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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The whole idea that 'being social' equates to 'socialism', the bogeyman edition is what will stop for instance the United States from adopting a more social agenda. Free - or at least affordable - public healthcare, public transportation, internet access and access to things like clean water should be a basic standard of living for any country that does not want to be labelled 'third world'. Instead, that whole agenda has been hijacked by parties that make it seem as though being nice & normal to your fellow human beings is somehow a bad thing because once upon a time someone else had an ideology that shared the same prefix.

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I think we focus too much on the "should"s and not enough on the mechanisms that make things like public healthcare, public transpo, etc. a reality. Obviously these standards of living cost money. Great. Which is why we have taxes. Great. And in order to have tax revenue, we need productive companies/citizens. Great. So we need to focus on keeping tax revenue high enough to afford healthcare for all including those who can't work or decide not to work. This means keeping the tax rate high enough (Democrats tend to emphasize this). This also means keeping the taxable base high (Republicans tend to emphasize this). These two things are a balance because if taxes are too high, the taxable base (companies/citizens) moves elsewhere. We've seen this at a country/company level and a state/citizen level recently. And if taxes are too low, we cannot afford to provide essential services. Saying that we "should" have this or that without consideration of the delicate balance of how we pay for it seems shortsighted to me. And I know people here are smart, so let's consider the full breadth of the topic and not oversimplify.

The USA is effectively 50 countries with different demographics, geography, culture, and needs. Trying to impose any “one size fits all” solution won’t work because it’s not appropriate for a significant number of them.

Where is "access to clean water" (or frankly, anything on the list) not appropriate?

I think the charitable interpretation of the comment you're replying to is that we may need ~50 different implementations of "access to clean water," etc.

In rural communities, you're most often getting your water from a well. I grew up in an area like this, with a pumped well and septic system. There was no need for public water infrastructure because the density did not necessitate it, and the natural aquifer more than provided for those needs.

That's fine. Those people have "access to clean water". Any guarantee of such needs to take into account the various ways people obtain clean water, and make sure one exists. It might just be someone noting, "nice, they have a functioning well with plenty of capacity, good to go". If they don't then the government should fix that, either by running a public water system to that location, or drilling a well.

If that's "socialism", then I'm all for it. The idea that we shouldn't ensure that everyone has access to clean water in this age is ludicrous, and, frankly, reprehensible.

Wells and septic systems are often regulated by state and local zoning laws. So, houses are not sellable without these things, as it stands. The initial builder of a house pays for the installation. And then it passes to the next owner as part of the property. Property owners are ultimately responsible. Landlords are responsible for providing clean water in accordance with tenant-landlord law. In U.S. this problem has long been solved. Sometimes you get poor local management like Flint, MI that screws things up. But by and large, solved problem.

That presumes providing clean water is somebody else’s problem. It’s not.

Classic American culture is rooted in independence. I honestly don’t grasp the notion that “access to clean water” involves compelling others to make water clean & available cheap/free in large quantity; don’t ruin what water is commonly available, property rights apply, collect what flows/falls on your property ... otherwise it’s up to you to buy or acquire/purify for your own needs.

If an area does not have a suitable source, move. There is no right to live where you like and compel others to alleviate regional inadequacies.

“Access to clean water” is not appropriate where there isn’t any (which includes much of the US), or where water has been ruined beyond reasonable reclamation (Flint, Syracuse, etc).

The USA is a single country with what's effectively two demographics, and one-and-a-half breeds of politician.

"50 countries with different demographics geography culture and needs!" is a complete fabrication. Wyoming doesn't even have a million people in it; implying Wyoming is a country is like implying a go-kart is a jet.

I don’t think culture is population dependent. Baltimore and Wyoming have roughly the same population but very different cultural attitudes, beliefs, ways of life etc. Its hard to make a case they should have the same policies and expect the same results

It's not so much population per se as the urban/rural divide. Baltimore is a city (arguably a megalopolis of Baltimore + Washington DC + Northern Virginia and nearby areas of Maryland). Wyoming, OTOH, is the 10th largest state geographically, the least populous, and literally has more cows than people [0, 1]. If I had to guess, I would say there probably hasn't been a significant number of cows in Baltimore in over 200 years.

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/3/11504568/states-most-cows

I don’t necessarily disagree, my comment was largely based in response to the OP seeming to think population was major discriminator.

Even at the city level, I think its is too broad of a generalization. Berkeley and Baltimore have roughly the same population density but very distinct cultures

wyoming has more than ten times the population of lichtenstein and more than one thousand times the land area.

Malta has less than a million people. Is it not a country?

Well, that depends on what you mean by "country," I suppose. If your definition is "independent, sovereign state," then, of course it is. But, so is the Vatican, with its population of ~800 and land area of 0.17 square miles. For perspective, San Francisco has a land area of ~47 square miles.

There aren't many definition of a Country.

The Vatican is not in fact a country, but a city state (or a sovereign microstate) and it is an exception, not the norm.

