Why Does Socialism Always Fail?

Yes that is exactly what we will do BECAUSE WE VOTED TO HAVE THIS TYPE OF SOCIETY. DUH

 

Value is established by voluntary exchange. If their profit margins are that wide, there is great incentive to enter the market as a competitor. If IP law, or any other legislation, is preventing entry into the market, that's what you get for recognizing a top-down legal system.

 

Nothing! You just don't pay and you receive zero benefits. If you are paying into it now, it isn't stolen because you are going to get it back when you become old enough to draw benefits.

Try and look at S.S. like you would healthcare with the free market system. When you show up to the doctors office or the hospital and cannot pay, who do you think makes up the difference when you can't or won't pay? That's right, the other guy getting medical treatment gets pro-rated for the amount you didn't pay. That constitutes stealing. That's why Obama had the mandate. To make sure others weren't getting ripped off for paying extra for healthcare because others weren't. That's how S.S. works. Everyone contributes into a pool of money that ultimately benefit us all. If S.S. didn't exist, then it stands to reason only property owners, as you have stated earlier, in their elderly years stood the best chance at getting any benefits to a quality of life, taking in the cost of living factor. Without S.S. that quality wouldn't be there for most of us. You want to gamble without it, go ahead.

You may argue, we'll, what about retirement plans? Retirement plans don't work so well when banks are deregulated to the point that they have the leverage to crash the economy at our expense.

That is why S.S. has turned out to be such a great success story for those who have received it.

 

Because you always run out of other peoples money and even the most liberal of people soon tire of carrying all of the weight.

 

Sounds to me that you're hell bent against a social contract altogether. Ha, if we were all like you and didn't want to pay into anything we wouldn't have to worry anymore about financing roads and bridges to drive on now would we?

 

Nope. If you refuse to consent to paying taxes, the government sends men wit hguns from the government to put you in a cage.

That's what happens.

 

It sounds that way because you're not looking at it from my perspective. We're broke. The middle class is being wiped out and the dollar is being devalued as inflation rises. And in Washington, we have one side voting to spend money on welfare while the other votes to spend money on warfare. We're printing money to the point that the dollar will fail. We're seeing the consequences all over the world where governments who depend on the health of the dollar are breaking down because prices are going up. And eventually this will come home. Except to the other countries' credit, they're restructuring and jumpng on board with the Asian Infrastructure Bank and the BRICS Banks and also restructuring their domestic and international financial clearing models in order to become independent of the failing dollar.

But here in America, the middle class is being wiped out and it's only going to get worse. Again, we're broke. When the dollar fails, there is nothing left but runaway inflation.

These programs will ultimately fail as a consequence of printing so much money and devaluing the dollar. It is guaranteed.

And you're going to see food riots on the street when people don't get their government checks.


Not only that, but I should be free to take care of myself. I don't want the government making laws in order to do it for me.

Go back to the excise tax as the founders intended. "Problem" solved.

 

No one is going to win the sort of arguments extant in this thread. Capitalism and Socialism are diametrically opposed concepts, neither of which produce a successful society when employed as absolutes and in isolation. In between societies such as the USA and North Korea lies the rest of the world - in which the most societally successful countries are those which incorporate free enterprise and systems of social justice in almost equal measures. Look to northern Europe to find them.

Of course there will be those of you who will very likely disagree with this, but that disagreement will generally stem from national pride. The northern European societies are far from perfect, but they have discovered that the above combination produces a productive and essentially fair society, wherein there are not armies of the homeless, where the likelihood of being shot dead by some stranger is almost non-existent, and where your basic needs will be met by society in the event you cannot provide for yourself.

So we do ourselves a disservice if we become too hung up on ideologies - the intelligent man looks at outcomes rather than polarised belief systems, and just as ostensibly Communist societies are benefitting from adopting modified free enterprise philosophies, so can hard right capitalist societies benefit from regulating the excesses of capitalism, and introducing necessary systems of social justice.

 

Because that is what we want to happen

 

It's telling that you choose to ignore the fact that the EpiPen can be a life-or-death medication and that this has a very strong effect on the decision to purchase the product. We can only guess that, to you, extreme profiteering like this for life-saving drugs is fine. How can you ignore that?

