Is socialism the future?

Wow, that's heavy, man.
This sounds like Russian propaganda farm fodder.
And your ignorance about the UK is astounding.
Right now, Labour is at least 30 points ahead of the Tories in the polls, who have become a spent, corrupt force and will lose the next election bigly. Then the pendulum will swing back eventually for a while. The brits are pragmatic, although they let a gang of xenophobic racists stampede them into shooting themselves in the head with Brexit. They will pay for that nonsense for years.

 

Yep. The old saw 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely' is fully applicable to the to socialist utopian dream.

 

Misreading what brexit was about and .
misunderstanding the critter that us boris Johnson.

 

Sure I did. I showed the typical mis-characterization of urban left wing progressive elitists whom try to use Red states to push false narratives about conservatives when in fact the true dependence in those states are the Democrats

Yeah, and the part that you leave out, intentionally, is that those people most dependent on those programs within any of those states are Democrat voters.

Or, I am calling out your attempt partisan mis-characterization of red states.

 

Oh boy, another liberal who wants to mischaracterize statistics to serve a partisan agenda.

Can you please provide me an example of one of these red states you speak about, so I can prove that it's really the Democrats in that state that are dependent?

 

Yup. The people who survived communist Hungary's political prisons and escaped to the West during the revolt in 1956 reported that the authorities employed the dregs of society to work in the prisons and brutalize the inmates.

It also reminds me of a passage from Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago when the protaginst spoke about the revolutionaries in the USSR, and you won't find this scene in David Lean's film:

Lara Guishar: You've changed, you know. You used to speak more calmly about the revolution , you were less harsh about it.

Yuri Zhivago: The point is, Larissa Fyodorovna, there are limits to everything. In all this time something definite should have been achieved. But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil: that's their native element; they aren't happy with anything that's less than on a world scale. For them, transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know about anything except that. And do you know why there is this incessant whirl of never-ending preparations? It's because they haven't any real capabilities, they are ungifted. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself - the gift of life - is such a breathtakingly serious thing! Why substitute this childish harlequinade of adolescent fantasies, these schoolboy escapades?

Gee, I wonder why the "progressive" authorities in Moscow suppressed Doctor Zhivago and threw his mistress in Lubyanka to punish him for writing the book and smuggling it out of the Soviet Union.

 

Is socialism the future?

The following is what Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had to say about this in his book Warning to the West, which was published after his expulsion from the USSR in 1974:


https://www.amazon.com/Warning-West-Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn/dp/0374513341

It is with a strange feeling that those of us from the Soviet Union look upon the West of today. It is though we were neither neighbors on the same planet nor contemporaries. And yet we contemplate the West from what will be your future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today. And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinions of children, the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed with a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.
(pp.129-130)

 

The most impoverished areas in red states are invariably big blue cities.

 

You called out nothing.
You made a silly assumption.
One that had nothing at all with what was actually stated.

But you can go back and quote the post you think made the claim you are now making up.
Until then, we'll assume you're not understanding what you replied to.

So, post the quote that has you thinking you made some revelation.

 

Showing color charts of states counties proves nothing you claim it does.
It just shows which counties are dem and which are repub.

You need to go further and prove that red states collect some of the most welfare because of a few counties in the state.

Start with Ms, one of the most welfare collecting state in the union.

 

Not really. It only takes enough people who'll happily sell their soul to the devil, if they think the devil will feed and house them.

The power hungry/greedy simply step into the breech. Having said that, it's the power hungry who condition the people to this kind of 'readiness' in the first place.

 

It really isn't.

If the individual submitting funds is doing so in exchange for things they would otherwise labor for, then it's capitalism. Taxes are the price we pay for things we can't or won't produce for ourselves, so it's pure capitalism.

State Welfare is also pure capitalism, for the same reason. If we submit funds to Govt to feed and house our own (ie those in our immediate community), so we don't have to feed and house them ourselves .. nor insist that they feed and house themselves .. then we're simply buying labor as per the capitalist model.

 

No thanks.

Not playing your games.

Your attempt failed in the face of posted statistics and facts, and you aren't big enough to accept and concede that.

 

You do realize I posted two charts right?

One showed the concentrations of poverty, i.e. those dependent on social welfare, and party voting.

Take another look at those two maps.

The trend is clear.

 

Wow.

I'm not even sure how to respond.

