Socialism Is Always Doomed to Fail

[coloradoatheist]

The usual 'Not true Scotsmen' sort of argument. Great theories again? How many times do you wanh to try them?

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. It isn't the welfare state. In practice the collective ownership is exercised by the government. Calling what I wrote "No True Scotsman" is, well, ... suppose you have a man who was born and raised in Japan. As were his ancestors for at least 30 generations. He looks and speaks Japanese. His DNA test comes back and says while he has a tiny bit of Chinese or Korean he has absolutely no European. Would you say he is a Scotsman? Apparently yes. The usual "No False Scotsman" sort of argument.

Are you such a die-hard capitalist that you can't give credit of the welfare state to anything else other than capitalism? Wow.

Come on, throw logic a bone once in a while.

It's funny because die hard Socialists claim that the government organization of resources such as welfare isn't true socialism. Their definition of socialism is closer to what people think of with communism. And people complain when those govt programs are called socialism.

Capitalism is what enabled the welfare state, but it's very easy for long term for us to kill ourselves with the welfare state.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Are you such a die-hard capitalist that you can't give credit of the welfare state to anything else other than capitalism? Wow.

Come on, throw logic a bone once in a while.

It's funny because die hard Socialists claim that the government organization of resources such as welfare isn't true socialism. Their definition of socialism is closer to what people think of with communism. And people complain when those govt programs are called socialism.

Capitalism is what enabled the welfare state, but it's very easy for long term for us to kill ourselves with the welfare state.

Yes, the welfare state.

The Bonus Army were the some 43,000 marchers—17,000 U.S. World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups—who gathered in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1932 to demand cash-payment redemption of their service certificates. Organizers called the demonstrators the "Bonus Expeditionary Force", to echo the name of World War I's American Expeditionary Forces, while the media referred to them as the "Bonus Army" or "Bonus Marchers". The contingent was led by Walter W. Waters, a former sergeant.

Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates.

It is as if people are completely unaware that suffering existed prior to Social Security.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The usual 'Not true Scotsmen' sort of argument. Great theories again? How many times do you wanh to try them?

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. It isn't the welfare state. In practice the collective ownership is exercised by the government. Calling what I wrote "No True Scotsman" is, well, ... suppose you have a man who was born and raised in Japan. As were his ancestors for at least 30 generations. He looks and speaks Japanese. His DNA test comes back and says while he has a tiny bit of Chinese or Korean he has absolutely no European. Would you say he is a Scotsman? Apparently yes. The usual "No False Scotsman" sort of argument.

Are you such a die-hard capitalist that you can't give credit of the welfare state to anything else other than capitalism? Wow.

Come on, throw logic a bone once in a while.

I call it "Social Safety Net" or "Welfare" or "Redistributionism." I try to not use the word "capitalism" too much because even though I mean "laissez faire" when I use the word, others use "capitalism" to include Keynesianism, monetarism, supply-side, demand-side, corporatism, etc. Now we even have a few twits who think all of those are laissez faire. I try to use accurate definitions, which is why I use "socialism" to refer to "collective ownership of the means of production", not because it has anything to do with Scotsmen (or Japanese Scotsmen) but because that is its definition.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

And at this point I realize I should have used "Korean" instead of "Japanese" because then I could link to a Starburst commercial.

"You're Scots-Korean, you don't make a wee bit of sense."

 

[dismal]

I find myself agreeing with Loren. China is an example of the worst of a "market economy" without all that pesky democracy gumming up the system.

They're a hopelessly corrupt totalitarian state with a veneer of capitalism. And they just declared their president gets to keep his job for life.

It's worth mentioning that China was a pretty impoverished and miserable totalitarian place before it got that "veneer of capitalism". Annual GDP per capita was about $250 and mass starvations were common.

With that "veneer of capitalism" GDP per capita is now about $9000. That "veneer" is arguably the greatest anti-poverty anti-misery measure in human history.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

The usual 'Not true Scotsmen' sort of argument. Great theories again? How many times do you wanh to try them?

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. It isn't the welfare state. In practice the collective ownership is exercised by the government. Calling what I wrote "No True Scotsman" is, well, ... suppose you have a man who was born and raised in Japan. As were his ancestors for at least 30 generations. He looks and speaks Japanese. His DNA test comes back and says while he has a tiny bit of Chinese or Korean he has absolutely no European. Would you say he is a Scotsman? Apparently yes. The usual "No False Scotsman" sort of argument.

