Now THAT question is a c l u e - b y - four.
Darkbeaver-istas, I'm sure can answer Avro's question.
Darkbeaver-istas, I'm sure can answer Avro's question.
Socialism Is the Only Way
- Thread starter darkbeaver
- Start date
France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Cuba, Venusala, Holland, the list of successfully applied socialism is quite long Avro. All of these have better health care, education, housing, food supply and security than Canada or the US, many have GAI which is very good for thier economys as is health and education. Capitalism is the same as suicide, watch it die on TV. They finally have something on that I enjoy watching.hahahaha:lol:
Name one honest and kind capitalist country that takes care of it's people before it's bankers.
Every one of those nations except for Cuba have huge proportions of their GNP dependent upon Capitalism to pay the bill presented by Socialism.
Socialism is not about creating wealth, but rather the distribution of it AFTER it is created.
Socialism is not about creating wealth, but rather the distribution of it AFTER it is created.
No Jim that is not correct. Labour creates the wealth (goods services ect) capital only creates capital, it's very stupid stuff, read the book, learn about Kapital. Socialism is about equitable distribution of the wealth created by labour. Capital is not wealth, it's capital, and that's all it is and nothing more.
Now when we institute The Newest World Socialist Order we will simply no longer have any requirment for very expensive and inefficient capitalists, perhaps we could sell them as surplus to requirement or perhaps eat them.:lol:
I fixed it for you
(btw, your post about Capitalistic countries I "fixed" is true, but get some perspective about what is government style and what is human nature)
Taking care of financial institutions is taking care of the people and has a great deal to do with economic success something socialists countries know nothing about.
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They are not true socialist countries they are capitalist countries dear boy as is Canada in a free market sysyem companies and buisness are not controled by the state and in many of those countries the private sector has a great deal more to do with health care delivery than ours so stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Not sure why people like you hate it when someone comes up with an idea and gets rich off it.
True socialism would be something like Cuba, North Korea and the now defucnt USSR.
"In a free market system companies and business are not contolled by the state." Therefore, no free market system exists. There is not one country in the world where all the companies are completely controlled by the state (which would be communism if the state properly represented the people, or a degenerate capitalism in the case of a monarchy) and there is not one country in the world where companies are free to do whatever they want.
People should be able to get rich off their ideas, unless their ideas follow the lines of: we will use our position of dominance in this one market to make it impossible for people in related markets to sell their products, regardless of the fact that their products are better than ours.
Which is why Microsoft was thrashed in the European courts.
When governments regulate markets, thats socialism. Forbidding companies from lying about the contents of their products, that's a regulation few people argue about. That is not the free exchange of products. That is all the people in a nation allowing their government to collectively bargain for them. They do not own the tools of production, so it is not communism, but they impose a limit to the completely free exchange of products, so it is not pure capitalism. But from the point of view of collective bargaining, it is both capitalism and socialism.
The only problem comes when you project these philosophies to their extreme ends where socialism becomes communism (and most people assume led by a dictator, therefore not communism but tyranny) and capitalism simply becomes anarchy, where the rich survive.
The socialist question is, how much regulation? The capitalist question is, how much market freedom? Nobody wants to end up in the crazy extremes. The one question is just a rephrasing of the other.
That's a nice complete and tidy explanation Niflmir. It seems to me that it would be relativly easy to make it widely understood that as you have explained the extremes of either end up adversely impacting the lives of the citizen, but it seems to me that we in the far western world have the idea that the lottery we call the free market affords them some advantage over a more socially inclined mixed system that satisfies the individuals needs and the collective as most of Europe employs I believe. It's an indication of our very poor educations that more of us do not understand the massive expence and damage of a heavily capitalistic systems such as the USA inflicts on it's citizens and indeed hopes to inflict on the rest of the world. The simple truth is that the better standard of living enjoyed in Europe is the result of hundreds of years of mayhem endured by those same countries at the whim of eliteists and illgotten privilage, but we have been unable to sucessfully instruct the students in that very valuable body of evidence for all these years and we are right now slideing into the anarchy and brutality of unbridaled capitalism. The systemic fraud slowly coming to light in respact to the failing American Capitalist free market almost exclusively dependent on constant and murderous warfare and outright resorce theft should instruct anyone interested in the very real damageing aspects of our economic systems, but it doesn't seem to sink past the illusions of grandeur many westerners employ instead of bloody ordinary common sense, even to the point where we are now faceing complete collapse and still they insist that further privitisation less regulation and lower taxes on wealth will correct a problem that was caused by those same devices in the first place. It will take the death of many millions of people to reverse that thinking I'm afraid. I can't see past that fear, I'm unaware of wholesale change of that order ever being peacefully brought about.
