Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 11:55 am
I agree "It's what people DO in response to those market realities that makes a difference to whether one has distress or success."
Well, great.
The problem is especially bad when people
pretend market forces don't exist or
don't have to be respected.
That's what happens under Socialism: the government starts pretending that it doesn't need to be creating more value than its expending. So it prints dollars it cannot back. It hands out money it does not have, by borrowing it at rates it cannot sustain, or by taxing the people who are actually creating value, so that they become unprofitable and non-functional.
It keeps adding promises...
free income, free social safety net, free health care, free education, free immigration settlement, free everything...but "free," for them does not actually mean "free": it means, "bought unsustainably, with money the government doesn't actually have." And it means that inevitably, the poor and the middle class end up eating the bill and suffering the consequences. When the food runs out on the shelves, it's never the rich who starve. The elites never seem to get hurt; they have investments, tax lawyers and offshore accounts they use as buffers. But the ordinary Joe is the one who is bankrupted by the "free" stuff.
That's why, in every case in history, Socialism, when given the reins of the economy, has produced poverty and misery among the middle and lower classes. It has no concern for market forces, and does not ever pay its own bills. And progressively, the economy falls behind and then collapses.
The simple fact about market forces is this: if more value is going out of the economy than is going in, then the economy inevitably bleeds to death. In order to sustain any social programs over the long run, the economy has to be making a good deal more money than it's losing to social programming. It has to be making enough for the private enterprise system to be vigorous, PLUS enough for the social safety net to be sustainable.
If Socialism ever respected market forces, instead of taking over the economy as a comprehensive and consuming ideology, you might find it was sustainable. It needs a strong capitalist economy in order to afford its promises. That's what places like Sweden, Denmark and Canada have found out; and even so, some of their social programs are now in peril, because it takes an awful lot of capitalism to pay for a little Socialism.