Socialism is just not intelligent.

[Quetzal]

What I did was to take a hoax, but a nice story that is highly plausable, then allowed socialists to complain about the "context and bad example", and then give them the reality of what socialism will do in a restaurant. Now, what will it do to a country?
Well, Russia, East Germany, Romenia, North Corea, and Venezuella learned their lesson, but it seems as if the socialists of this world dont even know about their restaurants failing because of socialist thinking.
Read for yourself.
Marxism on the Menu: Why This Communist Restaurant Failed | Abigail Hall

I still have an issue because you won't help us by defining, based on your understanding, what socialism is. I think this is important and will take a lot of guess work out. Socialism has many flavors with different levels of effectiveness and we need to get that out of the way first before the discussion can continue.

 

[joe1776]

...
Perhaps we can get a decent quality discussion into this otherwise rather sterile thread.

Let's try that.

The first point I'd like to make is one that's often overlooked in these discussions. Plans fail for these reasons: a) the plan is flawed; b) the plan is poorly executed or both a and b. And since we humans have yet to invent a government that hasn't been inept, corrupt or both, we can't say that any plan has been fairly tested and failed; and, we can't expect any economic plan to succeed.

Currently, the so-called "mixed economies" work best because free markets weaken the power of inept governments. However, their impact is limited only to products that are bought by well-informed consumers spending their own money. In all other aspects of the economy like healthcare, the free market produces massive fraud. Even inept government management is better.

In the future, after we have figured out how to govern intelligently, a cooperative economy will be possible that will treat all citizens fairly.

What do you think?

 

[sun rise]

Any story that starts with "Obama's socialism" is unlikely to contain much accurate information. This fit the mold.

You beat me to it. Right wing lies that President Obama was a socialist because anything other than right wing fanaticism is socialism to the extremist right wing.

 

[exchemist]

You beat me to it. Right wing lies that President Obama was a socialist because anything other than right wing fanaticism is socialism to the extremist right wing.

Agreed. To a European, the notion that any US government has been "socialist" is laughable.

 

[exchemist]

Let's try that.

The first point I'd like to make is one that's often overlooked in these discussions. Plans fail for these reasons: a) the plan is flawed; b) the plan is poorly executed or both a and b. And since we humans have yet to invent a government that hasn't been inept, corrupt or both, we can't say that any plan has been fairly tested and failed; and, we can't expect any economic plan to succeed.

Currently, the so-called "mixed economies" work best because free markets weaken the power of inept governments. However, their impact is limited only to products that are bought by well-informed consumers spending their own money. In all other aspects of the economy like healthcare, the free market produces massive fraud. Even inept government management is better.

In the future, after we have figured out how to govern intelligently, a cooperative economy will be possible that will treat all citizens fairly.

What do you think?

I too tend to favour a mixed economy. I am in Britain, where we had a lot of deregulation and privatisation in the 1980s under Thatcher. There seems little doubt to me that most of this was a very good thing for the UK economy, though its social effects could have been better mitigated. However I have never been convinced that privatising the railway network really made sense. It seemed to be mainly about getting capex off the government books (though it was also about reducing the power of the rail unions, which was a good idea in my view). Also the water utility privatisation has been a disaster, though for telecoms, gas and electricity it has worked well.

I'm inclined to favour market competition where consumers' buying power is effective. With natural monopolies such as utilities, great care is needed and where consumer power doesn't really work, e.g. banking and insurance, you need strong regulation, which we have not always had.

But I don't really think any of these issues are about socialism, really, more about how to make a market mechanism work for society. The big socialist areas seem to me to be health, transport infrastructure, and to some extent, education and housing. I can't think of any "Western" democracy that relies on the state to run supply of consumer goods, food, hospitality or entertainment, and nobody I have met in the last 30 years has suggested this would be a good idea.

 

[Altfish]

Could you not think of a more inflammatory title for your thread?

 

[Vouthon]

That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich; a great equalizer.

As other posters before me have already explained, Obama was in no sense - certainly not how the term is technically employed in political science - a "socialist", nor did he at any point in his career advocate anything remotely close to "socialist economics".