Right and the West including Canada and the U.S. have found that happy balance between extremes of the free market and a nanny state. You have countries that have more or less captalism like the U.S. which has more and they suffer with issues like health care insurance while you have countries like France who have less but with very high unemployment. Canada has a happy medium with low unemployment, state health care and a vibrant economy one that will weather the coming U.S. reccession although if I had my way I would involve the private sector to get invloved with the delivery of health care in this country like they do in Europe because lets face it, it works very well for them but socialists in Canada hate the private sector even though most Canadians are employed by them.
Your arguments are moot because while saying socialism is the only way you have now just given capitalism a pat on the back.....glad to see you have come to your senses....lol.
The Failure of Socialism
The world is watching the spectacle of Russia and the other captive nations of the former Soviet Union trying to free themselves from their seventy-five-year experiment in socialism. The bankruptcy of the system is accepted by practically everyone. The economies of the former Soviet republics are in shambles. Civil wars and ethnic violence have broken out in an increasing number of territories of the former U.S.S.R. And the quality of medical care, educational facilities and residential housing has been and is continuing to deteriorate.
The disarray, destruction and decay are the logical legacy of the application of the collectivist ideal. This ideal included three ideas: the theory of a planned economy, the belief in collective or group rights, and the notion of socialized or state-provided social services.
1. The Planned Economy. The primary goal of most socialists has been the desire to replace private property and a market economy with state ownership and a centrally planned economy. Capitalism, it was claimed, besides being an inherently unjust system, was economically inefficient and wasteful. Wise and intelligent men, serving the common good, could more rationally plan what goods and services should be produced, where and how they should be produced, and to whom and in what amounts they should be distributed than if these matters continued to be left to the decentralized decisions of profit-motivated private individuals.
Earlier in this century, the Austrian economists demonstrated that socialist planning would fail. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek showed clearly and irrefutably that when private property was nationalized and market competition eliminated, economic irrationality would result. In a market economy, the way people convey information to each other about the products they wish to demand — and the value they place on the various resources that can be used in alternative ways to make those goods — is through the price system. But with the elimination of private property, people are no longer able legally to buy and sell; and with no free-market buying and selling, there can be no competitively formed market prices. And without market prices, the most well-intentioned planners are clueless about what goods people actually want or what are the least-cost methods of producing what the consuming public actually desires.
The arguments of the Austrian economists against socialism have been proven correct in every country in which central planning has been instituted. Whether it has been in Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Poland, or Mongolia, wherever the planning model has been imposed and has supplanted the market economy, economic disaster has occurred. The types and varieties of goods and services produced by the state have borne no relationship to the types and varieties of goods and services actually demanded by "the masses" in these people's republics. Store shelves have been empty of the things people wanted; and they have been stocked with what no one desired. Resources and labor have been misallocated and wasted. And the customers, who are "always right" under capitalism, have been reduced to a life of long lines at state-retail stores and to a daily hunting for the essentials of everyday life in these socialist paradises.
The only avenues for everyday survival and subsistence in the centrally planned societies have been bribery of the bureaucrats who have controlled access to the meager supply of goods ad the shadowy world of illegal black-market transactions.
2. Collective or Group Rights. For the advocate of socialism, the idea of individual rights has been a bourgeois prejudice and deception. For socialists, human relationships in society are defined and determined by class relationships and antagonisms. The idea of individual liberty has been considered a smoke screen to blind those who are exploited and oppressed from understanding the "true" nature of the social order. It was for this reason that Martyn Latsis, a senior officer in the newly founded Soviet secret police, said in 1918 that, in judging the guilt or innocence of an accused, "the first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belongs What is its origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused."
