I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
Maybe where you are, here we have tax funded social programs. And that would be called a monopoly, they’re usually bad for everyone except the few people at the top.
Yes, how do you avoid that trending towards a monopoly? Competition forces centralization over time, and even extension into hyper-exploiting the Global South. Further, you absolutely have people dying out of being impoverished.
You have a government, and people fighting for their rights, etc. I don’t think there is any type of system in which we can just sit back and know it won’t need maintaining.
Where I live there’s a law that a company without competition has to forcefully close. There’s quite a bunch of shops kept alive solely by their competitor, who is forced to drive their prices down and service up because of the competition.
There’s a reason regulation exists.
You’re suggesting you de-develop companies and make them less efficient, rather than folding them into the public sector and further improving their efficiency. Once markets have done their job and left centralized, internally planned structures, the answer isn’t to break them up and repeat the process of misery and squalor, but to further develop by folding it into the public sector. It’s like you want to regularly pick up a race car and put it backwards on the track every time it gets close to crossing the finish line.
Competition naturally trends towards monopoly, there is no benefit to perpetually trying to move the clock back. Moreover, even with such laws, your country is still getting more centralized over time, only without worker control.
You need to seriously reconsider why you believe markets to be better than central planning at all stages in development.