Fundamentally, it is the problem of the people running the system and the people that believe the system works.
I'm not saying it wasn't a problem in the USSR, I'm saying that it's not an inherent problem of Socialism. Yeah, they got stuff wrong, that's because their nation was as much a social experiment as the US is. Thank God they messed up enough for us to learn from it and not do it next time.
It is in the Marxist-Leninist course.
Touche.
I know some Soviet military hardware outperformed stuff from the U.S. in test piloting, notably the MiG-29. The other stuff hasn't really been combat tested.
Actually, the USSR spent between 25-30% of its GNP on the military during the 1970s and 1980s, compared to around 5-7% for the U.S.
Since you have the factbook, what was the Soviet GNP vs. the American GNP for that time period?
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Snopes to the rescue:
"NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and development costs were paid by Paul Fisher.
No development costs have ever been charged to the government."
Even if it's not true, the mindset remains the same. Russian stuff is built to ease of maintenance and production; you ever see a MiG up close? It's got exposed rivets all over the place.
If socialism was the better system, then why didn't they ever catch up or surpass the U.S.?
I never said it performed better, I said it was morally right, and that it performed
well enough.
No one questions Capitalism's capability for fantastic growth, but that's why people like Marx said that socialism should and must come after Capitalism, which it did not in the USSR. Had they had the advantage of having gone through the capitalist phase, and then were compared to a continuing capitalist nation on par, I'm sure it would do better. Remember that Lenin's main theory was that it was possible to go directly to Socialism and skip the capitalist phase by rushing through it, hence the NEP and Five-Year Plans. It is quite clear that he was wrong in that regard.
The average high school graduate in the U.S. earns more his Soviet counterpart.
Of course, Americans have to pay for everything they need. Soviet citizens did not.
So socialism will guarantee me a fulfilling, electricity-free life?
You yourself noted that only "some" of them had no electricity. You ever been to West Virginia? Montana? Utah? It's not as if these things did not exist in the US, either.
Again, my point is that the Russians never even came close to our standard of living regardless of their circumstances.
Define "standard of living." If you mean material posessions, you're right, they didn't, because socialism is not obsessed with such things. And it's not just socialists who preach this, either, you can find this rhetoric in philosophy and religion, secular and ecclesiastic alike.
Sure it is, shareholders are protected participants in the corporation's management.
Sharholder /= employee.
