You don't remedy shortcomings and failures of authority by abolishing it. Doing so only multiplies the problem.
For talking about boneheaded and unsophisticated ideas, this post is severely lacking in nuance. No one is suggesting anarchy, and removing a generally malfunctioning authority can be quite productive.
Is it fair to call the US a capitalist country? Honestly, I don't think so. It's a weird disastrous mishmash of socialism, capitalism, and English bureaucracy. It's just "more capitalist" than other countries who at least have the intellectual honesty to more fully commit to a system.
We have some very limited vestiges of social democracy, but social democracy is not socialism. Socialists and social democrats were not allies. Google the meme: “SocDems killed Rosa.”
What you’re observing is what unregulated capitalism will always devolve into. It goes by many names: capitalism, crony capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism, oligarchy, fascism. But the idea is the same. Labor is violently oppressed. The State only serves the interests of capitalists. The State and Capital are often indistinguishable. There is no competition. There are structural barriers that stifle small businesses and enrich rent seeking trusts. It’s a new Gilded Age, brought to life by a new Lochner era for the Supreme Court.
I have good news and bad news: this system, whatever you call it, is extremely unstable. Its collapse is inevitable, well within the span of a single human lifetime.
Except for the half of the entire federal budget that is spent strictly on wealth redistribution to enhance equity between the rich and the poor - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Seriously, these three programs are fully half of all federal spending.
Not to mention all the state wealth redistribution programs, that cover housing (section 8), food (food stamps), education (public school system for k-12, pell grants above), utilities (utility vouchers), healthcare (ACA), telecom ("obamaphones", broadband vouchers), and more.
I've seen estimates that in the most progressive states, welfare benefits can amount to as much as $42,000 a year for a small family.
You can argue that on a PPP & CoL basis, that isn't much money in e.g. Bay Area (where that is well below poverty level), but that's also a global top 10% income.
To say there is "nothing" socialist about the US is disingenuous, politicized, and pedantic at best. There is substantial social wealth redistribution and there exist substantial worker protections in the USA. You can find plenty of countries with a FAR less socialist nature. In fairness, it is likewise hyperbolic to describe the USA as a communist or even "fully" socialist country.
We also spend about a sixth on interest payments.
Everything else the entire federal government does combined is only about one sixth the federal budget.
The UK NHS is a socialized healthcare system. The profit motive is not allowed to corrupt any part of the system. Pharmaceutical prices are strictly controlled (none of this $26k/year Alzheimer's drug nonsense). It is fully nationalized. Nationalizing an entire industry in peacetime is often (but not always) associated with socialism.
Even Canada's single payer system is not socialist in any sense of the word. It's just a government-run insurance plan. There are many multi-payer insurance systems in the world that perform far better than ours. Single-payer is not a panacea without price controls. Price controls are somewhat socialist. Funnily enough, the last US president to enact price controls was Richard Nixon, known friend of Marxists across the globe /s.
There's nothing socialist whatsoever about Social Security. It does not redistribute wealth. The tax is infamously capped at the first ~$130k of income you make per year. Any income above the cap is untaxed by Social Security. Your benefits are proportional to what you paid into it. Social Security is definitely not "wealth distribution." It is an income tax. It's income distribution if anything, but that's still pretty ghoulish framing for a stipend for retired folks that barely keeps them out of poverty.
> I've seen estimates that in the most progressive states, welfare benefits can amount to as much as $42,000 a year for a small family.
No citations, just some half-remembered statistic from a right-wing propaganda outlet that conveniently adds up to the weed number. Very believable. Very representative of the average person's lived experiences. I cannot overstate how pathetic you have to be, in order to be resentful about welfare benefits while making a tech worker's salary.
Is redistributive wealth policy count as democratic socialist policy or not?
>There's nothing socialist whatsoever about Social Security.... Your benefits are proportional to what you paid into it.
This simply isn't true. SS payments are not at all proportional to what you put in, with higher earners subsidizing lower. compare payouts for SS on 13k income and 130k income. What you pay in goes up by 10X and what you get back goes up by 3.5X you can play with a calculator if you want [1].
Tax on 13K income, SS benefit at retirement: $18,362/yr
Tax on 25K income, SS benefit at retirement: $24,627/yr
Tax on 50K income, SS benefit at retirement: $37,678/yr
Tax on 100k income, SS benefit at retirement: $56,505/yr
Tax on 130k income, SS benefit at retirement: $63,846/yr
https://smartasset.com/retirement/social-security-calculator...
