[Personal curiosity] Is a little bit of socialism such a horrible thing?

I’m a Canadian, as I think you know, so I have an outsider’s point of view on this as well, and I think you’re right that the Cold War rhetoric is still alive in the heads of many Americans. The words socialism and communism really have no literal meaning when used they way you’ve identified and, imo, are little more than a scare tactic that draws on echoes of old Cold War fears.

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So the answer to "money not being spent on the most needed areas" is to not fund them publicly at all? I'm assuming that when you say "most needed", you mean the poverty stricken areas. Wouldn't changing to a private system just increase this problem as the poor areas will continue to have low funded schools?

Also, what education philosophy are you referring to? I'm not sure what you mean here.

 

Exactly. Lou Dobbs the patriot makes a nice living shouting Red Communist China and doing his little cursing every day on CNN prime. Americans are very much indoctrinated by the powerful, efficient propaganda machine run by the rich. They don't ask how things are really working in US and other nations.

Excellent thread, by the way.

 

Bahaha... because Communism has proven out to be such a winner. That was nice.

 

BAHAHA, is that a child I'm replying to? Nice answer following your textbook. If you think communism have ever been executed by any government, you're delusional. If you think capitalism is the sole reason where America is standing at the world today, you're delusional. It's meaningless to call "----ism" in today's world.

Vast resources+science and technology+taking advantage of two world wars make today's America. America adopts the most brilliant people in the world. America also feeds the most narrow-minded, obese, stupid and lazy people in the world in the name of welfare and it's so paranoid (made out by the propaganda machine) to the idea of socialism and it'll never admit it's a socialism element. It's called socialism under the flag of capitalism. On the other hand, economically "evil" China is actually a state capitalism in the name of socialism. How ironic.

 

Serious question:

Isn't our group based health insurance that we all get from work basically socialism?

No matter your age or how sick you are or how often you go to the doctor everyone pays the same. (Unless of course you add on spouse or family)

This creates a situation where those that are healthy and take care of themselves end up paying for those who don't. An inequality in benefit since both the healthy responsible individual and the unhealthy irresponsible pay the same. Also the unhealthy person in this example is driving up the premiums because of his cost.

Thus the healthy individual is being "punished" because premiums keep rising through no fault of his.

I thought America hated the concept of paying money into the system and others gaining more benefit. Like welfare and other social programs.

Yet we tolerate it for group health insurance.

I wonder how people would react if we enacted car insurance the same way where everyone pays the same no matter how many tickets or accidents they have had. I am sure there would be backlash about why should my premiums go up when I am a safe driver yet the guy with 5 tickets who should be paying more pays the same as I do?

Yet again group health insurance we tolerate it's socialism.

Thoughts?

 

In theory pure unfettered capitalism is great, but neither deals with reality.

We have mountains of history dealing with fraud (ponzi schemes, lack of standards) and exploitation (children, women, the poor, powerless and uneducated) to realize that some form of regulation and protection is needed.

And dealing with the 80-20 power rule, there has to be some effort to spread that wealth (not necessarily through taxes and welfare) to prevent such an uneven, yet naturally occurring distribution. It's this effort combined with preserving that individualistic sense of accomplishment and self enterprise that continues to define the US.

There's no black and white distinction and our nation has been the best example of that, and btw it's done fairly well, all things considered. It's not the most perfect system (there's government subsidies on the corporate end along with individual entitlements), but it is among the most dynamic around the world.

 

Exactly, all insurance is socialism, except that the insurance company itself needs to make a profit, too. So it's capitalism based on socialism principle. The healthy folks are losers in both socialism and capitalism ways.

 

I can tell this is going to be a waste of time. You can play semantics with China's system all you want, it's still run by a bunch of Communist politburo aholes who've deprived the Chinese their basic human rights in exchange for satellite television. As long as they deny these rights they are fundamentally evil in their governance regardless of the economic situation. Call the system or government whatever you want if it makes you feel better about it. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The true irony is how many Chinese are in the United States having this discussion rather than in China.

 

Look, WNBA fan, Americans or America stands at no moral high ground to point their fingers to foreign countries until they sweep clean their own backyard. I would not discuss the cases of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Timor today.

Pointing out basic human rights violation by others for its own convenience is typical hypocritical behavior for either political reasons or making themselves feel better. Pretending caring about others' well being is just laughable.

