bobevenson wrote:Unfortunately, the fucking moderator won't let me respond to your bullshit.
Your brain won't let you respond you mean!
My hard-hitting comment was deleted by the mod.
Ha ha you mean, childish comment, no wait! Most kids actually have a bigger vocabulary and the skill to use it. It's always a shame when a member of the most highly intellectual spiecies on our planet is only willing to use less than 1% of their brain what a waste.
Most people I know who think like you Bob usually have common threads eg.
Lots of guns, lots of imaginary fear, believe only things that suit them, think that they are the only person who knows everything about everything and can't understand why nobody takes you seriously, if only you were running the place everything would be better.
Kurt wrote:What a coincidence, I am also a prophet my expertise is in false prophets.
Please consult "The Ouzo Prophecy" for information on the False Prophet, my friend.
Yep already seen that one, just a bunch of rubbish designed for gullible people with little knowledge of history and human behaviour. Just another con job.
Kurt wrote:What a coincidence, I am also a prophet my expertise is in false prophets.
Please consult "The Ouzo Prophecy" for information on the False Prophet, my friend.
Yep already seen that one, just a bunch of rubbish designed for gullible people with little knowledge of history and human behaviour. Just another con job.
Speaking of con jobs, I think you'd enjoy playing Ouzo, a new and improved version of liar's poker.
Kurt wrote:
Lots of guns, lots of imaginary fear, believe only things that suit them, think that they are the only person who knows everything about everything and can't understand why nobody takes you seriously, if only you were running the place everything would be better.
Kurt wrote:
Lots of guns, lots of imaginary fear, believe only things that suit them, think that they are the only person who knows everything about everything and can't understand why nobody takes you seriously, if only you were running the place everything would be better.
Kurt.
Does that mean I can put you in the same category as that idiot?
Kurt wrote:
Lots of guns, lots of imaginary fear, believe only things that suit them, think that they are the only person who knows everything about everything and can't understand why nobody takes you seriously, if only you were running the place everything would be better.
Kurt.
Does that mean I can put you in the same category as that idiot?
Category?
Please, if i was out to insult you i do it to your face. not through intermediary.
I made a longer post but it went in bin as somehow i mapped button 5 on my gaming mouse to remove entire posts in progress. and im literally all thumbs being a gamer
who maps thumb buttons 5&6 to action on targeted object [8 button mouse]. so i made post of smileys to limit possible grief
neutral/confused/wink?
should i apply what he said to you. are you any of those things.
would the world be a better place if you ran it?
chasw wrote: all socialist institutions rely on coercion to achieve their aims.
As a historian and specifically a military historian.
i agree. though 'my' field is not so much politics i do have a decent knowledge base to work from as war is 'continuation of politics by other means'.
socialism is rarely if at all from below from the working class or 'proles'. it seems always imposed from the armed gangsters. the thugs [thuggee]
in employ of self serving elitist factions.
they preach equality. lol ' we are equal when executed' is the way i see it
People ask me what N korea is all about. I say the last Tyranosaur. It calls itself communist but it is simply a totalitarian state mixed in with feudal satrapies.. very NSDAP.
10 km's from missile assembly plants masses starve as the food they grow is taxed 95%. Families push males into military so they get at least a 1/2 decent meal a day.
Stalinism
the great famine of '32
"For those who stayed in the countryside, often the only place where any food could be found was on collective farms, but the peasants were forbidden to eat their own crops. The "Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property" – nicknamed by the farmers the Law of Spikelets – was enacted on August 7, 1932. Under the Decree, political police and party officials were allowed to confiscate unlimited amounts of grain from peasant households. Thus, taking food – even a handful of rotting grain or produce – was considered theft of "socialist property." repressive feudalism by another name
I thank luck. i was born in greatest country on earth. oz
I'm right there with you on oz best country to live in
This whole discussion on socialism is always misrepresented by mainly mid west Americans. Must be something left over from the McCarthy era of fear mongering. Stalinism and socialism are poles apart. Stalin was a dictator who under a title of communism held supreme power. This is not socialism or communism, in fact communism in its true form has never existed apart from some tribal cultures. Even China is not a truly communist country. These political titles and others are used to ultimately direct power to those who have control at the time.
