Typical Lax Dad wrote: ↑Tue Jan 14, 2020 9:55 am1.2 million out of 128 million households are section 8. You may as well compare the outcome of a typical middle class family to the 1% and make an argument as to why the country is failing them or why we have the wrong approach. Of that 1.2, most received temporary assistance and then move off the roles. Some are generational but its a small percentage.Peter Brown wrote: ↑Tue Jan 14, 2020 9:44 amMDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 14, 2020 9:15 amHmmm, you are ignoring that there are fiscal conservative, capitalist R's like me who are also saying you are conflating various forms of authoritarianism with "socialism".Peter Brown wrote: ↑Tue Jan 14, 2020 8:32 am It's endlessly fascinating to see Americans (errr, Democrats, then to a lesser extent neverTrumpers) defend, almost lovingly embrace, socialism. That's not socialism, that's fascism... Amazing. I love it, for entertainment purposes of course. Never stop your enemy when he's making a mistake, so I won't do much other than to admit I am entertained by these posts.
(The best people to knock socialism, of course. are those who suffered through it. But not many of them play(ed) lacrosse.)
In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery (yes, Nazism, Communism, Nationalism, Statism, etc...). Like a pyramid scheme, socialism is ultimately unsustainable because it's based on faulty principles. Collectivism is unsustainable in the long run because it's also a flawed theory. Socialism does not work because it's inconsistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it's a system that ignores incentives.
But please, my good Democrat friends, keep entertaining us while you parse the definition of socialism!
Authoritarianism is the enemy.
Or at least has been throughout history. There have been no sustained "benevolent dictatorships".
We cannot pin you down on what you think "socialism" actually is. Why is that?
My sense is that because you think any element of socialism is equal to authoritarian versions.
When someone like Sanders, who actually describes himself as as a "socialist", meaning "democratic socialist", advocates for a policy he is not advocating for authoritarianism nor is he advocating for an absolutist, pure form of "socialism" that would require authoritarianism to enforce.
I do think we should challenge such policy prescriptions in terms of costs and benefits, how the policy impacts human behavior.
After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But we don't need to demonize either Capitalism (which obviously has very major flaws if unrestrained) or Socialism (which does not harness well people's natural desire to compete).
I thought I did. Socialism is a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Straight from Dr. Google.
What it really means is no one is incentivized and no one owns the outcome. You know and I know that if our companies mess up, the ultimate owner of the mess is the owner, not line guys or secretaries or sales people. Socialism creeps in via a slow eradication of incentives; at the end of its predictable life, everyone seeks to avoid ownership of the mess the created. That opens the door for authoritariansim.
Socialism can best be seen via Section 8/public housing projects versus private home ownership. Look at the difference in the lawn, the paint, wood preservation, colors, safety, the sense of community...this should be easy to understand (and see), but there's always been a strong incentive (mostly among Democrats) to portray socialism as an ideal paradise, when it's anything but; Democrats (I was one) trust government, indeed worship government (longer theory, but government writ large is in essence simply the exchange of authority from you to another, where you do not have the confidence to manage your own affairs), when the last thing you should ever do is trust a partner where your partner never owns any outcome between the two of you.
I do not agree with your takeaway, because my issue was about ownership (Section 8 does not own), your issue is about envy (he has a bigger house than me). The tiniest house owned by a homeowner will almost always (perhaps 99% of the time - some homeowners are slobs, let's be real) look better than the largest Section 8 house because the homeowner is incentivized to own the outcome.