As true and as insidious as that is, the problem is much worse in allegedly “socialist” countries historically. Note that I am not really including Western Europe in my definition of socialist, even though they have larger social programs than the U.S. Having a democracy lowers the degree of shamelessness with which funds for a social benefit like free daycare or universal healthcare can be used for things other than their ostensible purpose with no consequence and for a long period of time. It’s all relative. Americans sometimes make bad analogies to their own government (“are we really that much better than X”) and take for granted how our government avoids a lot of egregious abuses that you’d find in socialist dictatorships, regardless of which party is in power.

Of course I’m speaking only of internal politics - American foreign policy is another can of worms and we don’t even have complete information to properly assess it. Are we secretly propping up a dictator who is slaughtering his own people? Who knows, maybe we’ll find out when that information is declassified in a few decades, or never.

You're talking about democracy vs dictatorship, which is orthogonal to socialism vs capitalism.

In a socialist utopia you have more democracy than in a capitalist utopia, because "true" socialism gives workers democratic control over their workplace, where as "true" capitalism gives full control of the workplace to the capitalist.

Indeed, democracy is better at preventing corruption than dictatorship.

I don't think you've measured a single thing to proudly proclaim any part of what you said as truth.

I don't know what you expect me to measure about two different visions of non-existent utopia.

Are you suggesting capitalism is not supposed to give control to the capitalist? Or that socialism is not supposed to give control to the workers? I thought my assessment was pretty uncontroversial. The point about which system yields "more" democracy is a pretty simple inference from there.

Or do you mean my last statement that democracy prevents corruption more than dictatorship? What do you propose we measure to verify or reject my hypothesis? No amount of data can prove it. But there's a pretty clear argument in favor of democracy: you can't stop corruption in a dictatorship if the dictator is corrupt; you can stop corruption in a democracy so long as the majority are not corrupt. A dictatorship can have close to 0 corruption or close to 100% corruption, it all depends on the dictator.