"Socialism has never worked when implemented" is one of the most interesting pieces of propaganda to me. For starters, it's not a defensible claim. What does it mean when a society is "working"? The claim might as well be "socialism has had flaws when implemented". Uh, of course?

But it's more than that. If you press anyone saying this to you, chances are you'll more or less come to the conclusion that what they really mean is "socialism has never produced a society as good as the United States when implemented".

This is more or less how Americans are trained to think, so it sounds compelling at first, but it makes even less sense than the first thing. If I took a landlocked, impoverished, unindustrialized territory of 8 million people and made them socialist, after 60 years they would...

...of course be poorer than America. But If I took a landlocked, impoverished, unindustrialized territory of 8 million people and let neoliberalism run its course... it would STILL be poorer than America! In other words...

...when people say capitalism is working, they compare poor capitalist countries to where they were in 1890 and call it progress. When people say socialism doesn't work, they compare poor socialist countries under trade embargoes by the entire world to the richest nation on Earth

Leftists offer systemic critics of capitalism, and the right responds by pointing to specific states like Venezuela and generalizing. You get more confident to talking to the right when you realize they don't actually argue