An extension of this view in the Soviet Union was the idea that rights and privileges did not reside with individuals but were determined for the individual on the basis of his national or ethnic origin. In each Soviet subject's internal passport has been a line specifying his nationality, e.g., Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Uzbeki, Tartar, Jewish, etc. And this collectivist categorization determined the individual's life opportunities in terms of access to education, employment, residence, language usage and political advancement within the Party structure and the bureaucracy. One's personal fate has been determined by the accident of one's parentage and place of birth, as well as one's ideological "political correctness."
The legacy of this national and ethnic collectivism can be seen in the civil wars that now plague the territory of the former U.S.S.R. Having lost (or never had a chance to acquire) any conception of individual rights, the various nationalities fight over their group rights to land, statehood and resource control. In Estonia and Latvia, large Russian minorities are denied political and economic rights. In Moldova, the Moldavian majority has been fighting the Russian and Ukrainian minorities. In Georgia, it is the Georgian majority fighting the Ossetian and Abkhazian minorities. In the north Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, it is the Ossetians fighting the Ingushians and the Russians clashing with the Ossetians, Ingushians and the Chechens. Elsewhere in Russia, the Tartar and Yakut minorities demand separate statehood to have nationalist control of the oil and diamonds that are on their respective territories. And the years-old war between Armenia and Azerbaijan continues over the disputed region of Nagarno-Karabakh.
3. Nationalized Social Services. Since the socialist conception of capitalist society was that production for profit by those who privately owned the means of production always meant that the real or true needs of the people would never be fully satisfied, the socialist plan called for the state to provide medical care, guarantee all levels of education, provide employment for all, and assure every one a decent place to live. But with nationalization of these social services came politicization and economic inefficiency. Once it became the state that was responsible to supply and distribute these services and opportunities, it became the state which determined who had access to diem, in what quality and quantity and according to what criteria. For all levels of education, acceptance into the schools of lower and higher learning has depended upon a family's political connections and whether one's national or ethnic group had already had its quota for entry filled for that type of school. Housing has been allocated on the basis of one's Party status and the importance that the state assigned to the particular profession to which one happened to belong. Medical care and hospitalization have been equivalently allocated and provided on the basis of Party position and professional standing, as well as personal connections and bribery. And there have been "special stores" for the purchase of food and clothing on the same basis.
At the same time, since it was the central plan that determined the production and distribution of these services, rather than market-oriented profit, those who have provided them in the bureaucracy were merely concerned with fulfilling the assigned targets of the plan. Medicines of the most simple kind, which anyone in the West takes for granted and which can be bought in any quantity in any pharmacy in the West, are practically nonexistent in Russia. With no private owners to be concerned with the maintenance of industrial, agricultural and residential facilities and buildings, the entire industrial, housing and infrastructure is in a state of advanced decay.
Socialism's failure in the former Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries stands as a clear and unquestionable warning as to which path any rational and sane people should never follow again. Government planning brought poverty and ruin. The idea of collectivist class and ethnic group-rights produced tens of millions of deaths and a legacy of civil war and conflict. And nationalized social services generated social decay and political privilege and corruption.
Unfortunately, America is not absorbing the lessons that should be learned from the socialist experience and, instead, is following the same path of destruction.
In the early 1920s, Ludwig von Mises pointed out that "socialism is the watchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modem spirit. The masses approve of it; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter, 'The Epoch of Socialism."'
Since the Soviet experience in Russia was only beginning, Mises could still say in 1922, "As yet, it is true, Socialism has not created a society which can be said to represent its ideal. But for more than a generation the policies of civilized nations have been directed towards nothing less than a gradual realization of Socialism."
During the last seventy years, the socialists had their chance to institute their ideal in many countries around the world. And in every case the result has been disastrous. Socialism in practice has produced tyranny, mass murder, poverty, corruption and cultural destruction. The rejection of socialism by the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union must be considered the ultimate indictment of the ideology that declared itself to be the liberator of mankind.
