Socialism Is Always Doomed to Fail

[LordKiran]

"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.)

Successfully according to who's estimation? What is that estimation exactly?

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

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

The same thing happened with early British settlers to the new world.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

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.

W did try a little? Apparently I’m the only person that remembers the “Ownership Society” and him touting home ownership boom in ‘04 election.

 

[steve_bank]

The words capitalism, socialism, and communism are often used without definition.

Capiyalism is private ownership of the meand of production. Capital does what it wants with money.

Socialisn is a mix of private enterprise and govt or common ownership of the means of production. British coal mines and aviation.

Communism is the opposite of capitalism, there is no profit. The means of production are common held by all or the state.

The definitions say nothing about rights, private property, or freedoms like freedom of speech.

The Soviet and Chinese forms of communism failed. The Soviets collapsed and never recovered. The Chinese reinvented themselves and now identify as socialist. You can not argue the Chinese success.

Back in the early 70s an Israeli made an on campus presentation trying to recruit students to summer on a kibbutz.

The kibbutz he described:

Private dwellings.
A common meal hall.
Amenities like a swimming pool.
A car pool if you needed one.

It all depends on the overall social and political implementation of socialism or any system. 19th century capitalism in Europe and the USA had little in the way of rights as we enforce today. As time passed limits were placed on capitalism. Henry Ford was a ruthless abusive autocrat. Trump is a Ford wannabe.

 

[fromderinside]

Henry Ford was a ruthless abusive autocrat.

..who paid his employees twice the going wage at the time

Trump is a Ford wannabe.

.... like a flat retread tire is a new Pirelli Hard Case.

Otherwise you're dead on and off, port and starboard, libertarian and socialist.

 

[RVonse]

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?

Being rich does not have to mean you are corrupt.

Has any leader of China ever taken a bribe to sell out the nations uranium to Russia? How about starting a fake war to make money on Halliburton?

That is the kind of corruption I mean. A huge difference for the people. The kind of corruption that will get you shot in China. The leaders of China in fact do just the opposite for their people. They kick out Google and Utube just to help their own software industry.

In contrast, the corrupt leaders of the US are worshipped and almost elected to POSTUS.

 

[coloradoatheist]

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.

W did try a little? Apparently I’m the only person that remembers the “Ownership Society” and him touting home ownership boom in ‘04 election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html

The Democrats were the ones opposing it. I'm not saying it was an 110% effort, but there was some effort.

 

[bilby]

Most large businesses in the USA are collectively owned. Their owners are called 'shareholders'; It is fairly unusual for a single capitalist to own the majority of a large corporation, much less to own it outright. So that makes the dominant US model not Capitalism, but limited participation Socialism. At least according to:

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.

 

[steve_bank]

The Israeli kibbutz or collective

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

'...There are now three kibbutz compensation models. 1) The traditional collective kibbutz/kibbutz shitufi, in which members are compensated equally, regardless of what work each member does; 2) the mixed model kibbutz/kibbutz meshulav, in which each member is given a small percentage of his salary along with a basic component given equally to all kibbutz members; and 3) the renewing kibbutz/kibbutz mithadesh, in which a member's income consists solely of his individual income from his work and sometimes includes income from other kibbutz sources.[19]

According to a survey conducted by the University of Haifa 188 of all kibbutzim (72%) are now converted to the "renewing kibbutz" model, which could be described as more individualistic kibbutz. Dr. Shlomo Getz, head of the Institute for the Research of the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea believes that by the end of 2012, there will be more kibbutzim switching to some alternative model....'

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Most large businesses in the USA are collectively owned. Their owners are called 'shareholders'; It is fairly unusual for a single capitalist to own the majority of a large corporation, much less to own it outright. So that makes the dominant US model not Capitalism, but limited participation Socialism. At least according to:

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.

3 year olds cannot understand collective shareholder ownership, imperialism, governments, taxes, cooperative farms, credit unions, banks, investment portfolios, or sharing. Therefore, they are all doomed to fail.

 

[arkirk]

"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.)

Successfully according to who's estimation? What is that estimation exactly?

You could expect Loren to answer in his usual authoritarian voice denying always (by implication only) that democracy is any good for us and that only members of the selfish owner class are fit to control things. People are getting a healthy dose of education on just how much you can trust billionaires to protect the poor, the weak, the aged, hell anybody they decide cost too much to deal with. Loren has been this way for a long time. I didn't expect him to change and he hasn't. His formula is that we must obey the wishes of the ruling owner class. I don't feel they have earned our trust as they are continuing an assault on our environment for which all of society has been and will be paying even more heavily in the future.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

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.