This thread is now on the wrong side of moribund, but it provokes some thoughts by someone who has called himself a “socialist” for 54 years. You may pretty safely assume that no one else will have found this. So a comment would be a boon.
I would congratulate the initiator of the thread for issuing a good challenge. Asking the friends of socialism to try to formulate its normatively best definition is an excellent way to start a discussion. It is a good exercise for socialism-agnostics and socialism-opponent-devil's advocates as well. This is a lot better than buying into what was for so long the consensus definition shared by cold war liberals, cold war conservatives, and the official communist parties of east and west – an unholy but enormously effective intellectual alliance. The content of that consensus was that socialism equals Stalinism, an unattractive equation for most of us.
There has been huge debate among those who self identify as socialists about the definition, a debate made acrimonious by the conviction of many of its participants that their own definition is the right, the only possible, or the scientific one, or the one blessed by this or that socialist saint. Let us try to put that as much as possible aside.
Socialism has always been about ownership or control of significant productive units of the economy by the population at large. There has been a gulf between those who emphasize ownership and those who emphasize control.
For some it is enough if the people formally own the factories et al. That ownership can be administered, at least nominally in the interest of all the people, by an elite. “Socialists” of this stripe typically have national ownership in mind and defend the elite managers on an efficiency and “defense of socialism” rationale, promising a high, and highly equal, standard of living for all, despite the efforts of the external and internal enemies. If the elite has a few extra privileges that is a nearly inevitable concomitant of the difficulty of their job and their special competence. If a few civil liberties have to be sacrificed to combat the enemies of the people, that, too, is worth it. These are not always the politics for those who define socialism in terms of state ownership and emphasize material equality, but it has been an historically important tendency.
Those who define socialism in terms of control of the economy by the people insist that there is no socialism without a broad, deep, and uncorrupted democracy. So they are socialist democrats by definition. They are more often open to some use of markets, to some (smallish) private ownership, and to democratic control on various levels, down to the very local: municipal ownership, (e.g. the much loved Seattle City Light), workers’ councils, cooperatives, and various kinds of hybrids. What combination of markets and these various forms of democratic control will work best is a matter for imagination, dialogue, experiment, and, always, democratic ratification.
As you will have guessed, I would define socialism in the second way. So, for me and my sort, the regimes of Stalin and Mao were not imperfect socialism or degenerated socialism, they were not socialism at all because their democracy was purely rhetorical. Real socialism extends the reach of democracy.
Those civil liberties essential to genuine democracy are, then, conceptually included in our definition of socialism. This would include almost all the traditional civil liberties. Socialists of this ilk tend to be partisans as well of a regime of concrete freedoms and opportunities that goes well beyond the traditional civil liberties, but these can be conceptually separated from the definition of socialism. Aspiration to a broad and deep freedom, however, has typically been part and parcel of the motivation for looking to the possibility of forms of social and economic life that go beyond capitalism.
Socialist democracy is conceptually consistent with there being people who are very rich and others who are very poor. Some could own large private vacation islands while others live hand to mouth. This is, however, an unlikely state of affairs in an economy that is highly responsive to democracy. The right-libertarians say with a straight face that the CEO and his kitchen maid are equally free to procure an expensive vision restoring operation for a grandchild. The kitchen maid is “merely” unable, not unfree. The motivations that incline people towards socialism tend to find the right-libertarian concept of freedom a tad arbitrary and pedantic.
Significant differences in income and wealth might well be democratically ratified insofar as they could be justified under the Rawlsian “difference principle” which upholds inequalities that redound to the interest of the least well off. Socialism is not consistent with Agatha's passing on her steel mill to Agatha junior. It is also inconsistent with Agatha's being able to buy the loyalty of politicians.
Contrary to the thread initiator's apparent assumption, socialism need not come about by expropriation of capitalists. It can grow organically and has sometimes done so for a time here and there. No capitalist was expropriated that I know of when the co-op movement was thriving. ( I suspect, to the contrary, that for-profit enterprises sometimes used their leverage with politicians to discourage the development of co-ops, as they do to privatize any public activity they can. Private enterprises have the overwhelming advantage for politicians that they can contribute to the next reelection campaign.) The Veterans Administration health system in the US did not expropriate anybody. Agatha can be bought out in a perfectly voluntary transactions. So no direct force is necessary for a transition to socialism.