The socialist ideal contained three ideas at its core: economic central planning; the belief in collective or group rights; and the case for nationalized social services. The application of these three ideas in socialist countries resulted in economic chaos, social conflict and ethnic warfare, and the collapse of all basic services considered essential and desirable for normal and healthy life.
Yet here in America, at the very time that the end of socialism is heralded as the vindication of the American way of life — a way of life grounded in individual liberty, economic freedom and voluntary association — the American government, with the support of a sizable portion of the populace, continues down the road to socialism. The American people seem oblivious to the lessons to be learned from the socialist experience in other lands. And the ideas leading us further along our road to socialism are the same ones that lead other peoples to the dead-end of state control, economic stagnation, group conflict and societal decay.
1. The Planned Economy. Under the headings of industrial policy, high-tech subsidization, infrastructure modernization and worker retraining for "high-wage" jobs, the American government hag assigned itself the task of planning and directing the economic destiny of over 250 million people. If fully implemented, these policies will succeed in making practically all economic decision-making subservient to the central planners and social engineers in Washington. The methods applied will not be as crude or as brutal as the system of direct commands used in the old Soviet Union, but its end result will be no less comprehensive.
What gets produced, who produces it, where it gets produced, and what technologies and labor skills are used will no longer be determined solely by businessmen and entrepreneurs guided by the need to maximize profits by satisfying consumer demand. No, the private businessman, the entrepreneur, the investor will now have a governmental "partner." Through various financial subsidies and tax incentives, this partner will induce and stimulate those in the private sector to expand their investment and production activities in the directions that the government has decided are economically and socially desirable. The state will decide, even more than already, what kinds of communication and transportation networks America "needs." Presuming to know what skills and talents the American people should acquire to earn a good living in the future, the benevolent bureaucrats of Washington will create incentives for Americans to invest in certain types of technical and professional expertise.
And what is most disturbing, large numbers of Americans are waiting with great enthusiasm for this renewed era of activist government. Some in the private sector are waiting with great enthusiasm because they see higher profit margins, improved investment opportunities and subsidized job training through an expanded governmental largess. But far worse is the enthusiasm of those who believe that government should direct the private actions of the citizenry and who believe that government has the wisdom to do so. And far more dangerous is that these policies are propounded while their proponents assure the American people that they actually are advocating a market economy and rejecting the notion of governmental planning.
2. Collective or Group Rights. In the name of a false social and economic equality, the American government has embarked on a road that leads to a caste society, in which individuals will increasingly be categorized and judged on the basis of their social background, their gender and ethnic origin, and sexual orientation. Are you eligible for a particular job? Should you be admitted into an institution of higher learning, as either professor or student? Will you have the opportunity to compete for a contract in the marketplace? Should you receive a certain proportion of the business in a particular sector of the economy? Have you hired the right people — and the right number of different types of people — in your enterprise? Have you committed a hate-crime by uttering some words or articulating some ideas that are considered offensive to some ethnic, social or sexual group? These and other questions like them are what affirmative-action programs, multiculturism, and political correctness are all about.
The long struggle for human liberty, in which rights are conceived only in terms of individuals, is threatened with reversal in America. The individual will increasingly find himself submerged within the confines of how others classify him for political purposes. People will find, just as in the old Soviet Union, that their opportunities in life will be determined and controlled by the class, gender, race or sexual groups to which they happen to belong. The path to economic improvement will be transferred from the arena of peaceful competition and voluntary exchange in the marketplace to the halls of political power in the state capitals and in Washington, D.C. It will be in the halls of political power that collective groups will fight their wars for economic and social privileges at the expense of others, with individuals finding they have no identity or destiny other than in terms of how their group has fared in this struggle for governmental influence, redistribution of wealth, and control.
