"Ardently Capitalist Communists"

Government and politics

Main articles: Politics of Vietnam and Military of Vietnam

The Presidential Palace in Hanoi, formerly the Palace of The Governor-General of French Indochina.

The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, along with China, Cuba, and Laos, is one of the world's four remaining single-party socialist states officially espousing communism. Its current state constitution, which replaced the 1975 constitution in April 1992, asserts the central role of the Communist Party of Vietnam in all organs of government, politics and society. The General Secretary of the Communist Party performs numerous key administrative and executive functions, controlling the party's national organization and state appointments, as well as setting policy. Only political organizations affiliated with or endorsed by the Communist Party are permitted to contest elections in Vietnam. These include the Vietnamese Fatherland Front and worker and trade unionist parties. Although the state remains officially committed to socialism as its defining creed, its economic policies have grown increasingly capitalist,^[91] with The Economist characterizing its leadership as "ardently capitalist communists".

The pictures aren't important, they somehow hitched a ride on my "copy and paste" from Wikipedia. It appears that Vietnam has gone the same way as Red China, they still have a communist or socialist government, but their economic system has been drifting towards capitalism for some time. I know a guy (American) who has made a few business trips to Red China with the Japanese owned company for which he works. He told me that the deal in China is you can start a business there, but the Chinese government holds the controlling interest, that is, more than 50% of the stock. I'm not sure what the current status of private property ownership is there. There have been proposals made in the past to allow it, but I haven't heard that any of them have been actually implemented. I remember reading some years go that a Chinese politician, in defending one of those proposals, said that they needed to allow private property in order to "preserve socialism". I'm not sure what he meant by that, but he was a politician after all, so maybe it wasn't supposed to make sense.

The United States, on the other hand, has been drifting towards socialism since the days of FDR. Some European countries, and possibly Canada, may be ahead of us in the respect, but we're all going down the same road. Our politics, however, are probably more democratic than they have ever been, so I guess you could call what we have "democratic socialism". Back when we were kids, some people referred to it as "creeping socialism", but they were just paranoid.

We like to think that we own our real estate but, in a manner of speaking, we're just renting it from the state. If you don't pay your property taxes, the state will confiscate your property and sell it to the highest bidder. If nobody wants to buy it, they'll likely convert it to some public purpose, like a park or museum. This is not so different than it was in the Middle Ages. The Duke of Earl might think that he owned his dukedom, but that land was granted to the duke or one of his ancestors by the king, who could reclaim it if the duke failed to pay his taxes or otherwise pissed off the king. The duke could also be dispossessed by another nobleman in combat, but the king may or may not have had something to say about that too. All things considered, I think we've got a better deal now.

Whether or not our current system is fair depends on how you define "fair". Is it fair to take something away from somebody who has worked for it and give it to somebody who has not? Well maybe, under some circumstances but, if you carry that to the extreme, people might just stop working. Of course you could force them to work, but wouldn't that be slavery? I suppose you're right that we could "level the playing field" a bit more, but there has been a lot of that leveling going on in our lifetimes, and yet they say that the gap between rich and poor is getting wider all the time.

 In the communist countries, the government controls the money and, in the capitalist countries, the money controls the government. There must be a better way to run things, but I don't know what it is.