Understanding Socialism and China's Economy

It's funny how China is always left out when people like to

talk about how socialism has never worked.

China has lifted nine hundred million people out of poverty in

two generations.

Man,

what are we teaching people in schools?

China is not a socialist success story.

China is actually a great argument against socialism.

First, let's define what socialism is.

Socialism is not universal healthcare.

Socialism is not affordable housing.

Those are programs that can exist in any operating system,

capitalism or socialism. Socialism is an economic

system defined by one key thing, collective ownership

of the means of production. Means of production, AKA

farms, factories, companies. Collective ownership,

EG, the government owns those things.

Capitalism is the opposite. It's private ownership of the

means of production. China has what economists call state

capitalism. About twenty-five percent of China's GDP

is produced

by the government. In America, our government produces twelve

percent of GDP. In Cuba, which is socialist, it's

eighty-five percent. Now, some economists say we should call China

a mixed economy, but by no definition is it socialist.

But you know when it was socialist?

Before 1978, when the government created a program

called the

Great Leap Forward. During the Great Leap Forward,

the government collectivized

farms and abolished private farming, AKA seized the

means of production.

That spike in the chart is the result.

Socialism caused a famine that killed anywhere from twenty

to fifty-five million people. Now, what was it that

saved China?

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping came to power.

He legalized private business, which was illegal before.

He broke up government farms and gave them back to families.

He gave the means of production back to individuals,

AKA capitalism. Socialism starved

China. Capitalism saved it. Capitalism lifted eight

hundred million people out of poverty in two generations.

And despite China's government branding itself as communist,

capitalism is the economic system they're practicing.

In a democratic society, having an informed populace

matters. Knowing history and what words mean matters

because definitions determine decisions.

And if sixty-two percent of young Americans like socialism

but don't know what it means, that's an educational problem.

The socialists are right that America has problems we need to

solve, like the billions of dollars spent on

healthcare lobbyists to

ensure Congress passes laws that favor corporations, not

consumers. But those are relatively new bugs in our

politics that we can patch within capitalism.

We don't need to adopt a system that has destroyed countries and

killed tens of millions of people, and we certainly shouldn't be

adopting it based on a misunderstanding of history.

So no, China is not socialist.

No, Nordic countries are not socialist.

And no, America does not need

socialism to fix its problems either.

If you wanna learn more about the true history of socialism, check out my free

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