I don't know how to say it, but the russian military needs a drastic overhaul.

[myccrider]

10. They had the same system of corruption, kleptocracy, etc under the tsars.

In a sense, the culture never knew anything better. You might as well say that "this whole Imperialist Russian culture…" India is the largest democracy in the world, yet corruption is rampant in many areas of government. As bad as socialist Cuba is, it’s rated higher than India on the Corruptions Perception Index (65 vs 85) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index 😉

Free-market capitalism doesn’t exactly work as imagined by libertarians either. All utopian ideologies have a similar weakness, relying on the mechanics of a strictly economic, religious, scientific, patriarchal, matriarchal, etc system to produce a completely equitable, perfect society that ignores the foibles of human nature, eg, primitive Christianity, anarchism, nazism, libertarianism, pure democracy advocates, the Amish, etc.

So corruption and kleptocracy can be found within any form of government and in any culture, although it’s probably more prevalent in cultures that never experienced or had an expectation of a mostly honest government.

I agree with you that there need to be checks and balances, but what happened under Trump and what McConnell did to pack the SC show that even c’s & b’s can fail. It just isn’t as rampant as in Russia but don’t think that it couldn’t happen here.

These are my main objections to you saying the corruption was a "socialist culture". It can be found in any culture, society and/or government.