 

By pure I mean unregulated. Human greed is always the corrupting factors. There is always someone who wants all the wealth and power for themselves. Without human greed there would be no need to regulate a capitalist society, businesses would willingly police themselves, they would never try to cheat their workers or customers. However, because humans are greedy by nature, there are always those who would corrupt the system for their own gain, and so regulations are needed to prevent this from happening.

Corporatism is to capitalism as communism is to socialism. Corporatism is a system where corporations control the government. Currently, this is done by lobbying. Politicians let corporate lobbyists write the law, and vote how their corporate backers which them to vote. However, there are more extreme version of it, where corporations directly dictate government policy.

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No, unregulated socialism ALWAYS leads to authoritarian communism.

 

That can't be true if there has never been a communist society. There has never been a communist society. I suspect you don't know what communism is even if you think you do.

Would you say Marx is the authority on the definition and description of communism and what it is?

 

It's never true because strong leaders are required to implement the rules of a communist society and that requirement always goes horrible wrong.

 

Guess whatever you want. I can't stop you. Competition would bring the price down real quick. The state inhibits competition(intentionally and constitutionally in this case). You support the state, I don't. Blame yourself.

 

And where do you think that someone will be found when the power to regulate can be had by popular vote?

capitalism = real life

crony capitalism = capitalism + power to regulate

 

I'm still not seeing how pure capitalism (zero regulations) would lead to corporatism. Under zero regulations, what laws could corporations possibly want the government to make?

Also, a purely capitalist state would preclude the existence of a state at all, as capitalism is defined by the private ownership of the means of production, and the state is not a private organization. Therefore, in a pure capitalist society, there could be no crony capitalism, as there is no state for corporations to lobby.

 

Well, this is an impotent discussion because "pure capitalism" can never happen. But for entertainment sake, let's look at it.

If government took a hands-off policy and if there were no regulations on business and business were allowed to do whatever they like, the whole game would collapse in monopoly and revolution faster than it ever would without regulations. Regulations are a moderating influence on business and keeps business more sane and more durable. Capitalism cannot self-regulate and it's own internal contradictions would destroy it.

 

Capitalism is regulated by supply and demand, comparative advantage, and creative destruction. Regulations are necessary to protect the environment and to ensure property rights and punish criminal activities. The so called failures of capitalism have always been failures of gov controls. The recent housing bubble and financial crisis & the very weak Obama recovery are prime examples of that.

 

EpiPen
Current prescription drug pricing debacle
Deepwater Horizon
Vioxx
Roundup pervasive
C8 found in blood of everyone and even in polar bears
Flammable cellphones
Sub-prime loans
Whole Foods mislabeled weights creating huge price inflation

 

How do you claim capitalism failed on each of these ??

 

No, there has never been a communist utopia, and there never will be, because human greed prevents it. It's the same for capitalism. You can not have either in the form they were originally supposed to take. That is why a mixed economy, with both the private and public sectors being carefully regulated, is the best option.

 

A good example would be companies working together to undermine competition. The pro wrestling industry is a prime example. Before WWE, the business was controlled by an organization called the National Wrestling Alliance. This organization was made up of various formerly independent wrestling promotions, and these promotions divided the US into several territories with each promotions getting their own. They then would use their political and financial clout to undermine non-member promotions and basically controlled the wrestling business for well over almost 40 years.

This type of intentional undermining of the free market is stopped thanks to anti-trust laws. but it happens a lot still, such as with professional and college sports.

 

If it isn't immediately apparent to you, you shouldn't be voting because voting requires intelligent choices if the country is to remain safe and prosperous.

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You didn't answer my question.

 

All of those items on your list can be tied into bad governance and not capitalism. And it is telling that you cannot list how each item is the result of capitalism.

 

Command and Control governance doesn't work. The housing bubble/financial crisis is a good example of that.

Communism does/will not work because there is no personal incentive to work hard. Capitalism does work because this is a personal incentive to work hard. Additionally working hard on an individual and corporate basis results in the maximum benefit to society because of the ever increasing assortment of advanced products. Capitalism rewards productivity improvement which results in better products at lower prices. Of course the rule of law and light regulation is required by the people via government.