But that's not a Potemkin economy. The ghost cities were built after all. It's a waste, but that's a different sort of problem. A Potemkin economy would be a fake one, one that looks like it's growing, developing, etc., but it's not. That does not seem to be the Chinese economy.

Now, you're right that there is plenty of corruption. It's also a totalitarian regime, suppresses freedoms, persecutes dissidents even abroad, also is trying to seize territory that isn't theirs (they probably will succeed, at least partially), and as you pointed out, there is a significant debt problem. However, the fact remains that China is becoming increasingly powerful both in absolute and in relative terms. Whatever happens with the debt (but that doesn't seem to be a foregone conclusion), that's not going to make the things that were made - not just ghost cities, but cities with people living in them, nuclear reactors, roads, etc. -, or the knowledge acquired by many Chinese, go away.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Most large businesses in the USA are collectively owned. Their owners are called 'shareholders'; It is fairly unusual for a single capitalist to own the majority of a large corporation, much less to own it outright. So that makes the dominant US model not Capitalism, but limited participation Socialism. At least according to:

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.

Wow. Talk about missing the point.

 

[bilby]

Most large businesses in the USA are collectively owned. Their owners are called 'shareholders'; It is fairly unusual for a single capitalist to own the majority of a large corporation, much less to own it outright. So that makes the dominant US model not Capitalism, but limited participation Socialism. At least according to:

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.

Wow. Talk about missing the point.

OK: "Clearly you have missed the point".

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Most large businesses in the USA are collectively owned. Their owners are called 'shareholders'; It is fairly unusual for a single capitalist to own the majority of a large corporation, much less to own it outright. So that makes the dominant US model not Capitalism, but limited participation Socialism. At least according to:

The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.

Wow. Talk about missing the point.

Are you pulling our collective leg?

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Wow. Talk about missing the point.

Are you pulling our collective leg?

Impossible, I only have two hands.

 

[steve_bank]

There are different viewpoints associated with the terms. Socuialism when used by the conservatives is a pejorative that means an idological form of social control and authorterian tyrany likenStalin . The economic definition of socialism is a mixed economy. Examples are France and England before the Thather era devestiture of govt run major industries. I don't know how much remains. I have read that the French govt holds shares in major tech companies and can exert influence.

Collective business ventures are not collectives in the sense of the failed communist experiments.

The irony of the conservatives is busness benifits from the govt are very much a form of collectivization. Chapter 11 bankrupcy. Govt business loans that are backed by taxpayer dollars.

In an ideolgical sense we are far more socialist in how business functions than conservatives will acknowledge. In a true capitalist laisse faire system investors invest entirely at their own risk with no safety nets. If you start a business it is your money plus investors. If it fails you are shit out of luck.

Trump used bankrupcy several times. Without it he would have been long gone.

 

[RVonse]

Successfully according to who's estimation? What is that estimation exactly?

You could expect Loren to answer in his usual authoritarian voice denying always (by implication only) that democracy is any good for us and that only members of the selfish owner class are fit to control things. People are getting a healthy dose of education on just how much you can trust billionaires to protect the poor, the weak, the aged, hell anybody they decide cost too much to deal with. Loren has been this way for a long time. I didn't expect him to change and he hasn't. His formula is that we must obey the wishes of the ruling owner class. I don't feel they have earned our trust as they are continuing an assault on our environment for which all of society has been and will be paying even more heavily in the future.

+1 Agree.

 

[RVonse]

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.

But that's not a Potemkin economy. The ghost cities were built after all. It's a waste, but that's a different sort of problem. A Potemkin economy would be a fake one, one that looks like it's growing, developing, etc., but it's not. That does not seem to be the Chinese economy.

Now, you're right that there is plenty of corruption. It's also a totalitarian regime, suppresses freedoms, persecutes dissidents even abroad, also is trying to seize territory that isn't theirs (they probably will succeed, at least partially), and as you pointed out, there is a significant debt problem. However, the fact remains that China is becoming increasingly powerful both in absolute and in relative terms. Whatever happens with the debt (but that doesn't seem to be a foregone conclusion), that's not going to make the things that were made - not just ghost cities, but cities with people living in them, nuclear reactors, roads, etc. -, or the knowledge acquired by many Chinese, go away.

+1 Agree.

Furthermore the cities may not even be a waste at all. Just infrastructure not yet in use.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Wow. Talk about missing the point.

Are you pulling our collective leg?

Impossible, I only have two hands.

Not if you are a shareholder, then you collectively lease enough hands through employee contracts that you can do the job.