We tried laissez faire capitalism and it doesn't work well. Communism Soviet style doesn't work. The problem is far right types braying about socialism when what we have is nothing like socialism. We see that when we give the laissez faire capitalist reactionaries free reign such as we saw in the Bush years, Kansas, and Louisiana, that doesn't work. Yet as we read here now, in Kansas, the usual stupids want more big tax cuts. While on Fox we hear a lot of squealing about socialism by people who can shriek but cannot think clearly.

Does "socialism" work? For example, in the Scandinavian countries good health care is freely available. Scandinavians do not have to worry about a serious illness bankrupting them, losing their homes and living in poverty to the end of their days with their families.
To be sure their taxes are higher than in say, Alabama, but the results are in the end, good. If we call this socialism, then the right wingers who most certainly do are the best salesmen for socialism ever.

 

[dismal]

The usual 'Not true Scotsmen' sort of argument. Great theories again? How many times do you wanh to try them?

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. It isn't the welfare state. In practice the collective ownership is exercised by the government. Calling what I wrote "No True Scotsman" is, well, ... suppose you have a man who was born and raised in Japan. As were his ancestors for at least 30 generations. He looks and speaks Japanese. His DNA test comes back and says while he has a tiny bit of Chinese or Korean he has absolutely no European. Would you say he is a Scotsman? Apparently yes. The usual "No False Scotsman" sort of argument.

We tried laissez faire capitalism and it doesn't work well. Communism Soviet style doesn't work. The problem is far right types braying about socialism when what we have is nothing like socialism. We see that when we give the laissez faire capitalist reactionaries free reign such as we saw in the Bush years, Kansas, and Louisiana, that doesn't work. Yet as we read here now, in Kansas, the usual stupids want more big tax cuts. While on Fox we hear a lot of squealing about socialism by people who can shriek but cannot think clearly.

Does "socialism" work? For example, in the Scandinavian countries good health care is freely available. Scandinavians do not have to worry about a serious illness bankrupting them, losing their homes and living in poverty to the end of their days with their families.
To be sure their taxes are higher than in say, Alabama, but the results are in the end, good. If we call this socialism, then the right wingers who most certainly do are the best salesmen for socialism ever.

You thought we had laissez-faire capitalism in the Bush years?

Wow. People believe some crazy shit.

What we had in the Bush years was immaterially different than what we had in the Obama years.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

He thinks that "Laissez faire" means "tax cuts".

The word "capitalism" has various meanings depending on usage, which is why I try to not use it too much. To some people it is synonymous with "laissez faire", to others it includes the systems known as Keynesianism, monetarism, supply-side, demand-side, welfare redistribution, and corporatism. But while there is an argument to be made about whether or not all those others are included under the umbrella of capitalism, there is no argument to be made that all those others are included under the umbrella of laissez faire.

Still, having polluted the word "capitalism" to that degree, they have to move on to the next target and insist that laissez faire includes all sorts of government interventions, just not the interventions they like.

In the Usenet news group talk.origins there is a creationist there named Ray Martinez. One quote of his sticks out in my mind, which is him saying that Muslims were actually Atheists because Muslims don't accept the divinity of Jesus. An odd perspective. So a theist who doesn't accept his version of theism isn't a theist, according to Ray. And Republicans don't accept the Democrat version of economic intervention doesn't accept any version, according to many Democrats. Those Democrats are very much like Ray Martinez.

 

[dismal]

He thinks that "Laissez faire" means "tax cuts".

The word "capitalism" has various meanings depending on usage, which is why I try to not use it too much. To some people it is synonymous with "laissez faire", to others it includes the systems known as Keynesianism, monetarism, supply-side, demand-side, welfare redistribution, and corporatism. But while there is an argument to be made about whether or not all those others are included under the umbrella of capitalism, there is no argument to be made that all those others are included under the umbrella of laissez faire.

Still, having polluted the word "capitalism" to that degree, they have to move on to the next target and insist that laissez faire includes all sorts of government interventions, just not the interventions they like.

In the Usenet news group talk.origins there is a creationist there named Ray Martinez. One quote of his sticks out in my mind, which is him saying that Muslims were actually Atheists because Muslims don't accept the divinity of Jesus. An odd perspective. So a theist who doesn't accept his version of theism isn't a theist, according to Ray. And Republicans don't accept the Democrat version of economic intervention doesn't accept any version, according to many Democrats. Those Democrats are very much like Ray Martinez.