Also, all economies in the West today are mixed, with elements of "socialisation" to provide safety nets in a market economy, whether in medicine, housing or welfare. The US has been no exception, since the days of FDR in the 1930s and LBJ in the 1960s, albeit it has less in the way of "socialised" state funded services than most industrialised market economies.

But a good example of an actual modern ‘market socialist’ party is in Portugal, which not only has a socialist-led leftist government in power right now under Antónia Costa (called the Partido Socialista “Socialist Party” conveniently enough!) but even enshrines ‘socialism’ in its constitution, as the fundamental orientation of the Portuguese Republic (‘Preamble’, 1976, last reviewed 1989). Portugal, I can tell you, is a vibrant and successful market economy. It isn't anywhere near "communism" (i.e. a planned economy with full state ownership of the means of production and no private ownership of property whatsoever).

On the contrary, it has high growth - above the average for the eurozone - as a result of budgetary reforms introduced by its socialist government, which involved a reversal of the fiscal austerity and public spending cuts imposed by the preceding centre-right administration (in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis) and thereby " proving that by putting more money in people’s pockets it could lift growth ".

Socialism predated the emergence of Marxism and Marxian socialism (there was Utopian Socialism, Agrarian Socialism and Proudhonian mutualism / libertarian socialism before Marx), and remains to this day a broader category of left-wing economic theory.

In Portuguese and normative European terms, Obama would be a "centre-right" liberal. Not a socialist and certainly no Communist.

I am always bewildered by the vague and all-encompassing "pejorative" usage of this word, as a term of abuse, by very conservative / right-wing American pundits for anyone even moderately to the "left" of their worldview. This kind of loose and throwaway usage of the word is frankly unparalleled outside the United States.

As a European looking in from the outside, it just strikes me as rather bizarre.

And then you cap it all with an even more outlandish comparison of this allegedly "socialist" stance (though it is in fact a misapplication of the term), with references to historic crimes by Marxist-Leninist regimes - such as Soviet Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia - as if suggesting that moderate centrism or "social liberalism" is comparable not only to social democracy or democratic socialism but actually synonymous with totalitarian Marxian communism as well!

To me, this is almost Orwellian-level language manipulation / Newspeak. Things mean things. It means something to be a political "centrist" like a Clinton or a Blairite. It means something to be a "social democrat" or a "democratic socialist". It means something to be a "Marxist-Leninist Communist". And they all mean different things and should ideally be so distinguished.

By conflating and misapplying these quite precise terms in a highly partisan manner, one just empties them of any meaningfulness and so we end up with an almost total lack of substance in a conversation, since the terms used to begin with are so vacuous.

 

[metis]

I read a few stories about Professors teaching socialism to the class, but the best one is this:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich; a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the third test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, all failed and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

It could not be any simpler than that.
Does socialism work? A classroom experiment - The Commentator
It is only a story, but the same happened in Russia, and 25 million people died of hunger.
And even in Cambodia with Pol POt, millions more died.

And you really believe this story to be actually true, right?

BTW, Jesus' apostles operated out of a "socialistic" paradigm according to the Book of Acts.

 

[Lyndon]

Its easy to label everyone socialist when you're a fascist

 

[Tambourine]

Let's try that.

The first point I'd like to make is one that's often overlooked in these discussions. Plans fail for these reasons: a) the plan is flawed; b) the plan is poorly executed or both a and b. And since we humans have yet to invent a government that hasn't been inept, corrupt or both, we can't say that any plan has been fairly tested and failed; and, we can't expect any economic plan to succeed.

Currently, the so-called "mixed economies" work best because free markets weaken the power of inept governments. However, their impact is limited only to products that are bought by well-informed consumers spending their own money. In all other aspects of the economy like healthcare, the free market produces massive fraud. Even inept government management is better.

In the future, after we have figured out how to govern intelligently, a cooperative economy will be possible that will treat all citizens fairly.

What do you think?

I think that is largely wishful thinking and seems to come from an idea that capitalists are either incapable of failure, or that their failure does not matter. Profit-driven enterprises are rather narrow in their application and tend to fail when other values would need to be prioritized over profit.

