It appears Socialist Finland may have woken up.

[Jumi]

In my opinion, some things shouldn't be privatized as to where profits are the top if not only priority. People talk about not trusting the government but how are private mega corporations any more trustworthy?

Privatized prisons, privatized fire departments, privatized military, healthcare.... what could go wrong?

 

[Revoltingest]

Privatized prisons, privatized fire departments, privatized military, healthcare.... what could go wrong?

Those same institutions run by government are far from perfect too.
I've known both inmates & guards, & heard their horror stories.
And I've dealt with fire departments. If there's any chance you can
put out a fire yourself, then do so. There'll be much less damage.
And you won't get a bill from your local government.

 

[Jumi]

Those same institutions run by government are far from perfect too.
I've known both inmates & guards, & heard their horror stories.
And I've dealt with fire departments. If there's any chance you can
put out a fire yourself, then do so. There'll be much less damage.
And you won't get a bill from your local government.

It probably depends on what government is handling it, all those seem to work well here. Of course there is a drive by right wing parties to save money by privatization and to get more money for their in group that owns the companies providing... seems like every time something is privatized here things stop working and start costing more.

 

[Revoltingest]

It probably depends on what government is handling it, all those seem to work well here. Of course there is a drive by right wing parties to save money by privatization and to get more money for their in group that owns the companies providing... seems like every time something is privatized here things stop working and start costing more.

Aye, government ultimately controls all, with management ranging from direct
(micro) to snoozing (macro). The results are always our leaders' responsibility.
As for cost, there's a tricky hidden thing to consider....
Gov exempts itself from things like taxes, building codes, & other nagging things it
imposes upon the private sector. So a private company might nominally appear
spendier (in price), while actually being more cost effective. The moral of the
story...make fully informed decisions based upon analysis, & then manage well.

 

[Jumi]

Gov exempts itself from things like taxes, building codes, & other nagging things it
imposes upon the private sector. So a private company might nominally appear
spendier (in price), while actually being more cost effective. The moral of the
story...make fully informed decisions based upon analysis, & then manage well.

Typically I'd agree, as I'm no fan of big government but I think your government and mine are different type of beasts. For services they do a good job here. The center-right government blew hundreds of millions of euros of money on just planning how to privatize things and elderly people started dying in the care of multinational healthcare companies. You had people paying thousands of euros for eldercare with minimum care and huge extra costs for things like replacing toiletpaper. They also didn't even follow minimum number of nurses on shift rules and sometimes included people like electricians as being part of the shift. So it was a disaster that took down the government. But at least some people made millions of euros of money on it already.

 

[Revoltingest]

Typically I'd agree, as I'm no fan of big government but I think your government and mine are different type of beasts. For services they do a good job here.

Services?
Hmmm....here, government is more of an adversary.
Hence the old joke about the horror of....
"I'm from the government, & I'm here to help."

Of course, the above perspective is one afflicting
those who produce, rather than those on the dole.
But even the latter will agree that services are
handled poorly, eg, drastic loss of benefits if one
gets a job, thereby keeping many of the poor down.

 

[Shad]

And these same Americans have no qualms with using public roads, public schools, the postal service, etc.

Roads are infrastructure. Government expanded the public school system and a lot of people have issues with the failing schools. USPS can be closed as it is losing money.

A lot of Americans' knee-jerk, hyperbolic attitude toward socialism is simply remnants of the red scare.

You made the same mistake as Americans, calling things that are not socialist socialist

 

[Shad]

Did you even read the article? The problem isn't with a welfare state but rather with an aging population. Japan is also having to figure out what is basically the same issue of an large retirement age population that puts a strain on the current system set up.

So the solution is to import people to cover the system's cost rather than acknowledge the system had issues never addressed.

 

[Father Heathen]

You made the same mistake as Americans, calling things that are not socialist socialist

I am an American and I wasn't calling anything socialism. I was pointing out the hypocrisy of those who dismiss anything government ran as being "godless communism" or "nanny state" while using the government ran examples I gave.

 

[Jumi]

Our recent government made cuts in education (mind you, our government was right-wing dominated) and now everyone is pissed off after the best education system in the world was started to be ruined by these guys. Even the harder right-wing parties are now, before elections, wanting to roll back the education cuts...

 

[metis]

People in Europe would mostly find the comparison insulting. In Finland(and Sweden) lots of our shared risk bearing also comes not from Marx, but from Evangelical Lutheran religious ideals.

I think we're conflating things because the term "socialism" does not imply "Marxism", especially since the latter is much more than just an economic system. It's much more philosophical, as Marxism also blends in economic and political elements based on Marx's much broader philosophy.

BTW, I was brought up Lutheran, but the church I belonged to had an anti-science bent that bothered me. Nowadays, that element is gone as my old church now belongs to the ELCA Synod, which is much more accepting of science.

What Soviet Union paid for was a political machine that had the cares of the people only as an afterthought, same as the US from our perspective.

No doubt that it began to misdirect away from that which Marx taught, especially under Stalin's regime.

