re: #588 Lucius Septimius

With regards to China, executing plant managers when bad products hit the road sounds pretty Totalitarian.

The Chinese, like the Nazis, and the Soviets in their dying years, are prefectly willing to allow a certain level of “private enterprise,” but only with the proviso that it exists under the umbrella of a totalitarian system. Those private enterprises, then, are personal privileges granted to individuals that could be (and often are) revoked when the state feels like it (or needs to requisition capital). There is nothing free in the Chinese economy, and periodically the Chinese government takes little symbolic actions to demonstrate that fact.

As for Europe, their experience with socialism is leading them to move away from it.

China was not a “socialist” government before they became what they are now.

My point above was, socialism does not lead to totalitarianism.