It is anyway an independent state with sovereignty, it signs treatise with other states (like the Lateran treaty that binds it to Italy) has its own official language (Latin) its own calling code (+379) its own ISO 3166 code (VA) and its own Internet TLD (.va) so it more or less works as any other independent country out there.

And even though the actual resident population is very small, they have properties all over the World, they are in fact one of the most powerful countries in the World serving over 1.2 billions catholics (it's even 18th in the World for GDP per capita, even though the Vatican wealth is not really expressed by the GDP).

If you look at it that way, Vatican State is more of a country than Kansas will ever be.

Luxembourg has a population of 600 thousands people

Lichtenstein has 38 thousands citizens

There are 164 countries in the World with less than one million citizens and 159 with one million or more

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populat...

The issue with something like “free” healthcare is that proposed policies like Medicare for all only really talks about the demand side of the equation. It purports to expand the coverage without mentioning how we can pay doctors more so there is more of them, incentivize the private sector to produce (and profit from) top-notch drug treatments, reduce personnel and bureaucratic inefficiencies (which mind you implies layoffs which is the inverse of what government controlled sectors are associated with) etc.

In the absence of that missing supply side conversation, the proposals do start to resemble as forms of socialism i.e a simple redistribution and reversal to the mean with no major improvement to the overall system. Add assumed inefficiencies with government run systems, and you now have a more evenly distributed system but one that’s fundamentally worse in aggregate than the one before i.e. quite literally socialism of the 20th century that’s been tried and failed over and over again.

> It purports to expand the coverage without mentioning how we can pay doctors more so there is more of them

That part of it is actually not complicated: once you dismantle the private health insurance industry, you eliminate billions of dollars of waste and inefficiency that can now go toward actual care. Not saying that there won't be inefficiencies in a government-administrated system, but we actually already know what that looks like (Medicare).

Increasing the number of doctors is another issue, as private industry trade groups effectively set a cap on the number of doctors by limiting the number of teaching hospitals and medical school programs, and how many students they're allowed to take. (It's basically a doctor salary protection racket; limit the supply of doctors and the existing ones will make more money.)

Yes, we know what Medicare looks like.

We don't want "Medicare for all". Really.

The problem with this thinking is that the states are, for all practical purposes, not able to freely experiment with the things they need to. I agree that there is often no one-size-fits-all solution, but states can't always implement solutions that fit their needs, not because they aren't capable, but because of federal restrictions.

For example, the CA legislature was thinking about a single-payer healthcare bill for CA. Unfortunately, they can't do it on their own: they need special dispensation from the US Congress (and possibly the executive branch? I don't recall the details exactly) to use Medicare dollars in a way contrary to federal rules. That's unlikely to happen in the current political climate.

A cause of this deadlock is that federal taxes aren't optional. Even if CA wants to handle something for itself, it can't just tell all CA residents to stop paying that particular tax to the federal government. The state does get federal money, but it comes with strings attached. Yes, CA's taxes are already some of the highest in the nation, but I'd be fine with a (big) CA tax hike for statewide universal health care if it also meant that my federal taxes would be lower (and CA would be responsible for raising more of its budget on its own, being cut off from federal healthcare-related money). But that's just not how things work.

(Overall, I think this is a good thing: me paying into the nationwide Medicare pool means that states that would otherwise be going through budget shortfalls don't suffer. But it's ridiculous that the federal government is telling my state government what it can and can't do with what's effectively its own money, while I'm subsidizing healthcare for people in other states.)

As sort of a meta-point, the USA is maybe more like 10 or 15 different countries. Sure, there's a lot of difference in needs, values, and attitudes between someone living in Wyoming vs. Baltimore, but the people who live in DC, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Chicago have a lot in common. As do people living in Wyoming and Montana. They're not the same, but they likely have enough in common for single solutions to many problems to apply equally, or equally enough. I'm encouraged by states in the same geographic area coordinating their COVID-19 response; it shows that states with similar needs can (and should!) band together to tackle common issues where the solutions are likely to be similar.

No it's not, and the US is far from the only country that has a diversity of culture. The Canadian maritime provinces are extremely different from Nunuvut or downtown Vancouver. Paris is significantly difference than Nice. Shanghai is significantly different than Xinjiang province.

This is yet another annoying expression of American exceptionalism. Of course, it only ever comes up when someone says, "Maybe we should stop people dying because they can't afford healthcare."

The US is probably one of the most culturally uniform countries of any significant size I can think of honestly.

What's interesting though is that states that reject the notion of safety nets because "one size does not fit all" are doing the worst. Perhaps if they gave it a try, they might see that it does fit. But then we see that the problem is actually that of bought politicians.

I know. People have this idea that "socialism is when the government does stuff," if you'll excuse me in referencing a meme. They think Scandinavia is socialist because it has those things, but it is not: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland are really social democracies. That is, they're capitalist countries with strong regulation and a social safety net.

I'm not entirely sure whether full on socialism will ever happen in the US short of total collapse and reconstruction, but we can certainly take steps toward social democracy. Unfortunately, the major parties in power don't want to do that, instead pushing forward their laissez-faire neoliberal agenda.

