Um…
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made me set up monthly donations to the DSA. Just saying.
Should add: The proper response is at this point to establish that we’re suffering from perverted socialism as it is: Government handouts to the obscenely wealthy, workers paid so little they need food stamps, and so on and so forth. What’s being called socialism is little more than reversing an extractive economy and making it inclusive – healthy – again.
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Perhaps not in your narrow definition of socialism but taxes as the means of production (because all means are money) works fine in my use of the term.
However, lets play your game of the physical substrate of industry which you have enumerated as factories, machinery, mines, land, etc
Our government completely owns the physical substrate of the U.S. mail delivery industry. We own the trucks, the equipment, the bags, all of it. Heck, we even own the roads. We also allow private competition to mail delivery and road construction because we are free that way.
Our government owns the physical substrate of the education industry. Our taxes paid for the land, the building, the teachers, the books. Heck, we even own the means of setting the curriculum. We also allow private competition to the education system because we are free that way.
I can go on for all the other governmental socialist programs that we enjoy in the U.S. but I think you can see enough to understand that we own the physical substrate of pretty much every program our government enacts.
Now, if you want to argue that real socialism is when the government denies all private ownership or operation of the physical substrate of industry, I’d have to call that another No True Scotsman argument and one not germane in any way to the discussion at hand. Failed totalitarian models of socialism are not in play here and likely never will be.
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Roger that! He had to censor the first part of the ‘definition’ because it did not correspond with what he wanted us to believe. Only the bit at the end fitted the ideological template.
If you take the big Oxford Dictionary and look up ‘Jewish’ you will find all kinds of unpleasant uses of that word. Usually the more insulting and bigoted meanings are kept for last, and only appear in the biggest edition. But they are there because a dictionary attempts to document language as it is used, rightly and wrongly, by all users.
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This just came across my newsfeed:
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Thanks but no thanks - Hillary hand-picked Trump as her Fall Guy, and lost to him anyway! She was a crappy candidate, is a crappy human being (you don’t see Bernie Sanders, say, writing a overpriced, YUGE-publishing advance nastygram to the Democratic Party who fucked him over - no, he’s in there still trying to fix things!), and would have been an even bigger nightmare as a leader, because all she could talk about during the General Election was “Going Toe-to-Toe with Putin”!
Had she been President America would have likely been an irradiated crater by now - as you lot sipped mimosas rather than getting off your ass and protesting.
PS: Yes, Her Damned E-Mails! She at minimum covered up evidence of Foreign Bribery (we know this from the e-mails the FBI either found back-ups of or were able to piece back from her “scrubbed” server!) - and given how freely you fling around the term “Treason” about Trump, it’s not unreasonable to accuse her of the same…
Selah.
It does not help the cause of a mixed economy when anyone says “capitalism is the cause of our problems” when s/he really means that “unbridled capitalism with regulatory capture is the cause of our problems”. Saying the former can be taken to mean that you want the kind of system where everyone queues up to buy turnips and toilet paper. Bernie’s comment about there are too many kinds of deodorant on the shelves did not endear him to me.
I like me lots of capitalism, but kept below monopoly/oligopoly size, and with a regulatory structure that promotes new entrants into every market and plenty of competition. (Which means I have a real problem with things like Dodd-Frank which promote the opposite). And I like a well-funded social safety net, but with incentives to solve society’s problems rather than the creation of self-perpetuating bureaucracies which survive on never solving them.
So there is no political niche into which I fit…
And by the way, to those people who are wearing Che t-shirts. You are really, really not helping.
There are exactly two things that I think she got right in Atlas, neither of them said by her tiresome heroes or heroines.
“… when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.”
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system.”
If you can honestly say that neither of these quotes predict the 21st century USA, then you and I are not looking at the same country.
I’m not sure why you’re addressing that comment to me since I clearly specified late-stage capitalism (which usually includes some form of regulatory capture) as the problem.
I didn’t ask, although if you need help narrowing it down I’d suggest one where the proponents of which are prone to setting up left-wing straw men to take their edgy hip-shots at (from what I’ve observed on this site various forms of anti-statism might fit the bill). For example:
Have you seen any of them around here? The only evidence of Che I’ve seen around here is a user’s Alfred E. Neuman parody avatar.
Her willful blind spot here was not to understand that this kind of corruption can occur company-to-company as well as company-to-government. The recent collusion in the labour market by large Silicon Valley corporations is a case in point – they would have kept doing it if not for the threat of the state enforcing its anti-trust laws.
And again, Rand’s tunnel vision crops up. Corporations not only sometimes collude with the state in late-stage capitalism but also set up their own one-sided rules “that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted” in order to give themselves the option to make life miserable for anyone who crosses them – they’re usually called EULAs or mandatory employment agreements.
If you can honestly say that neither of those situations describe aspects of late-stage capitalism in the 21st century USA then you’re as willfully blind as are the Objectivists and Libertarians who see Rand as some great and prescient philosopher instead of of what she really is: someone to justify their acting like petulant children, licking their DRMed digital lollipops while proclaiming to the state “you can’t tell me what to do.”
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? You might want to avoid the mix of pharmacological agents you’re currently using.
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Say what you will about the evil Coastal Liberal Elites, they know better than to put hallucinogens into their mimosas. Why distort reality when you’re laughing over brunch at the latest instance of Il Douche’s supporters working against their own economic self interest?
Perhaps the person to whom you’re responding is Jon McNaughton, because judging by his latest masterpiece he’s on some heavy-duty drugs himself:
ETA: And after a hilarious and rapid series of suggested fixes by his fans on Twitter the final result is
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I live next to a coast, but it’s a cold, damp one, and I’m not very elite. Can I still put drugs in my mimosas?
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Since I recall you live in the UK I’ll allow it. You’ll need the powdered shrooms to help you forget the taste of orange powder mixed with Tesco Imperial.
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