3. Nationalization of Social Services. The extent to which the socialist idea has triumphed in the 20th century is seen most clearly in the very notion that there are certain goods and services that should be viewed as "social." The provision of medical care, housing accommodations, legal services, retirement plans and the like are no different than the provision of any of the other things people want and desire, and for which they pay a price in the market. It would be just as easy to argue that shoes, clothing, food, entertainment, reading material and marital partners are "socially necessary" commodities that every human being needs — and, therefore, that the state should be assigned the task of providing them. It is indicative of the extent to which the socialist idea has penetrated the American psyche that practically no one along the political spectrum in America is willing or courageous enough to question directly and uncompromisingly the idea that the state should provide any such "social services" and to make the positive case that the supplying of such "services" should be completely left up the private sector.
In his 1920 book, The Return to Laissez Faire, the English classical liberal Sir Ernest Benn argued that "a citizenship which is actuated by Individualism will wash its hands of that 'citizenship by proxy' which is variously called social reform, Socialism and Communism. All these shibboleths mean paying somebody else with other people's money to do your own duty — a very different thing."
By every individual doing his own duty, Benn meant that a free citizen in a free country takes on the responsibility to plan and care for his own life. He associates with his fellow free men on the basis of mutual, voluntary agreement and never expects others to bare the consequences or the costs of his own actions through use of the power of the state.
But, alas, Americans have lost the knowledge and the desire for this type of free citizenship. As in 1922, when Ludwig von Mises penned his monumental work, Socialism, "The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit ... it expresses the thoughts and the feelings of all." Its domination is, indeed, so complete that Americans now increasingly crave what they say they oppose. And, as a result, they will likely get even more of what they say they do not want.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0393b.asp
The world is watching the spectacle of Russia and the other captive nations of the former Soviet Union trying to free themselves from their seventy-five-year experiment in socialism. The bankruptcy of the system is accepted by practically everyone. The economies of the former Soviet republics are in shambles. Civil wars and ethnic violence have broken out in an increasing number of territories of the former U.S.S.R. And the quality of medical care, educational facilities and residential housing has been and is continuing to deteriorate.
The disarray, destruction and decay are the logical legacy of the application of the collectivist ideal. This ideal included three ideas: the theory of a planned economy, the belief in collective or group rights, and the notion of socialized or state-provided social services.
1. The Planned Economy. The primary goal of most socialists has been the desire to replace private property and a market economy with state ownership and a centrally planned economy. Capitalism, it was claimed, besides being an inherently unjust system, was economically inefficient and wasteful. Wise and intelligent men, serving the common good, could more rationally plan what goods and services should be produced, where and how they should be produced, and to whom and in what amounts they should be distributed than if these matters continued to be left to the decentralized decisions of profit-motivated private individuals.
Earlier in this century, the Austrian economists demonstrated that socialist planning would fail. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek showed clearly and irrefutably that when private property was nationalized and market competition eliminated, economic irrationality would result. In a market economy, the way people convey information to each other about the products they wish to demand — and the value they place on the various resources that can be used in alternative ways to make those goods — is through the price system. But with the elimination of private property, people are no longer able legally to buy and sell; and with no free-market buying and selling, there can be no competitively formed market prices. And without market prices, the most well-intentioned planners are clueless about what goods people actually want or what are the least-cost methods of producing what the consuming public actually desires.
The arguments of the Austrian economists against socialism have been proven correct in every country in which central planning has been instituted. Whether it has been in Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Poland, or Mongolia, wherever the planning model has been imposed and has supplanted the market economy, economic disaster has occurred. The types and varieties of goods and services produced by the state have borne no relationship to the types and varieties of goods and services actually demanded by "the masses" in these people's republics. Store shelves have been empty of the things people wanted; and they have been stocked with what no one desired. Resources and labor have been misallocated and wasted. And the customers, who are "always right" under capitalism, have been reduced to a life of long lines at state-retail stores and to a daily hunting for the essentials of everyday life in these socialist paradises.
The only avenues for everyday survival and subsistence in the centrally planned societies have been bribery of the bureaucrats who have controlled access to the meager supply of goods ad the shadowy world of illegal black-market transactions.
2. Collective or Group Rights. For the advocate of socialism, the idea of individual rights has been a bourgeois prejudice and deception. For socialists, human relationships in society are defined and determined by class relationships and antagonisms. The idea of individual liberty has been considered a smoke screen to blind those who are exploited and oppressed from understanding the "true" nature of the social order. It was for this reason that Martyn Latsis, a senior officer in the newly founded Soviet secret police, said in 1918 that, in judging the guilt or innocence of an accused, "the first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belongs What is its origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused."