How many media guys in this country really tried to understand other people and culture in reporting them except they have a hidden agenda for themselves and only see what they want to see? Do they even know the other language? A liar doesn't need to tell you a lie, he just needs to tell you the partial truth, no matter how small portion is that in the whole picture. This is how propaganda machine works and in the name of free speech, it works very well in this "greatest country on the earth". Too bad the Chinese government is so awkward in manipulating the mass media compared to USA.

I am not saying you don't know Chinese at all. I won't laugh at you for not doing so for whatever reason. I can say at least you never tried to read those Chinese forums discussing meaningful topics just about everything. The more the Chinese (at least those young college kids) read the western media, the more disgusted they become. Guess they are all nationalists, huh, well there are plenty of those in US, too. They are called "Patriots".

It's too trite to talk about "human rights" and "democracy" nowadays, my friend. Those words became laughingstock long time ago. They are the emperor's new clothes anyway.

 

It basically goes like this:

Cold War + Stupidity = Fear of Communism/Socialism

People don't know what socialism/communism is, but someone told them it's bad, so it gets a huge stigma. What they don't realize is that paying taxes is somewhat of a socialist activity -- tax payer dollars get shared amongst citizens via services, stimulus checks, etc.

Mostly, though, the stigma is there due to lack of education.

 

Of course one could just as easily say that one's openness to it stems from never having to have lived under it and thus never experiencing its particular set of problems.

 

Back to the question. A little bit of socialism is needed to have a decent moral society. Only a few cranks or idologues like libertarians would find it bad. You do have the wingnuts in the GOP who act like this is not true, but even few of them are that dumb. They just do that to confuse some of the folks.

 

A little bit of socialism is not a bad thing. I spoke prior that modern day U.S. democrats are socialistic democrats for the most part and that is not disparaging...

The problem is the "democratic socialists" since these elite class non-mud blood socialists are very against the framework of capitalism. At least, socialistic democrats believe in their agenda being enabled through the capitalism framework.

My contention is that's fine until individual right are infringed.

 

So because China is run by communists it is a communist country? If they switch the name to Chinese Republican party and does everything else exactly the same they are no longer communist country?

There are many countries with human rights issues including Suadi Arabia which has a strong US ally.

The economic system in China is much more capitalistic than the current system in the US.

capitalism does not care if it is run by the communist party or the democratic party or the martian alliance.

 

CommieWin, your idol Dalai Lama considers himself half-Marxist, what da ya know?

 

The majority of the people who go spastic whenever some talking head alleges socialism in the United States have absolutely no idea what socialism is.

Anyone familiar with the doctrine knows that true socialism can only occur as a progression from a capitalist state. We have never seen genuine socialism or communism (none of the "communist" nations had an established market system prior to their revolutions).

Industrialized Europe, to some degree, seems to be following the "inevitable" progression that Marx spoke of - when the proletariat in a capitalist society, who are inevitably going to be miserable in a capitalist system, end up having a greater degree of influence on the shape of society through their organizing efforts. The only thing, thus far, that has prevented this from occurring in the United States is the ridiculous power that capitalism (as an ideology, not as a process) has upon those who benefit from it the least, and the long-dead but still-eulogized "American Dream" that has people convinced (despite the fact that it creeps closer to impossible with each passing generation) they're all gonna be rich one day.

I don't agree with either system, as I think they're both outdated and inadequate for the modern world, but as far as the progression of capitalism -> socialism -> communism goes, I'd say it's still in the realm of possibility though the furthest stage that process has reached in the world is a rather mild socialism.

For those who clamor for a genuinely-free market (as if such a thing could exist in the modern day), I'd point out that over the course of the 19th century in the U.S. the system was at, or very close to, being completely unfettered by restrictions and actually, in most cases, received help from state power. There was rampant exploitation and a great deal of corruption, but it did help build the United States into a world power. Now, we've reached the point where capitalism (even with the supposed restrictions and safeguards in place) has the opposite effect: the corruption and lop-sided distribution of capital/power is now detrimental to the United States in both a local and global sense.

It's out-of-date, and does more damage to more people than good. Now it simply perpetuates the power of those who already have the greatest access to capital, and in the past decade we've seen how that effects the well-being of the country as a whole.

 

It isn't doing so great these days. I think we could certainly survive without the USPS, but as long as it funds itself, I have no complaints about its existence.