A Wonderful Socialist Life
paper.dropbox.com
paper.dropbox.com
The result is not convincing. It’s like a burn victim arguing against fire. Yes, fire can be bad, and I’m sorry you got burned, but I’m not going to give up cooking or heating because you’ve been traumatized.
... and the utter disaster that those were were actually still superior to what happened in China, Vietnam and other South Asian nations.
This is the best, not the worst, that socialism has brought:
> “The third tier socialized healthcare is for everyone else. Yes, it was free. But it also was a disaster of epic proportions. Truly horror movie like. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Countless people died because of lack of medicine, filthy operating rooms,…”
> “…lack of heat in the winter, broken down ambulances, overcrowded emergency rooms and last but not least doctors who were so poorly paid that they had to accept bribes in order to give proper attention to patients. This situation remained a disaster for another decade after…”
The worst, of course, was outright mass murder. And that's ignoring that both Cuba and the Soviet Union, which, again, are the better examples, did cause famines to eliminate populations. But again, a famine is far preferable to the "cultural revolution".
I've lived in France, so euhm ... shows what you know I guess.
(France has private, mostly employer provided healthcare (though you can pay for yourself if you want), and emergency and basic care available for free. Whilst yes the free part covers more than it does in the US, it's definitely not socialist medicine. Also, more and more doctors refuse to treat patients for the basic care (which they're allowed to do))
The issue is sustainability. Besides pensions at the local level, nothing to worry about for us in the US.
Those in France, Germany, Sweden must deal with major issue, including homegrown terrorists, low economic activity, decline in population, lack of control of their monetary policy. They will crash, as all socialistic country do, when their ressources are exhausted or when their population stops believing the dream their government sells them.
How many of the top internet companies are located there? Which of the top blockchain comparies are located there? Unless you think it will be different for the next technology, they will keep missing the boat and falling more and more behind.
Average income in Mississipi, the poorest US state, is higher than in these countries- look at the price of gas and electronics here vs there - and so on. Here buying a tiny car, without AC or automatic transmission would be weird. People did that a long time ago, but we can afford better now. There, it is still the norm.
It is just a question of when they fail
That’s just circular reasoning! All socialist countries fail because all of them will fail if they haven’t already. What?
What’s the deal with your Mississippi statement? A quick search shows Mississippi with a median income of about $20,000, and France (for example) at over $30,000.
I would be happy if I am wrong on this one example: I do not wish anyone to be poor. However, wikipedia says median income for MS is 40k now, cf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incom...
While for France, it is 20k according to http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=ilc_...
My numbers may be wrong, as other sources say it would just be above the 12 poorest, see https://mises.org/wire/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...
If France median income is not lower than the poorest US state, but on par with the bottom 1/5 of the states, that still speaks volume. It's burdened by a system that can't work.
You appear to be comparing Mississippi’s median household income with France’s median individual income. The former is of course much higher.
However I'm not sure you should celebrate that.
One aspect to taxes in Sweden that is not well known is that while taxes are high on labor, they are relatively low for corporations (22 percent) and capital. Keeping taxes low keeps corporations and capital from going to other countries. The 1994 changes in government deregulated everything from taxi, air service, railroads, electricity, telecom and school choice.
The open-competition school choice model in Sweden would trigger U.S. teacher unions into a froth. Parents and pupils decide what school they want to attend and they are all paid for by taxes. Corporations, towns, charities, religions, most anyone and anything can start a school, but it’s up to parents and pupils if they want to attend. The more people that choose a particular school determines if that school will get more government funding.
The fiscal side of Sweden has become increasingly pro free market, ranking 15th globally while the US ranks 18th. These capitalist features have helped sustain Sweden’s standard of living, but dark clouds are on the horizon. The nation has an ageing workforce coupled with a slowing birthrate (1.67 per female, well below the 2.1 needed for a population to maintain its population). Decades without significant construction in cities has resulted in skyrocketing housing prices, while high wages leave many unskilled workers, both Swedish and foreign-born, on the fringes of the labor market.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2018/07/08/sorry...
I don't think this is what you have in mind. If it is, it's not socialism. Looks like more market economy than in the US.
every time
I mean this as a genuine, rather than rhetorical, question.
Also, I can see the email address of everyone who's viewed this document, along with their name.
There’s a big difference between social democracies (Denmark) and socialism (Cuba, Venezuela). My personal take is that those who were instrumental in the creation of these had very different ideas about the desirable endpoints. Certainly, hearing my local “democratic socialists” (Seattle), I get a strong impression that Scandinavia is not their model.
Why can’t we respect Clement Attlee more than Comrade Gonzalo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
And by the way, why does equality for all mean this ?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3192933/Hugo-Chavez-...
Apparently, can't have socialism without Justin Bieber. Not for sharing, of course.