You tweak tax rates a few percent and keep 10,000s of other regulations and programs more or less the same and you are not wildly vacillating between "socialism" and "laissez-faire capitalism".

The lack of perspective can be breathtaking.

 

[bilby]

Abstract
Legal systems often rule that people own objects in their territory. We propose that an early-developing ability to make territory-based inferences of ownership helps children address informational demands presented by ownership. Across 6 experiments (N = 504), we show that these inferences develop between ages 3 and 5 and stem from two aspects of the psychology of ownership. First, we find that a basic ability to infer that people own objects in their territory is already present at age 3 (Experiment 1). Children even make these inferences when the territory owner unintentionally acquired the objects and was unaware of them (Experiments 2 and 3). Second, we find that between ages 3 and 5, children come to consider past events in these judgments. They move from solely considering the current location of an object in territory-based inferences, to also considering and possibly inferring where it originated (Experiments 4 to 6). Together, these findings suggest that territory-based inferences of ownership are unlikely to be constructions of the law. Instead, they may reflect basic intuitions about ownership that operate from early in development.

There is a natural instinct towards property ownership. This is probably why all hitherto experiments of collectivization or social ownership fail or do poorly. (Soviet Union; Venezuela; Maoist China.) Let's be mindful of our own human natural instincts to avoid calamity in the future.

Unless those kids spent their first 3-5 years in isolation (and I doubt the ethics committee would have allowed that), that study says three eighths of fuck-all about 'instinct'.

It's completely consistent with the counterhypothesis that children are fast learners, and (when raised in a society that places significant emphasis on private ownership of property) rapidly grasp the fact that everyone they interact with has a strong sense of private ownership of property.

So this study shows that human infants learn quickly. (Shock!)

Of course, we could test whether the concept of property ownership is instinctive or learned in another way - if it is a human instinct, then it will be universal amongst humans. So the existence of human societies without the concept of near universal ownership would explode the hypothesis that this is instinctive. And we know of many such societies - for example, many Australian Aboriginal societies had/have no such concept of private property ownership.

This study doesn't demonstrate what it is purported to demonstrate.

But of course 'Kids learn fast how to fit into their societies' doesn't make a compelling headline; and nor does it provide a comforting rationalisation for a particular political philosophy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Whatever China is doing at present seems to be right. Its not really capitalism nor communism but it is obviously working. They alone have the booming economy, no race riots, no graffiti on the walls, and clean streets. All this is happening with a population density that should have them living in squalor. The main difference I see between China and the US is that the Chinese government seems to actually care about the population. They have somehow managed not to become corrupted. In contrast, only 3% of the US population has confidence their government is working for their best interest.

Are there two countries named "China"??

Booming economy? It's a Potemkin economy. The government is obsessed with maintaining a 7% growth rate--and doing so through insane level of borrowing. Sooner or later they are going to have a major crash.

No race riots? Agreed--how the government would react to a race riot keeps such things from happening. Plenty of racism, though. I've got some relatives over there that I doubt I'll ever meet--because a relative doesn't want it known that my wife is married to a non-Chinese. (They know she's married to an American but think I'm ethnic Chinese.) I've had multiple people think it's unsafe for us to travel to certain areas--the only reason being the locals aren't Han.

No graffiti?

1) Labor is a lot cheaper over there, the cost of cleaning it up is a lot lower--you would expect a lot less.

2) I've seen a lot of it, although it's almost always advertising.

Clean streets?

Again, labor is a lot cheaper over there. Despite that, I've seen plenty of junk on the streets and even more so out on the highways (where cleaning them would be a lot harder.)

Squalor?

I've never seen the really bad areas. However, what I have seen:

1) Entire dwellings that were roughly 12' square.

2) Dwellings where water & sewer were added after the fact and only outside the house. (Their only water is an outdoor sink.) Electricity was likewise after the fact but apparently internal. (Toilets and trash were at communal points--and I saw lots of guys urinating into any waterways.)

3) A "toilet" at a bus stop--the men's at least was simply an area with a retaining wall. I saw nothing of how it drained or was emptied--and it most certainly needed emptying. Most of the feces there looked like they had been rather urgent. Be glad I have no way of reproducing the smell.

Chinese government care about the people?

Only if that doesn't interfere with the rich and powerful--and it usually does.

Not corrupted?



It's all about what you can get away with. Corruption is at pandemic levels. Virtually everyone in their equivalent of Congress is a billionaire--money they got while in office. How else could that be but corruption?