An extension of this view in the Soviet Union was the idea that rights and privileges did not reside with individuals but were determined for the individual on the basis of his national or ethnic origin. In each Soviet subject's internal passport has been a line specifying his nationality, e.g., Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Uzbeki, Tartar, Jewish, etc. And this collectivist categorization determined the individual's life opportunities in terms of access to education, employment, residence, language usage and political advancement within the Party structure and the bureaucracy. One's personal fate has been determined by the accident of one's parentage and place of birth, as well as one's ideological "political correctness."
The legacy of this national and ethnic collectivism can be seen in the civil wars that now plague the territory of the former U.S.S.R. Having lost (or never had a chance to acquire) any conception of individual rights, the various nationalities fight over their group rights to land, statehood and resource control. In Estonia and Latvia, large Russian minorities are denied political and economic rights. In Moldova, the Moldavian majority has been fighting the Russian and Ukrainian minorities. In Georgia, it is the Georgian majority fighting the Ossetian and Abkhazian minorities. In the north Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, it is the Ossetians fighting the Ingushians and the Russians clashing with the Ossetians, Ingushians and the Chechens. Elsewhere in Russia, the Tartar and Yakut minorities demand separate statehood to have nationalist control of the oil and diamonds that are on their respective territories. And the years-old war between Armenia and Azerbaijan continues over the disputed region of Nagarno-Karabakh.
3. Nationalized Social Services. Since the socialist conception of capitalist society was that production for profit by those who privately owned the means of production always meant that the real or true needs of the people would never be fully satisfied, the socialist plan called for the state to provide medical care, guarantee all levels of education, provide employment for all, and assure every one a decent place to live. But with nationalization of these social services came politicization and economic inefficiency. Once it became the state that was responsible to supply and distribute these services and opportunities, it became the state which determined who had access to diem, in what quality and quantity and according to what criteria. For all levels of education, acceptance into the schools of lower and higher learning has depended upon a family's political connections and whether one's national or ethnic group had already had its quota for entry filled for that type of school. Housing has been allocated on the basis of one's Party status and the importance that the state assigned to the particular profession to which one happened to belong. Medical care and hospitalization have been equivalently allocated and provided on the basis of Party position and professional standing, as well as personal connections and bribery. And there have been "special stores" for the purchase of food and clothing on the same basis.
At the same time, since it was the central plan that determined the production and distribution of these services, rather than market-oriented profit, those who have provided them in the bureaucracy were merely concerned with fulfilling the assigned targets of the plan. Medicines of the most simple kind, which anyone in the West takes for granted and which can be bought in any quantity in any pharmacy in the West, are practically nonexistent in Russia. With no private owners to be concerned with the maintenance of industrial, agricultural and residential facilities and buildings, the entire industrial, housing and infrastructure is in a state of advanced decay.
Socialism's failure in the former Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries stands as a clear and unquestionable warning as to which path any rational and sane people should never follow again. Government planning brought poverty and ruin. The idea of collectivist class and ethnic group-rights produced tens of millions of deaths and a legacy of civil war and conflict. And nationalized social services generated social decay and political privilege and corruption.
Unfortunately, America is not absorbing the lessons that should be learned from the socialist experience and, instead, is following the same path of destruction.
In the early 1920s, Ludwig von Mises pointed out that "socialism is the watchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modem spirit. The masses approve of it; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter, 'The Epoch of Socialism."'
Since the Soviet experience in Russia was only beginning, Mises could still say in 1922, "As yet, it is true, Socialism has not created a society which can be said to represent its ideal. But for more than a generation the policies of civilized nations have been directed towards nothing less than a gradual realization of Socialism."
During the last seventy years, the socialists had their chance to institute their ideal in many countries around the world. And in every case the result has been disastrous. Socialism in practice has produced tyranny, mass murder, poverty, corruption and cultural destruction. The rejection of socialism by the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union must be considered the ultimate indictment of the ideology that declared itself to be the liberator of mankind.
