despite the fact that socialism is an idea only articulated a couple hundred years ago
How so? Socialism has had many incarnations. Even Plato had a top-down Philosopher King ideology that wasn't much different. Socialism essentially boils down to a small group of people attempting to engineer society, which is not a new idea whatsoever.
And, even if you want to believe the WORD socialism - as you may want to understand it now - is new over the last couple of hundred years, even then it has a disasterous record and a 100% failure rate.
A single failure rate and it should have been thrown out of the ideological mix forever.
yet has the lowest infant mortality in Latin America tells me that maybe it hasn't totally failed.
Your saying your argument for socialism not having a 100% failure rate is that a series of variables that cannot possibly be quantified (such as genetics, food, geography...etc) is your smoking gun for its "maybe" being effective?
That's not even a shot in the dark, it's a desperate last death croak at the bottom of the sea.
it was a political house of cards made up of ethnicities that all hated each other.
North Korea was more wealthy than South Korea even for years after the war - look what happened to them. A small, fleeting amount of success is not a proving ground. A continued time span is.
When every single country that implements socialism is ultimately destroyed from within (and even just worse-off than before when they implement it partially) and then immediately redeemed within a matter of years once more capitalistic practices are adopted (China being an excellent example) then you just have to admit socialism is a failure at that point.
I thought we were arguing about a UBI or GMI, neither of which are socialism.
Yes - it's socialism.
This is the other thing I think is funny, besides people who advocate for socialism saying that the reason it hasn't worked was either due to other factors or it just plain not being implemented correctly, they refuse to look at obvious socialist behaviors and actions and call that what it is - socialism (an incarnation thereof) and assume that, becuase it's not 100% the same thing, that it somehow will have a different result.
It's incredibly flawed logic - makes no sense.