For example, in the field of health insurance, it would be inherently more profitable to only attract the healthy, i.e. low risk clients who are still willing to pay relatively high premiums, while ignoring or outright avoiding to sign on high risk clients such as people with unhealthy backgrounds (such as a history of chronic illnesses) or simply poor people who would be unable to pay high premiums. In this example, the profit goal stands in direct opposition to the goal of covering for people's illness and injury, to the point where the most profitable course of action would be to avoid pursueing the latter goal as much as possible.

So many of these "mixed" systems actually allow for substantial public control over essential infrastructure and services, in the expectation that these services will be able to manage themselves with reasonable efficiency absent a profit motive.

 

[joe1776]

I too tend to favour a mixed economy. I am in Britain, where we had a lot of deregulation and privatisation in the 1980s under Thatcher. There seems little doubt to me that most of this was a very good thing for the UK economy, though its social effects could have been better mitigated. However I have never been convinced that privatising the railway network really made sense. It seemed to be mainly about getting capex off the government books (though it was also about reducing the power of the rail unions, which was a good idea in my view). Also the water utility privatisation has been a disaster, though for telecoms, gas and electricity it has worked well.

I'm inclined to favour market competition where consumers' buying power is effective. With natural monopolies such as utilities, great care is needed and where consumer power doesn't really work, e.g. banking and insurance, you need strong regulation, which we have not always had.

But I don't really think any of these issues are about socialism, really, more about how to make a market mechanism work for society. The big socialist areas seem to me to be health, transport infrastructure, and to some extent, education and housing. I can't think of any "Western" democracy that relies on the state to run supply of consumer goods, food, hospitality or entertainment, and nobody I have met in the last 30 years has suggested this would be a good idea.

We seem to mostly agree on what economic methods work best given the current quality of the world governments. However, I wonder if you would agree with my vision of the future.

I foresee cooperative economies winning out over the competitive because:

1. Societies are essentially cooperative endeavors. The individual citizens cooperate expecting that their contribution will earn them a share of greater benefits than they could achieve on their own. Asking them to compete for survival, defeats the essential aim of a society.

2. Morally, economic competition is inherently flawed because, all else being equal, the competitor who cheats and can get away with it wins.

3. Individual citizens have basic needs for food, water, shelter and clothing in a safe environment. A system that makes it difficult for many citizens to get the basics while others accumulate wealth many times greater than their needs, is inefficient.

 

[joe1776]

...For example, in the field of health insurance, it would be inherently more profitable to only attract the healthy, i.e. low risk clients who are still willing to pay relatively high premiums, while ignoring or outright avoiding to sign on high risk clients such as people with unhealthy backgrounds (such as a history of chronic illnesses)...

The insurance carriers have been doing as you suggest for years. Are you unaware of the contentious political debate over "preexisting conditions?"

 

[exchemist]

We seem to mostly agree on what economic methods work best given the current quality of the world governments. However, I wonder if you would agree with my vision of the future.

I foresee cooperative economies winning out over the competitive because:

1. Societies are essentially cooperative endeavors. The individual citizens cooperate expecting that their contribution will earn them a share of greater benefits than they could achieve on their own. Asking them to compete for survival, defeats the essential aim of a society.

2. Morally, economic competition is inherently flawed because, all else being equal, the competitor who cheats and can get away with it wins.

3. Individual citizens have basic needs for food, water, shelter and clothing in a safe environment. A system that makes it difficult for many citizens to get the basics while others accumulate wealth many times greater than their needs, is inefficient.

I think we may see some rebalancing towards recognition of cooperative endeavour, as a result of the virus crisis. Here in the UK, we have (for now at least) a new appreciation of the vital importance of - and the risks run by - such lowly people as nurses, underground train and bus drivers and supermarket shelf stackers. It has been eye-opening for all of us to realise how dependent we are on these people. I certainly hope that they get out of it more self-respect and better pay and conditions, even if goods have to cost more or we have to pay a bit more tax.

But I'm afraid I do not believe in a cooperative model for most of the economy. The wish for individuals to get ahead, by their own effort, is deep-rooted. The genius of capitalism, when it works in a properly controlled manner, is to harness this perfectly natural and ineradicable self-interest in a way that benefits everyone.

