I've had trouble with liberalism and libertarianism for a while. The trouble I'm having is this: taxing the business cycle and redistributing the money is good for stability, but not perfect "efficiency". Most of the population likes stability much more than efficiency (as evidenced by recent reactions to the grey market set up around sub-prime mortgages), so democratically, a mixed economy remains the most successful political balance, regardless of its inefficiency.

IF we were rational, and IF we were grown-ups about our economic situation, then surely we would understand that roughly every 60-80 years, there's a recession, and possibly even a depression. But we are not rational. We are scared and we are greedy, and those two opposing forces rule our lives.

Of course, the government use of money seems like a squandering of resources, but it doesn't actually matter what they do with the money, economically speaking. They have already achieved the goal of smoothing out the business cycle (or tried), so nothing they do with it will be a waste. If they give it to homeless people who spend it immediately, then the economy is briefly sped up (and thus "improved" ). I know the libertarian economic stance on rewarding laziness, but lazy people are still capable of spending and lubricating the economy. (I acknowledge that consumption is more in line with a Keynesian world view, but it's difficult to dispute that the speed of the economy is the health of the economy.)

I suppose you're not happy that we've entered the greatest period of world socialism yet? I mean by all these countries buying up banks. But tell me: how is a state different from a corporation?

That's a very efficient way to explain what I've taken paragraphs to blunder through.

It boggles my brain how many people don't realize this.  Well, now that I think about it, there's a sense of entitlement among many ultra-conservatives.  It doesn't seem to dawn on them that they couldn't make their million bucks if the economy didn't exist, and economies do better when there's a narrower income gap and something approaching parity among the working class.

umm.... I was going to say that corporations don't generally bail out states when they fail, but then I thought about how dumb that response would be.

It's a very good question.

Libertarianism is bollocks as like communism it assumes most people are honest decent hard working people when in fact while people will cooperate if its in their interests most people are generally arseholes who want to get the most out of life while doing the least

Most people are not decent, most are hard working only due to necessity. Most people are assholes. So what? Do you want some asshole in the government laying down economic commands? The sad fact that most people are greedy assholes does not negate my desire to have a high amount of personal liberty in my life. And if I (or others) use that freedom to give into my greed so be it. I would like to know where you got this idea that libertarianism hinges on most people being nice from. I know people aren't nice, but I also know that governments aren't nice. And that makes us all choose some sort of ideal amount of government influence we would like to have in our lives. Some people would like a lot of government influence (or outright control) and others want as little government influence as is reasonably possible.

For that matter I don't know that communism assumes most people are decent and hardworking either. Maybe it does, but I would question communists about that before stating it as fact.

We don't want to "separate economics from politics." Perhaps you are thinking about anarcho-capitalists. They want no government at all and the economy running everything. On the other hand, libertarians want to restrained government influence on the economy. It grinds my gears when someone argues against libertarianism by arguing against some from of anarchy in which there is no government influence on anything. We do want the economy 'regulated to some degree.' We would just like that to be a rather small degree as compared to now. I promise not to straw-man communism if you don't straw-man libertarianism with this.

Many agrarian societies were not libertarian. Where did you get that from? Feudal Europe was agrarian, but it sure as hell wasn't libertarian. The Romans were agrarian, but they sure as hell weren't libertarian. There have been countless agrarian societies run by despots who made serfs or slaves toil to death in the fields. I really can't see how you are connecting libertarianism and agrarian societies.

As for lacking a historical basis: allowing women to vote lacks historical basis. Yet we let them vote anyways, since we don't care if how we do things lack historical basis. There is a LOT of historical basis for running your society off of slaves. In fact, not allowing slavery at all is a rather modern idea; ie. it lacks historical basis. There is a strong historical basis of societies being theocratic. Theocracies ran the world for most of history. Does that make theocracies a good idea? Should I go on with this, or is it clear that 'having historical basis' is worthless in politics thanks to horrible institutions have a strong historical basis?

As soon as you accept humans arent very nice leads in my opinion to the need for control. Whether that control is from government/society (the same thing as far as I'm concerned), religion, parents,peer pressure, tradition, nationalism is of course up to debate but I really think is beyond doubt that this control is needed. 

This absurd cult of the individual where want you wants becomes the more important than everything breaks down

I don't get that sentence. Could you explain what you mean by that?

