Quote from: bryant.coleman on September 05, 2015, 06:11:02 PM

And talking about China, it is not a 100% capitalist country. For example, people are free to trade in equities. But every now and then, the central government imposes restrictions, which makes conducting share trading very difficult.

For sure I didn't say it is 100% capitalist - and indeed the stock market is not something I would even bother with here.

It is the silly myth that it is "communist" that annoys me as really there is very little here that would strike you as being that (apart from perhaps the stock market but really that is just the SOE's and they don't work in a way that benefits anyone but those in power).

The entire "point" of Carl Marx's idea was to benefit "the people" (by their own efforts) - but there is nothing you can find here that actually does that at all (seriously not one thing - so to call China "communist" would be to call Carl Marx a guy who's vision was to actually screw everyone for everything and give them nothing).

For example I have experienced problems at hospitals where someone who has a seriously high BP is not treated until they do "pointless tests" in order to charge you more money (endangering the patient's life just to get some more funds). Now does that strike you as being something that Carl Marx would have ever supported (if so then I guess you have never read any of his literature - which is something that I actually did)?

Basically westerners who talk about the "evils of communism" have never read Carl Marx and have no idea about how governments like the Chinese one work (they just picked up from CNN or the like that "communism" is bad and don't even bother to try and research about how a county's political system actually works).