countries with different systems. E.g., most Western European countries have a system called "social market economy" (which is not [exactly] capitalism).

> premise is open to debate

Again, nobody disagrees. But if you ask me if I want red or white wine, and I, instead, launch into a diatribe in Marxist-Leninism, that’s not a valid argument and it’s very annoying. Outside these debate circuits, it could come across as debilitating.

Well as a classic example, you could debate "the unemployment rate is going down – is it good or bad?" (well, the Phillips curve…) and ask with Horkheimer/Adorno, if the entire notion of discussing this in terms of a statistical rate isn't normalizing a dysfunctional aspect of economy, regardless, where it's at. This is still a debate, but it shifts the core argument to a conceptually more fundamental level.

All countries in the world have mixed economies. (Except maybe Somalia or North Korea.)

The US has a fair amount more publically owned sectors than Europe, which eg has privatized postal services.

Yes. This is correct.

Though the extent of it really matters, I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela.

But people tend to point to Venezuela, and not Norway, as an example of a failed state owned economy.

It's not really about "sectors" of the economy that are publicly owned but actual economic output. The money in the US is produced and it is in the hands of private individuals most of it. In Norway near 70% of it is produced and in the hands of the state. Obviously Norway is a particular example because they're a country that relies on natural resources extraction. But you can look at other similar countries in terms of their exports (Australia, Chile) and see how the Norwegian model differs.

The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.

> The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.

USPS is profitable, though. (even if Congress messes with their retirement accounting to make it look worse)

If they subsidize anyone it's China, because we forced them to do that by signing the UPU treaty. After that it's people who buy forever stamps.

Sorry, my bad. Point still stands though, services don't necessarily need to be profitable because they're there for a different reason.

> I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela.

Can you please provide some sources backing up your claim? What metric did you use?

The metrics that I would use, like the Index of Economic Freedom by The Heritage Foundation, seem to contradict your claim.

The fact that the state owns some companies in key industrial sectors and has stakes in others does not mean that the country's economy is primarily in the hands of the state.

The Index of Economic Freedom is based on ideological arguments, not material analysis. Norway's government revenue makes up about 60% of its GDP [1], in part due to its share in oil, gas and fishing - this is in the top ten in the world. Venezuela actually has the lowest share of government revenue in the world, at about 5% of GDP [1], the black markets caused by hyperinflation probably playing a part here.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...

A better measure than revenue would be public ownership of property, but this produces some surprising results. I am not sure whether the fact that Singapore is the second most socialist country on the planet would likely be more distressing to the left or the right.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/03/09/how-capitali...

Someone else has already posted a good source for it. But I just wanted to add here that the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank particularly known for pushing "free-market economics" (read as: neoliberal policies of hyper-privatisation) so obviously it's on their best interest to label countries such as the nordic ones more capitalist than socialist.

And I mean, yeah, nordic countries for sure participate in the free-market... but Capitalism is defined by private ownership; so when you have such important portions of your economy be collectively, socially or communally owned (state, coops, labour unions) it's misleading to use such labels so lightly. These are mixed-economies, and I would even go as far as to say they're more socialist than capitalist.

Socialism does have a bad reputation though. So I don't blame for these countries to label themselves as "capitalist"; i mean, it's better for business.

It wouldn't be a contradiction to live in a country where most productive enterprises were owned by the state, but where individuals still had great economic freedom.

There is a big difference between governments owning things vs. exclusions to citizens owning things.

Socialism is when workers own and control the means of production. Capitalism is the opposite. There is no such thing as a "mixed economy." Social programs are not exclusive to socialism.

> Socialism is when workers own and control the means of production.

In most cases, workers can own the means to production as many corporations are public. They just have to risk their capital to buy a share of the company - like every other owner.

You missed the second part of that definition. Both parts must be satisfied. Workers do not control any public companies that I am familiar with.

If the workers control a company it's not a public company. That's what "public" means.

There are worker coops, customer coops, and state owned companies in the US.

This is true, but workers do not broadly own or control the MoP in the US. Thus, the US is not socialist. It is not a "mixed" economy, because there is no such thing.

I know "all numbers are either 0 or 100%" is a common belief, but people on here are supposed to be smarter than that.

Also you're still trying to argue against Keynes and your statement would make China and Vietnam capitalist, which would be a surprise to them. Not to mention Lenin's NEP mixed economy.

nb the people who "control" the means of production in the US are the voters, who can get the government to pass laws regulating it. It doesn't matter if you "own" it ie are equityholders. Although we have that too, in the form of our worker-owned index fund company Vanguard.

> and your statement would make China and Vietnam capitalist

Well they are. Just because they wave red flags and call themselves "socialist" doesn't make it true, for the same reason North Korea is precisely none of "democratic", "people's", or a "republic" despite its assertions otherwise.

If they are owners, they control it as much as the other owners - following the same rules; which I believe in most companies is the majority get the final say.

> In most cases, workers can own the means to production as many corporations are public

A thing being true throughout an economy and it being permitted by the formal rules are not the same thing.

Socialism is not merely where some workers do control some of the means of production, but where the entirety of the means of production are cobtrolled by the workers by virtue of their being workers.

If some people who happen to work also happen to have a private property relationship to some capital sufficient to be on par with their labor in terms of importance in their personal relation to the economy, then they are just petit bourgeois in a capitalist economy.

This classical Marxist definition of socialism is one I agree and identify with, but it's not what 99% of people mean by it, socialist or not.

I am not sure the word can be rescued from the 20th century at this point.

Who said anything about social programs?

Also, people just get on here and disagree with Keynes?

I always hear that European economies fall under the socialist rubric, but they seem pretty capitalist—at least a lot more so than the economies of any Marxist-Leninist government throughout history. I imagine scholars have a reason for their taxonomy, but I wish it made more sense to me.

To illustrate the difference, the Ahlener Programm, the first political program of Germany's conservative party (CDU) after the war in 1947, originally stated:

> The capitalist economic system has not done justice to the national and social vital interests of the German people. After the terrible political, economic and social collapse as a result of criminal power politics, only a fundamental reorganization can take place.

> Content and goal of this social and economic reorganization can no longer be the capitalist striving for profit and power, but only the well-being of our people. Through a public economic order, the German people should receive an economic and social constitution that corresponds to the rights and dignity of human beings, serves the spiritual and material development of our people and ensures internal and external peace.

This was dubbed "Christian Socialism", and, under the influence of Adenauer, the program soon inched somewhat to the center towards a concept now known as "social market economy", a term, which had also been in use by (some) social-democrats. Conceptionally, it's deemed different from ordoliberalism as it is more process-oriented and pragmatic. (We may also see how someone who is leaning marginally towards anarcho-capitalism like, say, Elon Musk, must be perceived as entirely misaligned.)