On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 15:52:49 -0700, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Is it POV to say that communism never works in practice? (or something similar)
No, just a simple fact-based observation.
But one that might be better phrased as: "By commonly accepted measures, no communist regime to date has been successful." The inhabitants of some former Soviet republics might well argue that communism was doing quite a bit better than the current free market/criminal anarchy that they are living under. And from discussions with Chinese students here, China is doing pretty well on most fronts other than political freedom and human rights, give the problems inherent in governing and feeding 1.3 billion people.
If a sentence in Wikipedia that does not refer to someone/thing dead, extinct, destroyed or completed contains the word "never" then it is in need of a rewrite. For example, we cannot tell that there won't be a successful communist regime in the future.