To start I found it difficult to get my head into the US psyche on the policy issues, for an example he wrote:

"I’ve also made a good amount of progress talking to leftists on the gun issue. If guns are power, they belong in the hands of the people, I say."

All the talk about gun policy seemed to revolve around this idea of guns equalling power, I personally don't see it. Guns are machinery but unlike some machinery purpose built for making life easier, guns seem, to me, to serve no particular function but to be a massive pain in the arse.

I suppose you might want me to agree that holding a gun grants you power over others, but I don't, the only power you have in that circumstance is to shoot the person you are asserting power over, the more times you do it the more you raise the chance that your shot will be fatal and you go back to having power over noone cause he doesn't exist anymore. The guns as power mantra is, to me, contradictory and self-defeating, it's the power to take power away from yourself, what a waste of time.

That's my leftist opinion, guns are a pain in the arse they serve sweet bugger all purpose, the only thing that gives guns any purpose is more guns, but they take up so much of our worlds energy, time and resources building them, building defenses against them, making laws about them, looking for them, destroying them, building some more...  anyone would be forgiven for thinking they were God himself.

As for legislating about them, I would have to say a government should lead by example, if the country goes along acting like it needs a great big oversized cock extension of an arsenal, how can it tell the average Joe that they shouldn't also have one of these -- it's just hypocritical.

If you reduce the size of the country's weapons development and stock budget, and the propaganda surrounding the need for a massive daily splurge on making guns/missiles and putting people half-baked behind the trigger, people might start waking up to the reality that their territory was breached by a few blokes with $2 boxcutters not 50 million dollar missiles, the big substitute weapons penis is really a big joke. Eventually, lead by a revolution in thinking, maybe people will just stop caring whether or not they have guns at all and we can stop wasting vast amounts of energy debating over it.

Libertarianism is often popular with people who have been lucky economically speaking, or have the benefit of a commerce-related education. They're making money, why can't everybody? If you're making a lot of money, it sucks to give a good chunk of it to the government. But giving the middle class and poor money seems to work out better than bailing out banks.

Not really dumb, considering the implication. Saudi Arabia would be a lot of sand and some guys in tents without oil corporations, so there are subsidies both ways. It's my opinion that in the Libertarian context, a state is just a monopoly corporation that has an agreement with its customers. Since monopolies happen in a free market context, there's no reason to begrudge the state its monopoly on governance. Otherwise, we're objecting to monopolies, and we'd need some kind of anti-trust group to rein those in. But I would imagine that would be part of a state.

Here, the Libertarian objection is understandable, though. When someone is demanding my money based completely on precedent and monopoly status, it feels like a violation. There is, however, a path to freedom: one may remove one's self from the country and seek a country less enthusiastic about taking one's money. You would, in a market framework, be in the market for a new monopoly corporation. As with a corporation, you just buy the products of a totally different state.

I hope so. With Marx's work, which frames capitalism as exploitation, and someone like von Mises, who frames the state as exploitation, I'd hope that we'd all get together and realize that we're talking about the same perfectionistic tendency applied to a dynamic that cannot by its very nature be perfected. Instead of saying "state" and "corporation", we might understand that we're discussing groups of people who congeal with a loose goal in mind. Every attempt at a group will have obvious flaws and inefficiencies in achieving its stated goals (Communism decries the ripping off of the working class, and Libertarianism the ripping off of the economically astute). That doesn't mean that we can't use the Libertarian and Communist ideals, since both are valid critiques. But they're ideals. As such, they're not going to be achieved in some pure and supreme organization of humans.

Well no, I was only thinking of one right at the time the right to an equally weighted vote on whose interests are served, and in what sort of measure, by the leviathan actions of the ruling class. Now I know in real life state systems an equally weighted vote is not exactly guaranteed but it is at least implied, which is just not the case with a predominantly capitalist run society at all. For the poor and working class (and what I think some libertarians fail to notice is that they exist because they are essential to a working society not because they're too lazy or disinterested to become wealthy) having any right to input into major decisions regarding the society they live in would be like wishing you could vote in another country.

Also, yes, I know that libertarians want a limited, not absent, state establishment, it's just that corporate policy is such a powerful and diverse ruler over a societies interests that every time you say, 'well with a limited government you fix that' there's yet another corporate strength to rein in -- on and on until the state gets big enough that it's a roughly equally mixed economy anyway.

