If you are in a capitalist society, how can you work harder and educate your offspring if you get made redundant, there's no jobs available :eek:and the cost of university education is £9000 per year?

Norway is socialist....

Norwegians aren't exactly living in poverty and cueing up for food. Norway nationalised it's oil and gas, then decided to use renewable energy itself. So it can sell the oil and gas to other suckers who are dependant on it. This money pays for their healthcare, housing, education, pensions, helping with unemployment, etc etc.

You don't like socialism because you were told not to like it.

How come its suicide rate then is higher than Ireland, UK, Germany, Portugal etc if things are so great ?

racedo, it's dark half the year, cold most of the year, and beer prices are outrageous. :)

I asked a German chum about the way they dealt with things so quickly when the first rush of wheezing Trabbis came over the border to shock the greenie-weenies with their oily exhausts. All the travellers were welcomed and housed in transit camps whilst everything was sorted for them to move on.

Was this a prepared German plan? It was very efficient.

"Nein. But you see, ve Tchermans, ve know a sing or two about camps.....", he replied in a 'cartoon Gestapo' manner....;)

Really, well thanks for putting words into my mouth and telling me something I didn't know. What an absurd contention!

Norway is a benign type of socialism that works, it is not the hardline socialism that destroys lives and economies. Norway has rich resources, and a small and homogeneous population.

The idealogy is a dismal failure everywhere else.

I was serving at Bruggen at the time on 17(F) - it changed things completely. Travel to Berlin for example was rubbish after the demise of the military train!

If you cannot get a job, then eventually you will become homeless, and die of starvation or sickness.

Of course in a civilized society, this will not be allowed to happen, and other peoples' income will be spent taking care of you.

That's all very well, but it makes you dependent upon others' charity. Not a place I would like to be. So I work hard to ensure that won't happen. If I were to lose my job, I would find another. I don't care if it is stacking shelves or flipping burgers. I would rather do that, and cut my cloth accordingly, than go cap-in-hand to others.

Socialism led to the atrocious conditions of the 70s and early 80s, before the cancer was cut out. I grew up with power cuts, mountains of rotting bin bags on playing fields, unburied dead, truly shocking industrial practices, constant strikes, the rest of the world laughing at the UK.

Then came Margaret, and the socialist principles were never heard of again. Blair and Brown are simply less-conservative Conservatives, lacking in fiscal and moral judgement.

Well said Roadster,

I lived in the Soviet Union about 40 years ago. The abject poverty, crumbling infrastructure, frequent powercuts, unreliable water supply and lack of civil liberties will stick with me always. The phrase "better dead than red" would just about sum it up.

So long as you have lots of resources and a government that doesn't get in the way of the people who want to extract and sell those resources, the type of government doesn't matter much. The money will be rolling in either way.

According to Reuters today, Norwegian oil revenues declined nearly 20% last year, oil and gas production declined 9%, and they're going to have to invest twice as much in the future just to keep output flat:

Norway's Petoro to double spending just to keep oil output flat | Reuters

At least they've saved much of their oil revenue, so they probably won't become the next Venezuela when it runs out.

Personally, I was still at university when the Berlin Wall came down, and was just glad I probably wouldn't end up a charred corpse in a nuclear war.

Not sure if anybody has actually answered the OP's original question from a first-hand perspective so I will offer this:

Not long after the wall came down those of us fortunate to sit on Nuclear QRA at Laarbruch and Bruggen found that part of our commitment removed and the weapons were eventually withdrawn from RAFG.

That was both good and bad for we aircrew employed in that role!

Good, because it released us back onto the flying programme for a 24 hour period that had previously been denied us and -

Bad, because in QRA you could catch up with a hell of a lot of 'secondary duty niff naff', play uckers without the Boss breathing down your neck to do something constructive and watch porn movies on Deutsch 3 long into another boring night in the pen!

Happy Days

Bloggs
:E

It does, because a 'socialist' government would do the exact opposite and would block free enterprise.

You would have been alright, all you had to do was lie down facing the blast and tuck in all exposed flesh and it would pass right over the top of you, then it wouid come back over you again in the opposite direction.... And I should know because i still have my survive to fight book :p

Now.. having a poo surrounded by blister, blood or nerve agent, that was the tricky one...

40 Years of our lives working up to fight the "Russian Communist Threat".
A large proportion weren't Russians,
very few were die hard Communists,
and perhaps the Threat was somewhat over stated.
.
,
,
,
or so I was told.........

With capitalism we are having to work longer and harder for less. Our money is no longer going as far as the cost of living keeps on going up. Capitalism is making only the very rich richer and everyone else worse off. I'm not saying the Soviet bloc was good, I'm saying capitalism isn't working too. Capitalism is also destroying the lives of the people who live in our very own countries and the economy isn't doing too good.

Capetonian, nationalising industry blocks bad practices, such as price rises without any reinvestment just to maximise someones profit. The reason why capitalist politicians allow such extortionate industry is because of the campaign donations they receive.

gr4techie : I respect your idealistic point of view, but I learnt a long time ago there is no point in arguing with drunks, women, or people who are opposed to capitalism.

....... and SWMBO is home and I'm on kitchen duty tonight despite only having one good hand at the moment, having lost an argument with some rocks and a river!

This is because previous governments spent the money on social programs. Worse than that, they borrowed even more money to do so. The current generation of taxpayers are having to find the money to service that debt, which is why you feel worse off.

It's not capitalism that is the issue, it is the Labour party.

If a farmer can produce a gallon of milk for say a pound, and he wants to make a living, he sells it for more than a pound. That makes him a capitalist.

If a mechanic can change the oil on a car for say twenty pounds, he's obviously going to charge more than that to make a profit. He's a capitalist too.

I lived in Berlin 66-68 (Dad was at Gatow). Years later I was on taceval at Lyneham, in the crewroom, clad in charcoal suit with all the kit and crap close to hand watching the first chunks of the wall being chipped off and seeing East Germans clambering all over it. Big sense of "so what's it all about now, Alfie?" filled the room.

I now spend a lot of time working in E Germany (Leipzig). There is still a lot of infrastructure work to do (city centre lovely, outskirts derelict) and most people over 30 don't speak English, the younguns do.

I work with a guy whose German father was captured by the Russians in WW2 aged 16, assimilated into Russia and became an academic. His son (my colleague) became a Mig fighter pilot. After the collapse of communism he qualified as a civvy pilot, moved to Germany and became (re-became?) a German citizen. But he does have a very Russian name.

I also work with another E German who was a tank commander in the E German army.

Funny old world.

Ah Roadster,

If only your beautifully simple explanation were heard more often we wouldn't be in this mess! Not PC I know, but I'd love to see a comparison of IQs between Labour and Tory voters.

Thanks for posting that, the key can be seen in 2009, where the budget deficit more than doubled, as the wheels came off in spectacular fashion. You can see where the Brown Chancellorship started throwing money away as far back as 2002, ending in the disaster of 2008-9.

The ConDem coalition has taken 3-4 years to reduce the deficit, and there is a way to go yet, but the trend is definitely in the right direction.