What we have is best described as a mixed economy (like China's, just with a different mix of market and state that leans more towards market than China does), with an unhealthy dose of corporate regulatory capture.
Regardless of whether you're on team "big government" or team "free market", I'm pretty sure we're all quite dissatisfied with a big government that's largely captured and controlled via a revolving door between the powerful regulatory agencies and entrenched international corporations that have weaponized regulatory agencies as a business "moat" against competition.
Again, regardless of whether you're team "big government" or team "free market", it seems a vast majority of politically conscientious people ought to be opposed to such revolving doors, corporate capture, and money in politics in general.
It's deeply regrettable that even in a Democracy, positions of power have a tendency to attract people who are drawn to power, who seem to be some of those least inclined to wield it cautiously and responsibly.
I haven't exactly figured out a solution, but I wouldn't be opposed in a strictly conceptual sense (e.g. not agreeing to a specific implementation without considerable discussion / peer review) to restricting voting to
1. People with a stake in the future stability and strength of the whole system (land owners? people who've had children? not sure what the right mechanism here is, but the litmus test is a provably vested interest in the success of the whole system on a long time horizon)
and/or
2. People who are civically engaged enough to even be familiar with the process of government (civics test? I know in the past these have been abused to facilitate discrimination - I just have a hard time believing that our species is incapable of devising a knowledge-based litmus test that isn't being deliberately used to facilitate discrimination).
and/or
3. More mature people: Raising the age of majority in general from 18 to [21-25], including voting age. We know the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in making good, responsible decisions by weighing long term consequences, and it's not done developing until mid-late 20s. That said, it would be a politicized act to change voting age but not lawful firearm ownership age based on this concept, or vice versa. The politically neutral and principal-based solution here is to just raise the age of majority across the board to more accurately reflect our improved understanding of the nature of human brain development.
Why would making subsets of the population work and rent but not allow them a voice improve anything?
Everything you suggested would result in the current problems getting worse. Land owners don't mind the raising housing prices as long as the taxes don't impact them. Older people got theirs and are fine with policies that lead to younger generations getting screwed.
The first litmus test needs to be in determining whether one has a vested interest in the long-term stability of the whole system.
The second litmus test is more about capability to participate in the system as intended by determining whether one even understands the system (and hence their role and responsibilities in it). I like another commenter suggesting US native-born citizens should be able to pass the same immigration test that immigrants are required to pass in order to naturalize and gain the right to vote.
What I'm not for is making sweeping changes that aren't peer-reviewed, discussed, and widely agreed upon, precisely for the reasons you outlined - the intent is not to benefit any one segment of society at the expense of another. We all have blind spots and the ability to call out eachother's blind spots (as you've done for mine) is kinda the selling point of peer review :)
Hell I would love to hear an example of such a restriction that wasn't beneficial to a particular part of society.
This isn't a "need better rules" thing it is a "access to voting is not our problem" thing.
I believe age 18 came about because of the Vietnam War draft. Old enough to die; old enough to vote & drink. Something to consider.
The tax system is a problem also. There's an agency issue; it all about getting someone else to pay more taxes. Don't want to open that can of worms now.
Landownership, by proxy, also used to mean "white male". I'm 100% opposed to race-based and sex-based litmus tests like that, but I:
A. Remain unconvinced that, conceptually, the landownership aspect by itself (in a vacuum, devoid of the race and sex overtones), was a bad thing - land owners have a vested interest in the health of the political system that influences the value of their land in a way that renters simply do not. This isn't a diss against renters (I am one), and the reasons so many people are relegated to renting are a long list of problems of their own.
B. Firmly believe we can design such vested-interest litmus tests that do not facilitate discrimination of any protected classes.
I also firmly believe 18 year olds shouldn't be dying in pointless imperial crusades, regardless of whether they're in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine. Most 18 year olds of today (at least in the US) are very much so still kids in many ways. No more dead kids.
Your consideration suggestion is noted but slices both ways. Not old enough to drink or own a handgun? Not old enough to drive or die in pointless wars.
Well somewhere along the line we changed our minds on the drinking age, which is 21 in all 50 states