The real problem here is first past the post voting, and the way election law is structured to keep the 2 major parties in power. We need to get rid of first past the post and reform election law before we can make any real changes.

And, annoyingly, that requires those parties to lose at least one election so they are incentivized more strongly than ever before to cast the current system in concrete. It pretty much guarantees the see-saw two party system for the foreseeable future. Imagining how America would look under a coalition government is an interesting exercise.

The 'ism' is about control, not about benefit.

Philosophically I agree that we need a better system the benefits everyone, and I agree with the gist of your comment.

However saying we need socialism skips over the most important part of it -- the mechanism to achieve that. That's the hard part that we haven't quite figured out and need to discuss. The current narrative assumes that simply funnelling the money through government for redistribution fixes the problem. It doesn't. It makes things a lot worse.

How hard is this honestly...

Socialism -- Worker ownership of the means of production.

Socialism is not "when the government is big" or "when the government does things".

A big federal government is not socialism. Norway is not socialism. Heath care is not socialism. Unions are not socialism. China is not socialism (charitably it's a state-captialist government with the goal of achieving socialism, realistically it's an authoritarian state-capitalist government).

Maybe you use a big or authoritarian federal government to try to achieve socialism, but a big federal government is not necessary or sufficient for socialism.

Except you can't really have such a thing as a large group of people have an equal say in control of anything, c.f. democracy. It is the mechanics that are the issue.

If you are talking about workers being "shareholders" then that's still capitalism.

The reason government comes into play in socialism is because you still need decision makers and decision makers concentrate power. You have a democracy today that is basically turning into an oligarchy, and the belief is that by some magic if we transferred control of "means of production" to workers this would change.

Ok, divide Amazon's shares across its workers. What have you changed? Who comes up with the list of options for them to choose from? What happens to their stock aka "control" once they leave the company? There are a million tiny details which when you work through show you why it is not workable and at best you end up back here today.

The fundamental problem we are dealing with is allocation of resources, and the masses not being sufficiently informed to make decisions. Until you solve that problem every system you put in place corrupts, some worse than others and some with few mechanisms for correction and recovery.

> Except you can't really have such a thing as a large group of people have an equal say in control of anything, c.f. democracy. It is the mechanics that are the issue.

Sure, you might disagree that socialism is possible without big government, but that has nothing to do with the definition. My only point is that it doesn't inherently have anything to do with control. The problem with saying that socialism means big government is it associates it with decades of red-scare propaganda and makes all discussion impossible.

> If you are talking about workers being "shareholders" then that's still capitalism.

Not really, if the workers have ownership over the company and the capital, then they "own the means of production".

> The fundamental problem we are dealing with is allocation of resources, and the masses not being sufficiently informed to make decisions. Until you solve that problem every system you put in place corrupts, some worse than others and some with few mechanisms for correction and recovery.

Sure, resource allocation is hard, but "lets just let the rich/monarchs/the lizard people decide" is a cop-out.

For what it's worth, you should probably engage with some 'real' socialist literature beyond just sound bites from Twitter. Many of these questions are considered. Richard Wolff might be an interesting starting point.

> Sure, you might disagree that socialism is possible without big government, but that has nothing to do with the definition. My only point is that it doesn't inherently have anything to do with control. The problem with saying that socialism means big government is it associates it with decades of red-scare propaganda and makes all discussion impossible.

I didn't say that at all. You can review my comments. But the point is that socialism doesn't distribute power, it concentrates it because "society" is never in control of anything. They'll elect representatives and they will be in charge. It is something that would work, provided human nature didn't exist.

> Not really, if the workers have ownership over the company and the capital, then they "own the means of production".

Shareholders have control over capital and have ownership.

> Sure, resource allocation is hard, but "lets just let the rich/monarchs/the lizard people decide" is a cop-out.

That's not what anyone is saying and that's not what is happening today.

There may be some who have a philosophical difference about "many" being in charge versus a "few". But just because I believe that in plurality of power it doesn't mean I believe socialism is the best way to get there.

I am not going by Twitter here. I have read a lot on the subject. Most of what I see uses socialism as a shorthand for "common good" and capitalism as shorthand for "greed". It is incorrect.

As an analogy, imagine if we're taking about ethics and morality and how to have a better and just world. If this was 100 years ago in the west, "Christianity" would be shorthand for morality and "Atheism" synonymous with evil, greed, and depravity. We've moved beyond that today and realized that neither of those will necessarily lead to a more moral or just world, and that ethics and morality are nuanced topics with a lot of details to be worked out. Simply being Christian doesn't make you one or the other, although hard to prove that to an average American in 1895. Furthermore, of the two, one is more static, dogmatic, and leads to corruption. I view the socialism and capitalism debate in the same vein.

Ah yes, I forgot that "socialism doesn't work with human nature". Good point, never considered it.

On second thought, I was wrong.

Believing in fairy tale magical solutions without caring to understand the complexity of underlying problem, is a quintessential human characteristic. So I correct myself, believing in socialism is very natural.

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological arguments. They're all the same, therefore tedious, therefore off topic here.

They also get dumber and nastier as they go along, so we end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22904776 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22904923.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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