Understanding Socialism
Posted by Solver 4 years, 11 months ago to Philosophy
In seven and a half minutes, Bill Whittle tells some tells some great easy to understand stories showing what does and does not drive people’s strong desire for socialism.
https://youtu.be/McZdgBPkmEE
https://youtu.be/McZdgBPkmEE
It is exactly how it is.
The tragedy is that the sheeple have no idea what they are getting themselves into.
Like most socialist giveaways, his decision worked, for a little while. The extra cash made it possible to dump lots of money into welfare projects. In fact he was so pleased with the result of his decision, he set about nationalizing all the industries that were partnered with Americans, to pull even more cash into the government, and it worked, for a while.
The problem nationalization created was that there were no indigenous experts to keep all these industries running. In short order, drilling rigs and pumps started breaking down, with no one to repair them. Oil production slowed, and profits shrank. Even native experts with operating knowledge were shoved aside, in favor of Chavez cronies, only making the situation worse.
Jobs started disappearing, requiring Chavez to increase welfare expenditures. Then he became ill with cancer, and made one of his worst decisions by selecting Maduro to take over until he recovered. Maduro's only working experience had been as a bus driver, until he caught Chavez's eye, and was brought into the team.
Chavez dying was the final blow for Venezuela, as the trust and agreements he had secured that enabled him to continue down the path of "Bolivarian" socialism was gone. Everyone knew Maduro was an incompetent. Chavez had tolerated some opposition, but Maduro knew nothing about how to play political games, and became heavy-handed, turning Venezuela into a police state. Maduro began frantically trying to gain control of all commercial activity, ignorant of the fact that centralized market control always fails. That sent the economy into an accelerated fall, so Maduro next tried to change the value of the nation's currency, making it essentially worthless.
This is the story for socialism. A lack of understanding of what makes a market work inevitably leads to disaster. The European countries that Sanders points to as "democratic" socialism are not socialist at all. They're capitalist welfare states.
Creates more and more looters until everybody is one with no one left to produce any worthwhile product or and produt at all.
teacher bragging , "I never tip." She said management should pay the waitresses "a decent wage'. Now she did not say the government should do anything about it, but I think this is the idea held by a lot of people. They want mandatory minimum wage, and taxation for a welfare state, but actually tip anybody with their own money?! Ha ha! (By the way, I think tips should be earned, by taking out the food extra fast, offering to hand things to the customer, etc., not just given automatically).Still, there is a lot of this attitude on the part of altruists, for instance, the customers who hand out religious tracts as substitutes for tips.
I think the video should have ended there before he went off and used SJW without irony.
“If you got a business, you didn’t build that.”
Of course Obama wasn’t talking about your business was he? He was talking about roads and bridges, right? “That” roads and bridges.
"“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."
It was not a mistake, it was a deliberately framed attack on capitalism. It's the underlying argument why they own the fruits of your labor.
I think we should try to privatize these things where possible.. Maybe roads could be partially privatized and paid by supply and demand, so there would never be traffic jams. The price would go up until demand = carrying capacity of the roads. At one time there was only one phone company and one cable TV company, and now there's competition. So public goods can be privatized.
The fact that there are public goods ,though, is not in itself an attack on capitalism. The quote is stating fact. Coming from Warren, though, she was likely using it to make a socialistic point.
ment Fee he was also paying for national defense.
Oh, but immigration is a huge problem - thanks to Obama and the Dems. Oh, and now we're finding out that Obama's Justice Department was involved in spying on Trump during the election. Yup - Obama was just so amazing... [/sarcasm]
The one thing politicians stand to blame for is the borrowing. I thought the $400 billion a year when Obama was president was staggering. I never imagined it would double in such a short time. It's a problem that will lead to a mini-crisis, one that would be easier to address before it materializes. Getting back to Obama-era deficits would be a huge improvement.
1. Tax breaks. Lowering the tax rates gave everyone more money to spend the way they wanted to.
2. Tax breaks enable lower prices for business goods and services.
3. Less regulation means lower regulatory costs (which get passed on to consumers) and better business flexibility.
4. Regulation rollback means less control by the bureaucratic state.
These are all policies which Democrats - led by Obama - put in place which were then reversed under Trump and the Republicans.
I agree with you that the borrowing is still a huge problem, but again, most of the obstruction to lowering borrowing is being led - again - by Democrats. This is especially true in the Senate where they continue to use the filibuster to block votes on any bills they don't approve of. So while there are a minority of Republicans who have gone along with the Democrats, this is a problem caused and owned by the Democrats.
I think there's no bit of truth to that. The recession of '08-09 was not caused by politics. The recovery and expansion following the recession were not caused by politics. We're due for a recession, and it won't be anyone's fault.
Regarding the last paragraph, I couldn't care much less who gets the blame. I don't get any benefit from their games. I am not surprised politicians have found a way to increase borrowing, spending, and gov't intrusiveness. I just wish there were some way they clone Obama and at least get half way back there, not even all the way, but just cut spending and borrowing to levels between 2016 and now.
Good grief, man! Political policies set the stage for everything that happens in an economy. Higher taxes lead to the recession - higher taxes that were introduced by a Democratic Congress under Bush and exacerbated under Obama. Then what happened when the Republicans and Trump slashed taxes? The economy came roaring back. The EXACT same thing happened under Carter (who with Democrats raised taxes leading directly to a recession) and then Reagan (who slashed taxes despite Democrats which led to an economic boom).
And we don't even have to look at the US to see this. What is happening in France under Macron? Riots and protests in the streets because of gasoline taxes - a public policy decision. Europe's crime rates have skyrocketed since they took an open borders position - a public policy. I can't figure out whether you are playing devil's advocate or willfully blind because there are heaps upon heaps of evidence of public policy decisions and how they affect the economy.
"Regarding the last paragraph, I couldn't care much less who gets the blame."
Obviously not, because you keep voting for the primary perpetrators of bad policy.
You are also factually incorrect about your timing of the economic cycle, but this is moot because I don't accept the opinion that these political decisions are responsible for the economic cycle.
Consider your example of bank bailouts in 08-09. I can accept they caused the recession of 08-09 to end faster and the expansion following it to get going faster. They came at the cost of moral hazard and govt debt taking the place of bank deleveraging. I find political games to assign blame and credit to be beyond asinine. The banking system is structured such that we prime the pump with fiscal policy, get malinvestment, have another crisis, and then do another round of monetary and fiscal stimulus.... fiscal stimulus that will only be possible as long as the USD remains the reserve currency of the world. I think crypto-currencies will supplant it fast. At any rate, this is just an unstable system. It's not the first unstable system I've seen as an engineer, and it's not the first time I've seen people spend their efforts on blaming one another instead of working the problem.
I try to be a stoic and kind person, but I have strong contempt for people responding to an unstable inefficient system with creative narratives to blame one another instead of working the problem. In addition to your timeline being factually wrong about when the recessions/expansions occurred, I find the blame-oriented narratives surrounding them as loathsome as Ayn Rand villains.
Yes
The fact is that political leaders can have a tremendous influence on a nation's prosperity. To ignore this fact is to ignore reality. Such a denier of reality will also be unwilling to place responsibility on those making those (poor) decisions in the first place.
That very well symbolizes the end game of socialism to me.