you can have a bit of capitalism and a bit of socialism in a healthy mix of free trade economy with regulations
I used to believe this, and I also used to argue against socialists on the same exact grounds.
At some point I noticed that all those nice little bits of socialism that rounded off the edges of capitalism kept getting rolled back. Then I read more about how those safety nets were put up in the first place – I found out they were all bought with the blood of people much farther left than me, and I saw how violently capitalists opposed them. I found that a lot of the reason those safety nets were so nice for so long in the Global North was that our countries were slaughtering people by the millions (again, a lot of leftists) elsewhere in the world to prop capitalism up.
At that point I stopped just nodding along to all the campfire stories about socialist countries. Maybe, like my standard U.S. education had missed a lot of pretty important things about how capitalism works, it had similarly missed some important things about how socialism works.
I used to believe this, and I also used to argue against socialists on the same exact grounds.
At some point I noticed that all those nice little bits of socialism that rounded off the edges of capitalism kept getting rolled back. Then I read more about how those safety nets were put up in the first place – I found out they were all bought with the blood of people much farther left than me, and I saw how violently capitalists opposed them. I found that a lot of the reason those safety nets were so nice for so long in the Global North was that our countries were slaughtering people by the millions (again, a lot of leftists) elsewhere in the world to prop capitalism up.
At that point I stopped just nodding along to all the campfire stories about socialist countries. Maybe, like my standard U.S. education had missed a lot of pretty important things about how capitalism works, it had similarly missed some important things about how socialism works.