I’m “debating” a Liberal who thinks “Marx had some valid critiques of capitalism” and “the US has done some bad things” but isn’t great on AES. I sent them the recent post showing that China doesn’t block western media, and they said that it only shows one computer and smart people can get around blocked stuff, and I explained what it actually shows before they said “China is still more authoritarian than the US and my personal freedoms aren’t stopped by my government” (note: all of these are paraphrases, but I don’t think I’ve strawmanned anything). So, what are some solid examples of the average citizens in socialist countries having more “freedom” than in capitalist countries? Edit: Thanks for all the great responses!
I don’t have the sources on hand rn but you can cite the correlation between citizens’ wishes and legislation in various countries. In the US there’s literally no statistically significant correlation, there’s a little bit of correlation in many European countries, and it’s pretty high in China. You’ll probably have to search quite a bit for the studies tho.
I remember the very study you reference (American wishes vs. What Congress actually passes) being a major seed of my early radicalization. If paired with the China correlation, I would have shortcutted to ML perhaps!