Extreme poverty halved under Chavez. The most vulnerable citizens in Venezuela (poor, indigenous Venezuelans) are the strongest supporters of the socialist government.
Venezuela has had economic problems, relating to their over-reliance on oil revenue (which has always been a problem and has nothing to do with socialism), and bad monetary policy (which again, is not at all related to socialism)
Meanwhile, the US continues to levy harsher sanctions aimed at forcing regime change (ie, so their country is run by a puppet state friendly to US capital), which only makes the crisis worse.
Same happened in the Soviet Union, but of course giving total power to the state (def. of socialism) never leads to the people that are the state (all states are nothing but a group of people) abusing that power to get away with bullying, rape and murder.
Especially once, inevitably, a socialist state runs out of other ways to pay them. They can't survive without them.
But noooo, it's outside sabotage, as if capitalist states don't sabotage each other too....
Then, in this new expanded space in your mind, it challenges an assumption prevalent in politics that policies are "good" or "bad" independent of who (and how many people) they are applied to.
In my opinion, there should be a lot more discussion about this. Maybe what we really need is something resembling the Democratic platform at the local level, and something closer to Libertarianism at the national level.
The fact that these ideas aren't even discussed should make you worried -- how many other ideas are just not even thought about in public discourse?
The Civil war is a valid example of our historical struggle with the issue of state vs federal policies, but that was a long time ago.
But I don’t think it’s hard to find, you just have to look for it. Lots of contemporary debates have a strong element of this. For example, the fight over “sanctuary cities” is all about this. Gun control and abortion often involve questions of whether those things are better set at the state or federal level. A huge amount of education policy debate is about how much the feds should dictate. A big part of health care reform is whether it should be done at the state or federal level. Net neutrality is turning into this now that the feds have given it up. I have a hard time thinking of anything domestic where central versus local control isn’t a big part of the debate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_s...
http://www.freedommag.org/issue/201501-religion/world/her-na...
Still think medical monopolies are such a great idea ?
Liberalization of the market economies in Scandinavia has been taking place in a pace rarely seen anywhere else. Go to Sweden and find voucher schools for all ages, free taxi markets etc, - things you can barely find the US!
I think this confusion may arise so frequently because socially speaking the current governments are very liberal-leaning (super pro immigration, super pro diversity/gender quotas etc). However that's causing kickback. Sweden's next election is predicted to be dominated by the Sweden Democrats who don't approve of such things.
I can't tell you why Scandinavian counties seem to be sensible and many others are crazy. But, I would say that anyone thinking about changes to US governance needs to take the craziness level into account. For a while the US made a passable imitation of being somewhat sensible, but it seems that was an illusion.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/venezuelas-inflation...
Not mine. Thanks, Multi-Account Containers!
I think we have too much of a tendancy to think hierarchically, i.e. Trump/Obama is the boss of America, so if something is wrong anywhere then look to them for help.
The more reasonable explanation is people abusing the abuse button or whatever twitter uses to flag posts.
Can you show me proof that any web single company actually has this point of view? If anything, most tech companies are anti-puritan, anti-anglo-saxon and anti-US national interests.
Had you bothered to read the link, you would know the author has the exact point of view you just described and yet he's been kicked off of twitter thrice.
From CEOs getting cozy with presidents and declaring their patriotism (while running a globally important web services), cutting off people like Assange, or even directly working for the State Department or various agencies (e.g. Bezos), to the censorship that's always based on what a US-person would tolerate (e.g. nudity) or find offensive, and so on... Their whole mission statements reek of Californian ideology as well, but that's another story.
Do you have proof of what you said?
proof: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1020755555978162176.html
I don’t see anything in your “proof” which shows why he got banned. Did I miss it?
> No reason given, other than the standard “you broke the community rules, here is the link you click if you want to appeal”.
Does he contradict this elsewhere and give the reason?
I scrolled down for quite a while and what I saw was a mix of pro-Trump tweets, stuff about Romania and communism, and the only things I could find related to gender were tweets stating sarcastically that the actresses who slept with Harvey Weinstein ("sleazy producer") had no moral agency, i.e. they did have moral agency. Is that what you mean?
We have more than enough resources to provide a good living for everyone in this country. Capitalism does not do that, and never will. Only socialism will.
I am having trouble finding Cuba's GDP before, or arround, the revolution in 1953. So take this comment with a grain of salt.
Compare the development of China, which is responsible for nearly all of the poverty reduction of the last 30 years, and India, a similarly situated but more market-oriented economy victim to western Imperialism. It's night and day.
I'm not defending any of these regimes (they all certainly had problems), but the argument that socialism "doesn't work" in terms of creating a functional, growing economy is simply not consistent with the historical record. Again, despite controlling most of the global economy and being the wealthiest country in the world, the U.S still doesn't have affordable housing, livable infrastructure, reasonable work environments, and enough food for all its people. Because capitalism never has and never will provide those things.