I think the most amazing thing about the chinese economy is how such grand-scale efficaciousness can be paired with such tremendous waste like we see in China. People think America is wasteful, yet The Chinese government puts tons of resources into building cities nobody even lives in.

Those ghost cities are a big example of the Potemkin economy I was referring to.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I find myself agreeing with Loren. China is an example of the worst of a "market economy" without all that pesky democracy gumming up the system.

They're a hopelessly corrupt totalitarian state with a veneer of capitalism. And they just declared their president gets to keep his job for life.

I wouldn't say it's just a veneer of capitalism.

Totalitarian refers to how the government works.

Capitalism refers to how the economy works.

There's no incompatibility here, it's quite possible to have a totalitarian, capitalist state--and China is an example of it.

Of course, the capitalism is hindered by the fact that those with power don't play fair, but that doesn't change the fact that the economy is basically capitalist.

We also see a lot of the evil side of capitalism because it's usually the powerful doing the evil and the government rarely will act against them. They're actually trying to clean up the corruption, but it's hard when the corrupt have enough power to avoid being brought to justice.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I also agree that one study doesn't prove or disprove socialism. Human behavior is quite complex and mysterious.

But the biggest issue with capitalism is that it's too successful, and those are the issues we have to deal with.

Capitalism is doomed to failure without significant checks and balances. We saw that in 2008.

The real cause of 2008 wasn't capitalism, but rather the government intervening in the market.

The bankers knew the loans were shit, but so long as the government would keep buying them up they were happy to make and sell them.

Phase 1 was the Community Reinvestment Act. It didn't do what they wanted because it takes a lot of pressure to get the bankers to write crap when they're going to be left holding the bag.

Phase 2 was changing the underwriting standards for the government loan programs. Now they had pressure and little downside, not to mention plenty of profit to be made off the additional business.

Then as we saw things getting farther and farther out of hand Bush didn't try to address the issue because the bankers wouldn't have liked that.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

"Socialism" is a word like "shit" that we have been trained by our media to use to queer human relations with this silly idea that ownership is somehow real. Socialism may be thought of as whatever we elect to make governance become. The democratic institutions need to be safeguarded from the manufacturers of unconscious and uninformed consent. When you have a system of ownership of nearly all of the means of communication, you have something that stands against socialism and declares it unworkable.

Fundamentally, socialism is separating the control of the assets from the demonstrated ability to control them successfully.

As such, it will never do remotely as well as capitalism.

(Note that extensive safety nets like we see in much of western Europe are not socialism.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I find myself agreeing with Loren. China is an example of the worst of a "market economy" without all that pesky democracy gumming up the system.

They're a hopelessly corrupt totalitarian state with a veneer of capitalism. And they just declared their president gets to keep his job for life.

It's worth mentioning that China was a pretty impoverished and miserable totalitarian place before it got that "veneer of capitalism". Annual GDP per capita was about $250 and mass starvations were common.

With that "veneer of capitalism" GDP per capita is now about $9000. That "veneer" is arguably the greatest anti-poverty anti-misery measure in human history.

And for those who doubt the numbers, I have a simple, practical demonstration of it:

I've been visiting China for 20+ years by now. I'm 6' tall, very tall by Chinese standards.

When we first went to China I could see above the crowds. Eye level for me was above the top of the hair of just about everyone around. However, the people who were coming of age were the ones that had grown up under the capitalist system. They grew taller than their parents--and more and more heads started blocking my line of sight. By now, while I'm still taller than just about everyone around the difference is small enough that I'm no more able to see over a Chinese crowd than an American one.

Genetics doesn't make a change of this size in a generation--this is a matter of nutrition. In other words, people were eating better under the capitalist system.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I also agree that one study doesn't prove or disprove socialism. Human behavior is quite complex and mysterious.

But the biggest issue with capitalism is that it's too successful, and those are the issues we have to deal with.

Capitalism is doomed to failure without significant checks and balances. We saw that in 2008.

The real cause of 2008 wasn't capitalism, but rather the government intervening in the market.

The bankers knew the loans were shit, but so long as the government would keep buying them up they were happy to make and sell them.

Phase 1 was the Community Reinvestment Act. It didn't do what they wanted because it takes a lot of pressure to get the bankers to write crap when they're going to be left holding the bag.

Phase 2 was changing the underwriting standards for the government loan programs. Now they had pressure and little downside, not to mention plenty of profit to be made off the additional business.

Then as we saw things getting farther and farther out of hand Bush didn't try to address the issue because the bankers wouldn't have liked that.

