>>>If you don't learn, you've got NO chance at all.
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>>So you MUST learn, and I agree with that. It's just the elegant path how it changed from "not guaranteed" to "not even promised" :).
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>Why should it be promised?

This was an echo to CharlesH's note to the "pursuit of happiness, not promise". And we aren't even talking about the happiness, just measly livelihoods.

>Maybe I am reading your recent posts incorrectly but you seem to be experiencing some lingering nostalgia for socialism. Is that an unfair statement?

Slightly. Always ready to defend the slandered and badmouthed, specially when I saw the statements to be false.

You see, nobody says "capitalism inevitably leads to dictatorship", although that's exactly what happened in quite a number of countries. But it happened to socialism a couple of times (USSR 1920s on, China during the cultural revolution, Ceauşescu's Romania) and it's somehow 100% guaranteed? I could argue that the Scandinavian countries, e.g. Sweden, have their own version of socialism, and nobody accuses them of being a dictatorship, do they?

Socialism is a design. The implementation may vary. You don't want VFP9 showcased by means of 2.6 spaghetti code, or capitalism showcased by sweatshops. Likewise, I do not equate socialism with command economy, that's simply a bad implementation. And who knows, maybe even USSR would have grown out of that phase had it not been put under siege and henceforth ruled by military minds. Note that its initial slogan was "all power to the councils" (aka soviets), i.e. down-to-earth local democracy. But after several years of siege and counterrevolution, they got into that enemies-are-everywhere, we're-in-a-war stupor and the power never went back to those councils. They became just a formality, rubberstampers for the party.

Socialist state is also supposed to be a government of the people, for the people, a democracy. Historically, the role of the communist party was to vanish, i.e. it was supposed to build a society with direct democracy, where there'd be no need for any leaders or a leading force it was. But of course its historical goal always got postponed indefinitely, because it became a bureaucracy, and made its own existence its primary goal. Which doesn't mean it would have to be so in each and every case. I presume any XXI century socialism would have to be quite different - based maybe on a mix of worker-owned, state-owned and private enterprise competing on the market, with direct online democracy. If everyone has a cell phone, can't they vote through it, and not vote for someone who will just push their own agenda, but vote directly on issues? (OK, this was from a SF story I never finished writing ;).