Implication here is you can't bake the cake under socialism?
Maybe, maybe not. Stalin baked a humongous cake, but perhaps he would have baked an even bigger one in a free market.
I think it's fair to say he baked a cake using the bodies of millions of people as the main ingredient.
The point is those large companies were created under capitalism and stagnated under socialism. IOW: It's not that they have large companies, it's that in real terms many of them have
contracted. Slowly, maybe, but it still indicates that this is not a wise long-term strategy.
A UBI is not all the Swedish government does
This is the multivariable problem I pointed to. But, socialistic societies usually have similar tendencies: Worker protection, Minimum wage enforcement (well UBI would accomplish this by proxy), bureaucratic business regulation, extensive social programs like healthcare, social grants.... all these things chip away, chip away....
One will need to separate the various issues; "socialism" isn't one single thing that always does exactly the same thing.
I'd say many of them are based on the same underlying philosophy and thus, in implementation, are extremely difficult to tease apart. Because a govt keen on one of them is usually keen on the others too.
Without a doubt. I wonder if even hardline communists would argue otherwise.
I think we have plenty of examples in SA of people who totally don't get it at all. I read an article in which someone close to Zuma was describing just how clueless he is about what money is or where it comes from.
America wasn't always a plutocracy, and it underwent its biggest growth, perhaps the most spectacular in history, during very unregulated times. Today it is still renowned for being business friendly, though not always for startups.
All true.
On the other hand, there is a cost to everything, and America's free market is not without its human cost.
Nothing is. Capitalism is not perfect and I'd never argue it. However I've yet to see a better system.
I for one would not really want to live there if I had to work for other people. Huge numbers of Americans, living in the richest country on earth, have virtually no access to healthcare
What is huge numbers? What is the representation of those numbers vs the population? What is the quality of that care?
The healthcare thing is maybe offtopic but, one thing is for sure the people in the USA are, to put it like a englishman: maybe a tad over-medicated. They do have access to facilities that would make most of the rest of the world blush. Yes they can complain about the expense, and the costs have been rising. I concede this easily. Market forces have driven the costs upwards.... however I'd also argue this alone says a lot about their relative levels of "poverty".
and work two jobs and never get a holiday. I'm not sure that is the kind of society I would want to live in (of course, if I were a rich and famous artist or something, none of that would bother me!)
I've been there, lived for a while with someone who worked in their economy. What they consider low pay is how billions of people in the world would dream in their wildest fantasies to live. We don't measure ourselves by absolute wealth, we compare against those around us. If, as in the US, lots of people around you are doing absolutely great... then your own fate starts to look bad. My friend is single income w. wife and child... Not highly trained or anything of the kind. He's simply competent. In any economy that goes a long way already. I'd live there in a New York minute.
.... but not IN New York that place is a dump.

"Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground, Silly monkeys, give them thumbs, they make a club and beat their brother down. How they survive, so misguided, is a mystery. Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability to lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here" - Tool