Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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"left" indeed -- I have been a pretty radical socialist since I was 16. (Well, at least on paper, I haven't been done activist work for years) ... And I don't recognize myself in this "left" that people keep talking about. I think it's hilarious to call CNN "left" or think that anybody in GitHub leadership is "left" for relabeling git branches. Plz. It's just a proposterous strange (and uniquely American) partitioning of the world.

If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.

So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)

I am not american, so can somebody explain why this comment is downvoted? So that I can avoid such mistakes in words usage when I come to america?

If you want to understand why Biden and Obama are called socialists, I suggest you do some reading of the Anarcho-Capitalist literature (Anatomy of the State is the most obvious) or maybe listen to someone like Peter Schiff.

I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.

Biden and Obama are called socialists because Americans were trained to fear communism and socialism during the Cold War. There is nothing about their political stance that is socialist. Conservatives have just learned that they can score easy points by calling anyone left of Ronald Reagan a marxist

> There is nothing about their political stance that is socialist.

I don't know how anyone can make this statement with a straight face. What about ObamaCare?

How is ObamaCare socialist? It's just a giant subsidy to private insurance companies. It's literally the opposite of socialist health care policy.

> It's just a giant subsidy

If it is redistributing wealth, it's socialist. Taking taxpayer money from person A and paying it out as a subsidy (even if laundered through a private company) to benefit person B is socialism.

Anytime you are redistributing wealth under the threat of the government's right to licit first use of force, you're engaging in socialism.

Socialism as defined by socialists is social ownership of production.

What you're describing is socialism as defined by its libertarian intellectual opponents, and that's a pretty broad definition (any taxation followed by spending is socialism? That's pretty odd... so all military and police forces are socialist?)

So, fine, if that's what you choose to believe, but it's certainly not a policy proposal that is advocated by actual socialists. Even the soft left wing of the Democratic party found/finds the ACA objectionable.

In fact it's explicitly the kind of policy that liberals advocate in order to avoid socialist policy measures and to avoid being called socialists.

> Socialism as defined by socialists is social ownership of production

That's communism, a specific flavor of socialism.

“ Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

You should read the rest of that wikipedia article instead of just the first line.

There are many variations discussed in the article. What you should look for are the market varieties of socialism, especially the ones where the objective is to achieve socialism by following peaceful mechanisms of achieving socialistic goals instead of achieving socialism via revolution.

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