You're close I think. 

The central difference in my mind between myself and a libertarian is that I don't think a mixed market should favour either of free enterprise or state governance at all, whereas generally a libertarian sees the free market as being "as good a place to start as any". 

Neither free enterprise nor state control, in my estimation, are any kind of ideal of universally upholding people's liberties and rights; however since I'm essentially at a loss as to what serious alternative to bring to the table it is trusting in the principle foundation of democratic state which gets the temporary pass from me.

ah, but necessary, necessary.  this is where so many people jump the gun and misunderstand marx.  marx's view of capitalism wasn't fundamentally polemical, despite his more than occassional use of caustic rhetoric (engels tended to be more tempered).  marx viewed capitalism as a necessary stage of human development, but harmful when prolonged unnaturally.  marx, in fact, states quite clearly in many places that socialism can never be achieved without developed capitalism.  this is why, in marxist terms, leninism did not work and the soviet union was doomed to failure (of course, this wasn't the whole story).  this is also why lenin was forced to fall back on NEP.

if marx was fundamentally polemical against anybody, it wasn't capitalists but wishy-washy liberals like proudhon.  in fact, marx was strongly influenced both by stalwart reactionaries like maistre and saint-simon and bourgeois economists like ricardo.  he just took the opposite side of the dialectic.

not just von mises.  also marx, engels, and lenin.

quite right.  i've always hoped that those passages where marx most approaches idealism were whims of fancy and revolutionary zeal.

No, a rabid libertarian would say no help for the poor and those that can't compete in a free market economy. I'm in favor of doing what works, not handing out welfare checks and free services in the name of compassion. This method doesn't work. So stop living in fantasyland that it could ever lead to anything but poverty, bankrupt governments and class warfare.

You can't deny that free market capitalism brings the most advanced technology, the best consumer products(for those who can afford them) and good jobs( for those with the right skills). The computer and Internet technology you are using now could not have been developed under a socialist or communist system. Socialism/communism eventually brings poverty to everyone.

I agree with the people that say capitalism is a flawed system. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water or in this case the goose that lays the golden eggs. Keep what's right about capitalism in giving people a motive to work hard, start new businesses and invest. Fix the problem of some people not having anything to contribute.

I would argue that the communists and socialist are more of anarchist than I could ever dream of being. Social order is maintained by having people work for their wealth. Anarchy would be to steal all wealth and just distribute it according to the demands of violent, angry mobs.

The more you understand the leftists, it is just people that expect life to be handed to them on a silver platter. Angry, lazy and jealous people that don't want to pay their dues to become successful. Whining has become their drug of choice.

well, what i understand marx to mean is that only capitalism could bring humanity to the next level of development, first with division of labor and then with advances in machinery.  without the competitive drive to maximize surplus value and surplus labor time, these developments never would have happened.  however, marx believed that capitalism could not continue indefinitely without a. the increasing concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands, and b. the decreasing standards of living for the worker.  this would result in more and more economic crises of increasing frequency and severity.  this is the point where it becomes "prolonged unnaturally" (that term was my own).

now, in the developed countries of the world, history has not borne this out.  marx did not foresee, for example, the rise of small shareholders and the effectiveness of the labor union movement in increasing quality of life for workers.  marx, as is frequently pointed out, also did not see the rise of the tertiary economy, intellectual property, and the need for more and more skilled workers.

however, not every economy in the world can be tertiary, as long as 6.8 billion people and growing need food, clothes, and shelter.  this is why the buck for unskilled labor has been passed to the third world, and this is where the main repository of the world's proletariat lies.  this situation will never change until the day when, star trek like, we can just say, "computer, one pot roast."

lenin is a favorite target of revisionist history these days, which is fine and all, but usually the revisionist books tell you nothing new, since lenin and trotsky were both very frank about the dictatorship of the proletariat.  they just go over the old ground and repackage it as something shocking.  historical perspective is important.  russia was a hell of a mess in 1917 and, contrary to what a lot of revisionists like to say, i don't think kerensky would have been able to bring enlightened bourgeois liberalism there.  russia historically just isn't an enlightened, liberal sort of place.  yeltsin tried it and look how long that lasted.  now we have tanks in red square again.