The socialist ideal contained three ideas at its core: economic central planning; the belief in collective or group rights; and the case for nationalized social services. The application of these three ideas in socialist countries resulted in economic chaos, social conflict and ethnic warfare, and the collapse of all basic services considered essential and desirable for normal and healthy life.
Yet here in America, at the very time that the end of socialism is heralded as the vindication of the American way of life — a way of life grounded in individual liberty, economic freedom and voluntary association — the American government, with the support of a sizable portion of the populace, continues down the road to socialism. The American people seem oblivious to the lessons to be learned from the socialist experience in other lands. And the ideas leading us further along our road to socialism are the same ones that lead other peoples to the dead-end of state control, economic stagnation, group conflict and societal decay.
1. The Planned Economy. Under the headings of industrial policy, high-tech subsidization, infrastructure modernization and worker retraining for "high-wage" jobs, the American government hag assigned itself the task of planning and directing the economic destiny of over 250 million people. If fully implemented, these policies will succeed in making practically all economic decision-making subservient to the central planners and social engineers in Washington. The methods applied will not be as crude or as brutal as the system of direct commands used in the old Soviet Union, but its end result will be no less comprehensive.
What gets produced, who produces it, where it gets produced, and what technologies and labor skills are used will no longer be determined solely by businessmen and entrepreneurs guided by the need to maximize profits by satisfying consumer demand. No, the private businessman, the entrepreneur, the investor will now have a governmental "partner." Through various financial subsidies and tax incentives, this partner will induce and stimulate those in the private sector to expand their investment and production activities in the directions that the government has decided are economically and socially desirable. The state will decide, even more than already, what kinds of communication and transportation networks America "needs." Presuming to know what skills and talents the American people should acquire to earn a good living in the future, the benevolent bureaucrats of Washington will create incentives for Americans to invest in certain types of technical and professional expertise.
And what is most disturbing, large numbers of Americans are waiting with great enthusiasm for this renewed era of activist government. Some in the private sector are waiting with great enthusiasm because they see higher profit margins, improved investment opportunities and subsidized job training through an expanded governmental largess. But far worse is the enthusiasm of those who believe that government should direct the private actions of the citizenry and who believe that government has the wisdom to do so. And far more dangerous is that these policies are propounded while their proponents assure the American people that they actually are advocating a market economy and rejecting the notion of governmental planning.
2. Collective or Group Rights. In the name of a false social and economic equality, the American government has embarked on a road that leads to a caste society, in which individuals will increasingly be categorized and judged on the basis of their social background, their gender and ethnic origin, and sexual orientation. Are you eligible for a particular job? Should you be admitted into an institution of higher learning, as either professor or student? Will you have the opportunity to compete for a contract in the marketplace? Should you receive a certain proportion of the business in a particular sector of the economy? Have you hired the right people — and the right number of different types of people — in your enterprise? Have you committed a hate-crime by uttering some words or articulating some ideas that are considered offensive to some ethnic, social or sexual group? These and other questions like them are what affirmative-action programs, multiculturism, and political correctness are all about.
The long struggle for human liberty, in which rights are conceived only in terms of individuals, is threatened with reversal in America. The individual will increasingly find himself submerged within the confines of how others classify him for political purposes. People will find, just as in the old Soviet Union, that their opportunities in life will be determined and controlled by the class, gender, race or sexual groups to which they happen to belong. The path to economic improvement will be transferred from the arena of peaceful competition and voluntary exchange in the marketplace to the halls of political power in the state capitals and in Washington, D.C. It will be in the halls of political power that collective groups will fight their wars for economic and social privileges at the expense of others, with individuals finding they have no identity or destiny other than in terms of how their group has fared in this struggle for governmental influence, redistribution of wealth, and control.