There is so much wrong with your post. Last thing first, W didn’t want to address the bubble as it was the only thing driving the economy.

Secondly, the deregulation of the derivatives market created all sorts of doomed products.

And yes, as long as banks could off bad loans, they would. Of course these loans were divided, twisted, man handled into massively confusing investments, which were stamped AAA by the ratings agencies. Fraud?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Are you such a die-hard capitalist that you can't give credit of the welfare state to anything else other than capitalism? Wow.

Come on, throw logic a bone once in a while.

I call it "Social Safety Net" or "Welfare" or "Redistributionism." I try to not use the word "capitalism" too much because even though I mean "laissez faire" when I use the word, others use "capitalism" to include Keynesianism, monetarism, supply-side, demand-side, corporatism, etc. Now we even have a few twits who think all of those are laissez faire. I try to use accurate definitions, which is why I use "socialism" to refer to "collective ownership of the means of production", not because it has anything to do with Scotsmen (or Japanese Scotsmen) but because that is its definition.

You completely avoided answering. Is the Welfare State pure capitalism, yes or no? Or is it part capitalism and part socialism? I say it's somewhere in between, i.e. democratic socialism like in Norway.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The Welfare State is not part of Laissez Faire. Whether or not it is compatible with Capitalism depends on how you define the word. If you equate it to Laissez Faire, then no. If you equate it to the whole umbrella of ideologies, then yes.

Of course, if you want to redistribute wealth then you need wealth in the first place to redistribute, which is why it is not part of Socialism.

 

[coloradoatheist]

The real cause of 2008 wasn't capitalism, but rather the government intervening in the market.

The bankers knew the loans were shit, but so long as the government would keep buying them up they were happy to make and sell them.

Phase 1 was the Community Reinvestment Act. It didn't do what they wanted because it takes a lot of pressure to get the bankers to write crap when they're going to be left holding the bag.

Phase 2 was changing the underwriting standards for the government loan programs. Now they had pressure and little downside, not to mention plenty of profit to be made off the additional business.

Then as we saw things getting farther and farther out of hand Bush didn't try to address the issue because the bankers wouldn't have liked that.

There is so much wrong with your post. Last thing first, W didn’t want to address the bubble as it was the only thing driving the economy.

Secondly, the deregulation of the derivatives market created all sorts of doomed products.

And yes, as long as banks could off bad loans, they would. Of course these loans were divided, twisted, man handled into massively confusing investments, which were stamped AAA by the ratings agencies. Fraud?

W did try a little, but they weren't going to do much. It helped the economy and the Democrats and the GSE got good numbers with minority housing. It was like a 7 layer cake that all the layers had to come together to get the storm.

 

[dismal]

It's worth mentioning that China was a pretty impoverished and miserable totalitarian place before it got that "veneer of capitalism". Annual GDP per capita was about $250 and mass starvations were common.

With that "veneer of capitalism" GDP per capita is now about $9000. That "veneer" is arguably the greatest anti-poverty anti-misery measure in human history.

And for those who doubt the numbers, I have a simple, practical demonstration of it:

I've been visiting China for 20+ years by now. I'm 6' tall, very tall by Chinese standards.

When we first went to China I could see above the crowds. Eye level for me was above the top of the hair of just about everyone around. However, the people who were coming of age were the ones that had grown up under the capitalist system. They grew taller than their parents--and more and more heads started blocking my line of sight. By now, while I'm still taller than just about everyone around the difference is small enough that I'm no more able to see over a Chinese crowd than an American one.

Genetics doesn't make a change of this size in a generation--this is a matter of nutrition. In other words, people were eating better under the capitalist system.

I keep this story bookmarked and bring it up every time our resident leftists gripe about how China hasn't been helped by Capitalism (which means you've probably seen me bring it up here 5 or 10 times before). The local left doesn't seem to grasp what a totalitarian heap of deprivation China was just a few decades back. And to think it's from our very own socialist radio network so it must be true...

It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.

At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.

That huge harvest gave them away. Local officials figured out that the farmers had divided up the land, and word of what had happened in Xiaogang made its way up the Communist Party chain of command.

At one point, Yen Hongchang was hauled in to the local Communist Party office. The officials swore at him, treated him like he was on death row.

But fortunately for Mr. Yen and the other farmers, at this moment in history, there were powerful people in the Communist Party who wanted to change China's economy. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who would go on to create China's modern economy, was just coming to power.

So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders ultimately decided to hold them up as a model.

Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China's economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secret-document-that-transformed-china