Capitalism is based on a free and open exchange of goods and serves voluntarily, the the mutual benefitnof the parties of the exchange.

There is NOTHING capitalist about taxation.

Claiming that taxes and social programs are capitalist, because without it we would all be responsible for other people.... is collectivism.

I'm not responsible for other people, and especially through force and mandated compliance. Now if I elect to give to the needy, either directly or through charity, its a voluntary philanthropic action.

Collectivists are unable to understand that I don't and shouldn't have an obligation to provide for others. I'm not sure why, or why collectivists have self appointed themselves to determine what I should and shouldn't do.

 

Workers in the bureaucracy are also sell outs.

They may not be as ambitious as those who rise higher, but they are just as unethical and despicable.

Which is why everyone in Washington D.C. needs to be 86'ed. Right down to the secretaries and janitors.

 

You're missing the point.

Social Programs are always capitalism. They all require significant funds, which can only be raised in a robustly capitalist society. Capitalism pays for them, and they function on a capitalist premise (profit, and the buying/selling of labor etc).

Meantime, when I say we should be responsible for others, I'm talking only about our own others. IE family and/or immediate close community. I'm not talking about random strangers who happen to live in your general area, or your state, or your nation. We should never be responsible for random strangers. We're only forced into that position now, because far too many of us have abandoned responsibility for our own.

Lastly, the 'collectivists' you're referring to are fantasists. They think collectivism means free stuff - when in actual fact it means work-to-eat, shared resources, and a high level of obligation and responsibility (for one's own group). What they really want is a kind of oligarchy .. where the overlords keep us poor, property-less, and dependent, and refuse all potential for growth or independence. A horrifyingly large number of such fantasists would allow that to happen uncontested, if it meant they could hand the adulting to someone else.

 

Yes, it's clear. But it's not a trend. It's factual.
The states receiving the most welfare per capita are mostly red.
That was clearly shown in the link I posted that your responded to.

 

America will never be a socialist country, if the definition you are going by is 'state ownership of the means of production and distribution'. It will always be a democratic socialist country if your definition is 'a social democracy with social programs to help the poor and disadvantaged mixed in with private enterprise for consumer goods and services'.

So, it depends on what definition of socialism you are using.

But, it will continue to have semi socialist aspects, aka a 'mixed economy'. Since FDR, it always has been and that has been supported by both the right and left, until the rise of neoliberalism, which is trying to kill all the social programs.

 

A purely capitalist nation cannot assure access to affordable health care.

It requires a government employing social programs to do it. There is no other way.

 

You want every road to be a toll road, as in, you get in your car to drive to the grocery store, you pay a toll? is that what you are saying?

That's nuts.

there is only one circumstance where I think a toll road is appropriate.

For example, driving from south Orange County to Los Angeles, insteading taking the 405, one can opt to take a parallel path on the 73, which is a toll road, one enters in it South Orange County, and is let off just before one gets to Long Beach. During peak hours, it's like 6 bucks, but for those who are willing to pay, they avoid a lot of traffic for the 20 mile stretch it affords until it remerges with the 405, and this relieves traffic on the 405 for those who do not want to pay it one the way to the L.A airport

So, I support toll roads adjacent to major thoroughfares ( 'freeways' ) as a parallel relief strategy.

 

I believe in a society that can achieve an equilibrium of the two polar forces, government sector / private sector, as described in more detail here:

http://politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/politics-of-the-center-what-is-it.585857/

 

Capitalism, without socialism, will devour itself

Socialism, without capitalism, will collapse under its own weight.

Just as man needs woman, and woman needs man, capitalism and socialism need each other, together, under one nation


Socialism for needs
Capitalism for wants,

This, I believe, should not be the forced rule, but the guiding principle, as there are always exceptions and shades of grey.

I've outlined my philosophy on this in detail, here

http://politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/politics-of-the-center-what-is-it.585857/

 

This is what we did in Ft Lauderdale (I-595). The outer 3-4 lanes on each side are free, while the 3 lanes in the middle are toll roads, so if you want to by-pass the traffic during rush hour, you can opt to pay the .75 cents and take the middle lanes (they change direction to accommodate morning / afternoon rush hours). The expansion (3 middle lanes) were done by a private company which did it for free with the condition that they get to collect the tolls for 30 years. Win-win.

 

There's no 'semi socialism' either. There's no state socialism at all .. outside the military (and even that's voluntary).