As a conceptual matter, although not as a practical possibility on any scale beyond the smallest, taxation would not even be necessary for a government to purchase an enterprise. All the funds could be voluntarily contributed. Workers have bought the enterprises for which worked.
The thread here takes us beyond the definition of socialism to the right-libertarian attack on all forms of political and social organization other than the minimal state – that very theoretical entity.
Right-libertarians complain that taxation for any purpose other than support of the minimal state is implicitly the use of force to take away freedom. The thread initiator seemed to assume that property has an equivalence with freedom, in which I think there is more truth than right-libertarians usually grant. The rich are freer than the poor, and so taxing does take away some freedom.
That there is a threat of force behind all taxation we should also grant. Tax evaders may be taken off to detention in shackles. This threat of force behind taxation is, however, is nothing new to socialism. It has been true of all taxation reaching back deep beyond historic times, and it is true even for taxation by the minimal state. It may be that everyone should agree to pay a tax voluntarily to be protected from armed robbers, but not everyone would so agree. Many would be happy to ride free.
The very idea of the minimal state, what it is within the minimum and how it is to be financed, is a minefield of problems for the non-anarchist right-libertarian. The minimal state will certainly protect wealth from robbers. Will it also protect it from fraud by material omission or from commercial disparagement? Are copyrights and patents permissible in the minimal state? How long? Does the fact that the wealthy have more to protect mean that our coercively backed tax should be on wealth or is income an appropriate proxy? There is a tendency for right libertarians to resolve such questions in the way that most favors the very rich, so perhaps the right answer is that every individual should pay the same exact dollar or pound figure to support the minimal state. After all, it is, by grand assumption, no fault of the rich that the poor do not have much property to be protected by the constable.
Does the minimal state protect us from the externalities that others dump into what remains of the public space – chemicals and heat into I streams, pollutants into the air, global warming? Private industry has been free riding on the rest of us for a very long time. Right-libertarians have tended not to be much concerned about these externalities.
On the subject of grand assumptions, the thread's originator demonstrated the tendency of right-libertarians to assimilate real world capitalism to the hot house models of their theory. As Nozick, the most philosophically sophisticated of all right-libertarians, argued wealth is justly held if it can be traced back through a series of just transfers to just acquisitions (or if there was any failure of these, then it was repaired by justice in rectification.)
Looking past all the many problems about Lockean “labor mixing,” the chief theoretical starting point of just acquisition, the model of just capitalist holdings has a severe problem. For any significant holding – a factory, a mine, a large farm, there will be very many transactions in the history. There is this machine and that, this parcel of land and another and another. It will be a tree that branches as we go back in time. Every loan and every equity investment will multiply the branches. Some will go back through the twentieth, nineteenth, and eigteenth century. Inevitably some of those far flung branches will trace back to the labor of slaves. No libertarian believes that slavery was just or that the wealth it produced was derived by justice in acquisition or in transfer. There are many other sorts of injustice in the historical transfer tree, (thefts, frauds, crony capitalism) some of them very compelling, but slavery is the most unarguable.
I see no plausible account of justice in rectification that could have purged this injustice. So it appears that no large holding is just by Nozickean right-libertarian principles.
Were I to advise those who want to use right-libertarianism to justify the actual holdings of today's billionaires, I would suggest not justice in acquisition-transfer-rectification, but, instead, some political justice equivalent of statutes of limitation. The problem with this approach, however, is that statutes of limitation have not been championed as a matter of achieving true justice, but out of practical concerns – the judicial difficulty and cost of reaching back too far, and the costs of uncertainty to those involved. These sorts of “merely utilitarian” advantages are derided by right-libertarians.
Absent a theory that the rich hold their great rich by a warrant of justice so strong and unchallengeable that it trumps all other human values, we may wonder why it would be unjust to tax for the non-minimal state purpose of curing blindness in children.