Nobody asks individuals to compete against each other "for survival". That's not what happens. Businesses compete for the favour of individuals. Any market stall trader knows he or she needs good stuff, at a reasonable price and served to his or her customers quickly and cheerfully, if they want a good business. Same for the local plumber. That is as it should be and the fact there may be another market stall or plumbing business down the street just keeps both of them honest. But one doesn't drive the other out of business, as a rule. The French food markets I visit seem quite happy to have about 3 of everything under one roof and they all make money.

I do agree - of course - that larger businesses can have a natural tendency towards monopoly. That is the reason we need what was called the Monopolies Commission (FTC I think in the US) to stop that. I do think there is an argument that these entities need to be more active.

I also feel strongly that the conventional wisdom of trickle-down economics has allowed an absurd over-remuneration of top managers in business. These people all sit on one another's remuneration committees and talk a lot of self-serving balls about "the going rate" for CEOs etc, when there is no real market pressure on these people to justify their salaries. This is well overdue for correction, either by reducing top salaries or by exponential taxation at the top end to make it pointless. I mean, how many luxury yachts does a man need to motivate him to work hard? It's a scandal.

 

[Nimos]

What I did was to take a hoax, but a nice story that is highly plausable, then allowed socialists to complain about the "context and bad example", and then give them the reality of what socialism will do in a restaurant. Now, what will it do to a country?
Well, Russia, East Germany, Romenia, North Corea, and Venezuella learned their lesson, but it seems as if the socialists of this world dont even know about their restaurants failing because of socialist thinking.
Read for yourself.
Marxism on the Menu: Why This Communist Restaurant Failed | Abigail Hall

Clearly that is proof that socialism is not working.

Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday, September 15, 2008. ... The filing remains the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, with Lehman holding over $600 billion in assets.

Clearly capitalism doesn't either then following the same logic, I guess.

 

[joe1776]

...
But I'm afraid I do not believe in a cooperative model for most of the economy. The wish for individuals to get ahead, by their own effort, is deep-rooted. The genius of capitalism, when it works in a properly controlled manner, is to harness this - perfectly natural and ineradicable - self-interest in a way that benefits everyone.

I do agree that the competitive free market is a clever device that has utilized self-interest to advantage. But I see no future for it because:

You write in praise of the wish for individuals to get ahead, by their own effort. I don't see this as praiseworthy since "get ahead" will amount to more than making a decent living. And your claim that it benefits everyone isn't true. In any competition, there are losers.

The winners are fairly predictable at birth. If a child is born highly intelligent and infected with greed to highly intelligent parents who were infected with greed, that child is, almost surely, a winner who will own far more wealth and property than needed.

The losers are equally predictable at birth. If a child is born with below average intelligence and wants only to live a decent life, that child is a loser who will struggle to survive and is unlikely to own property.

Capitalism won't survive because it's unfair and it promotes inequality..and our world had been trending toward fairness and equality.

 

[Valjean]

Could someone explain the difference between socialism and democracy?

 

[joe1776]

Could someone explain the difference between socialism and democracy?

socialism is an economic system
democracy is a form or government (by the people)

 

[Twilight Hue]

That's one of the problems with U.S. conservatives; they define "socialism" as anything they don't like or understand. Most democrats, by global standards, are center right; a far cry from actual socialism. And judging by the political compass scale, those who identify as liberals tend to fall within the green quadrant, not the red one.
View attachment 41164

And I suppose it applies conversely with the fascist tripe? Or is the latter too inconvenient?

 

[Twilight Hue]

socialism is an economic system
democracy is a form or government (by the people)

Too bad it couldn't be that simple.

All the same, I would say Marxist would indeed be more fitting than Socialist at this stage when it comes to the modern Democratic party and people like AOC.

Maybe the word Republic needs to be redefined as well.

 

[Tambourine]

The insurance carriers have been doing as you suggest for years. Are you unaware of the contentious political debate over "preexisting conditions?"

I am quite aware of that. That's one reason why I chose that particular example.