3. Nationalization of Social Services. The extent to which the socialist idea has triumphed in the 20th century is seen most clearly in the very notion that there are certain goods and services that should be viewed as "social." The provision of medical care, housing accommodations, legal services, retirement plans and the like are no different than the provision of any of the other things people want and desire, and for which they pay a price in the market. It would be just as easy to argue that shoes, clothing, food, entertainment, reading material and marital partners are "socially necessary" commodities that every human being needs — and, therefore, that the state should be assigned the task of providing them. It is indicative of the extent to which the socialist idea has penetrated the American psyche that practically no one along the political spectrum in America is willing or courageous enough to question directly and uncompromisingly the idea that the state should provide any such "social services" and to make the positive case that the supplying of such "services" should be completely left up the private sector.
In his 1920 book, The Return to Laissez Faire, the English classical liberal Sir Ernest Benn argued that "a citizenship which is actuated by Individualism will wash its hands of that 'citizenship by proxy' which is variously called social reform, Socialism and Communism. All these shibboleths mean paying somebody else with other people's money to do your own duty — a very different thing."
By every individual doing his own duty, Benn meant that a free citizen in a free country takes on the responsibility to plan and care for his own life. He associates with his fellow free men on the basis of mutual, voluntary agreement and never expects others to bare the consequences or the costs of his own actions through use of the power of the state.
But, alas, Americans have lost the knowledge and the desire for this type of free citizenship. As in 1922, when Ludwig von Mises penned his monumental work, Socialism, "The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit ... it expresses the thoughts and the feelings of all." Its domination is, indeed, so complete that Americans now increasingly crave what they say they oppose. And, as a result, they will likely get even more of what they say they do not want.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0393b.asp
Geez Av... Take a breath willya!
It's not so much socialists in Canada who hate the private sector as it is the Unions. Bargaining units see memberships in decline when work gets contracted out into private sector labs and clinics. Government Health Care still covers less expensive services. What the public is paying a price and playing the waiting game for is more a Union survival ploy than it is a shortage of medical services.
Woof!
So nurses and doctors are being paid to much? Get bent!
The only area that is possibly over priced is the support staff ie janitors but that in no way accounts for the system failure. Health care in this country is still overall superior to the U.S. model of go bankrupt when you get sick (over 50% of U.S. bankruptcies are do to health expenses. However if we had a public private partnership like they do in France where all falls under one umbrella of access we would be better off.
Why do you think Lab Techs are getting farmed out to the private sector? Why are Doctors seeing their rates capped? Why do all three hospitals in town operate under one name? They're the only places hospital admin can really cut because if they cut the guy who scrubs the toilet's wages, the Union will close down the hospital.
Woof!
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Like I said woof overpaid Janitors are not the problem even though they are overpaid. It's how the whole system works on top of giving tax cuts when you promised to reduce wait times like the feds did.
If it were up to me I would privatize the toilet scrubbers (good chance for me to get the contract) but that wouldn't make up the difference by a long shot.
Also may I add you said unions in your response and the nurses and doctors have a union so that's where I read that.
Av
My bad.... I'm thinking of nurses who contract part-time positions in several hospitals (a way for the hospital to cut out the Union - a big reason SARS got around so fast) and doctors who work on salary or have tenure.
Woof!
Hospitals are expensive because no one has the incentive to make the dangerous corner cutting decisions that cost lives.
There is laziness that cuts corners still, but you better bet private sectors have their own lazy "retire on the job" types too. They just have a "net zero" effect because they also cut corners to save cost on top of that.
There is laziness that cuts corners still, but you better bet private sectors have their own lazy "retire on the job" types too. They just have a "net zero" effect because they also cut corners to save cost on top of that.
This socialist will gleefully bayonet the private sector hawkers if they screw with heath care or education one more millimeter. In any case we constantly do not identify the two factions in this country.
My complaint is primarily with huge mutinationals and the obscenely wealthy and hugh banking concerns. Which perenially rape the public purse, useually in the form of corporate welfare of one sleezy form or another. I want a concrete permanent wall erected between what is public and what is private, no P3s at all and not one CEO to serve in any legislative body, no corporate lobbyists anywhere near public buildings, strict tender rules, get them out of the schools out of the hospitals and under strong lights with heavy expensive brutal regulations untill they get the picture once and for all. What's a good whet stone for sharpening a bayonet?