You're perfectly entitled to that belief, and you may well be right to hold it. But there are plenty of people out there who don't share your belief in this matter, and therefore are capable of supporting communism without supporting mass murder.
To put it another way - it may well be true that communism in practice inevitably results in oppressive regimes, and is incompatible with democracy. But I personally know several people who believe otherwise, and are some of the nicest people you'd meet. They aren't secretly desiring a purge of their enemies, they aren't planning on supporting a new stalin, they merely have some fringe beliefs on economics.
Anyone who doesn't share my "belief" that tens of millions were murdered in Russia and China, and proportional numbers in Cuba and Cambodia are simply unthinking denialists of reality - crazy bigots. I'm quite certain that Marx didn't intend or support mass murders - so what ? Are you arguing that good intentions make up for millions of murders and vast repression of human rights that commonly accompany communist takeovers ?
All of these systems in practice were not egalitarian; they were oligarchies or dictatorships with communist rhetoric. So maybe a pure communist state is fundamentally untenable, unstable. Perhaps they are all subverted by a Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez in the beginning - but that points to a different and serious flaw too. Are there any counter examples ? They are so repressive that they must re-educate or imprison or murder enough dissenters to create some systemic stability. Maybe these good-intention types simply fail to calculate that when you make the lot of half the population better by redistribution, that you necessarily make the lot of the other half worse. You cap the potential to do well at a very low level. The communist system prevents people from engaging in value-adding exchanges of the free market (tho' it's hard to entirely suppress), so it necessarily leads to inefficient use of resources and poor productivity. Is there even one case of a person risking death to escape a capitalist democracy to emigrate to a communist paradise ?
Plenty of other western countries have limits on political campaign spending. The stipulation in the UK is that you cannot fund a political party over a set limit unless you have literally no ties to them, as I understand it. I'm not seeing a restriction of free speech resulting.
Well for one thing - we aren't other countries. For example Canada has no compunction about prohibiting freedom of the press in reporting of trials. They have laws that allow prosecution for speech I would call politically incorrect, and modestly offensive at most. So I'm quite glad we have greater freedom in that respect.
Your description of UK campaign finance does not correspond with anything I read on the topic.
http://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/uk.php
So there are spending limits per-candidate, but no contribution limits for a qualified contributor. A registered voter, or UK company or UK union can give as much as they want.
Broadcast time cannot be purchased by candiates - which seems like a ridiculous imposition on free speech and impractical for the US market. There are all sorts of limits on expenditures but 3rd parties (what we would call PACs) for/against a candidate - but I see no attempt to prevent any issues spending by companies or the wealthy.
No - I just don't see the advantage. The PM candidate can spend ~$25Mil, but the lawyer's or unions or big biz could spend lots more on an issues campaign and use broadcast media to do it. Seems much worse. The candidates are not free to even spend their personal money on themselves - and you think there is no imposition of free speech !??!