I visited Sweden quite recently, people were as great as expected.

My family there is largely from Skanee and also a rural area just north of Stockholm.

 

[metis]

BTW, after reading some other posts, I think part of the problem is that some are using rather specific definitions of "socialism" whereas "socialist" in reality is really quite varied.

So, before going any further, maybe read this first: Socialism - Wikipedia

 

[Jumi]

I think we're conflating things because the term "socialism" does not imply "Marxism", especially since the latter is much more than just an economic system. It's much more philosophical, as Marxism also blends in economic and political elements based on Marx's much broader philosophy.

I know about Marxism and how different it was then the Soviet's way of doing things. I'm not a big fan of Marx bashing though, he gets a lot of misdirected hate. One only needs to read things about "disarming the populace" where Marx gets commonly mentioned. The guy was for arming the populace... so not many people care what his views were, he's just a scapegoat and excuse.

BTW, I was brought up Lutheran, but the church I belonged to had an anti-science bent that bothered me. Nowadays, that element is gone as my old church now belongs to the ELCA Synod, which is much more accepting of science.

I remember us discussing something about Lutheranism so I knew you were brought up one. The Lutherans, at least in Europe, are quite different from how they used to be. The anti-science people and priests have moved out into the fringes. Of course there's pentecostals that somehow hang around the Lutheran church which is quite odd.... but that's how it works here.

No doubt that it began to misdirect away from that which Marx taught, especially under Stalin's regime.

I always thought that no one who called themselves Marxist after Marx could accept the Soviet Union and it's political and philosophical underpinnings, but I've been mistaken many times. People from both left and right get Marx wrong. Well they have their purpose... he's become a political tool kind of like how some people use Jesus and Muhammed for whatever they themselves are for or against.

My family there is largely from Skanee and also a rural area just north of Stockholm.

Kan du tala svenska själv? Both are beautiful places, somewhat more temperate in weather than my land...

 

[metis]

Kan du tala svenska själv? Both are beautiful places, somewhat more temperate in weather than my land...

We have lots of Finns in the Upper Peninsula here in Michigan, and I've been to FinnFest twice there as we used to have a summer home there up until late last summer.

What was sorta funny during the last one at least is that Michigan law prohibits public nudity, including female toplessness, but when we had FinnFest that law was pretty much ignored. The police only would intervene if someone complained, and apparently no one did.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

It seems that a lot of Americans don't/can't/refuse to understand that it's a scale. In their minds it's simply socialism/communism vs. capitalism (never mind services like public schools, public roads, public transportation, postal service, social security, etc.)

I can't say I'm surprised given how we try to smush everything nice and neatly (and grossly overstuffed) into a box of black and white, this or that. It reminds me of one of the articles in the book "This Idea Must Die," that was about how a "singular theory of everything" is really just a hangover of Christianized Europe where there was a centralized everything, and it was god. Going off of that, and how Christianity itself is extremely rigid and binary in its worldview, I wonder if our insistence that everything must be of one or the other with no shades of in between also stems from this same cultural hangover from a time when it made sense for practical and survival purposes to have such a narrowed view of things. Today if someone appears sick, it's far less a gamble if we don't act on that. But before modern medicine, if someone appeared sick, it makes sense to take no chances and assume they are sick. When you don't know what causes day and night, it makes sense to think "either-or" is the natural state of the world as twilight and dusk are nothing more than transitional phases from one state to the next, not the results of a cosmic dance that reveals night and day to be a state of relative positioning (which leads to a position of a "colorful" worldview that is open for explanations outside of a binary explanation, as it's day, not because it's day, because this side of the Earth is the one currently facing the Sun).

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I know about Marxism and how different it was then the Soviet's way of doing things.

Even Lenin stated Marx wasn't a major influence of his, and Marx and Engels provided very little in regards to what Lenin and other Communist Revolutionists would set out to do (they wrote more about what society would like once it was a worker's utopia - most of their writings as a whole is a mountain of cultural and economic analysis and critique). It's to the point that often political scientist will say Marxism (with some going as far to say Communism) has never been attempted.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

So the solution is to import people to cover the system's cost rather than acknowledge the system had issues never addressed.

I don't have the solutions. But they'll never be reached if people want to assume it's a problem with a "welfare state" when in reality it's an issue of an aging population that all "advanced" nations either are currently facing or will face in the future.

 

[Altfish]

So the solution is to import people to cover the system's cost rather than acknowledge the system had issues never addressed.

That is one part of the solution, in the UK they are gradually raising the retirement age.Contributions will have to go up.

 

[Shad]

I don't have the solutions. But they'll never be reached if people want to assume it's a problem with a "welfare state" when in reality it's an issue of an aging population that all "advanced" nations either are currently facing or will face in the future.

Population decline is connected to the welfare state and the taxes required for it.

 

[Shad]

That is one part of the solution, in the UK they are gradually raising the retirement age.Contributions will have to go up.

Which is horrible solution as far as importing people and increasing the age of retirement which is just fleecing of people forced to go back to work as the government can not manage much.