lenin's centralization was due mostly to the immediate needs of the civil war.  to his credit, he was very pragmatic in instituting NEP after the war ended, which relaxed things considerably--not to the degree of britain or the US, certainly, but russia was neither britain nor the US.

i don't think a careful examination of lenin's life bears out that he was a powermonger.  the bolshevik party as a whole, perhaps, was a powermongering party, but it was possible to argue with lenin, and even defeat one of his motions, without losing your home or family or life.  trotsky's autobiography is full of examples of heated and public arguments he had with lenin, both abroad and in sovnarkom.  in fact, lenin initially insisted that trotsky, rather than he, be the chairman of sovnarkom.

well, don't speak too fast.  marx was definitely a revolutionary, albeit not a "professional" one.  he just didn't get any opportunities.

it's not at all difficult, though at times a bit lonely.  there aren't many people in the world anymore who are willing to read marx and marxists without a prejudiced eye.  one of my biggest arguments is always that the modern european social state owes as much, and probably more, to marx than the soviet union or china, even if you don't find his face plastered everywhere.  it's important to note that one of the most censored, edited writers in the soviet union was always marx himself.

marx did not consider himself a prophet, and altered his position throughout his life.  i think, if he were alive today, he would be writing mostly on the question of the third world, but we can only guess at what solutions he would offer.  still, some marxist constants would no doubt remain: 1. the revolution must be international in character and program, and 2. the developed countries must lead.  if we accept these constants as truly marxist, then it's easy to see why stalinism and marxism have little in common.

well, both marx and lenin were theoretically opposed to statism.  they believed that the bureaucracy was a tool of bourgeois interests; that the state apparatus and its accompanying police force were tools in the hands of rothschilds and morgans.  lenin writes extensively on the dictatorship of the proletariat (marx only wrote on it in passing) and sees its function as using centralized powers to nationalize the means of production and stamp out counterrevolutionary elements.  after this work had been completed, the state would "wither away" (both marx's and lenin's terminology) and leave the means of production in the direct control of self-managing workers.  government at this point would be at the commune level and mostly for the purpose of setting goals.  even a police force would be unnecessary, as the people would admonish each other.  admittedly, both marx and lenin are hazy on this, and i find that most modern marxists, even if they are dialectical materialists, are usually more concerned with applying marx's criticisms of capitalism than his visions of the communist future.

while i'm largely unfamiliar with von mises' theories on the state, it's my understanding that he was against statism for the opposite reason: that it puts a check on personal gain and private property.  marx believed that the state actually safeguarded the "rights" of private property for the richest of the capitalists.   

Yes it does work, EXC. You are very wrong on this matter, I live in a probably one of the most far left leaning countries in the world and I have seen that good welfare systems have excellent outcomes. There are systemic problems with how welfare systems are handled, and often that comes down to attitudes like yours; people that believe helping someone out is 'bad for them', basically. That sort of thinking clogs up socially responsible systems and blocks them doing good necessary work on the socio-economic state. At any rate, serious failures of welfare generally come down to withholding aid rather than giving it (see New Orleans).

Moreover, to try another tack, if you're so for personal liberty why do you care so much about dictating what is good or bad for some other person, doesn't that make you a hypocrite? Consider, if you've "made it" in a capitalist society then you and several others own basically everything there is to own and I doubt you're thinking seriously about parting with much of it in the future, so what does that leave for the up and coming, then? When claim is already laid to most everything that is less liberty for others to lay claim, that is the simple fact of it  and there's no getting around it. The logical conclusion of a capitalist libertarian ideal is that the rabid libertarians, when all other injustices are abolished, become the last bastion of violating anothers liberty.

But there's hope, still. You might come instead to realise that healthy socio-economic system across the board is in your interest, (personally, I just don't know how anyone can not see that already). I mean, you want good services? right? When you take your car in for new tyres, do you or do you not want the resident minimum wage earning trainee tyre-fitter to be at the most top of his game that he can be Or would you rather he be dangerously distracted by the toothache, injury or illness he simply cannot afford to fix, the rent he can't pay, the disdain that you represent to his minimum wage-earning because everyone must start out kicking the shit for someone arse. . Think about that for a little bit you're talking about people who polish the floors you walk on, make the coffee and burgers you consume, service the sewerage pipes that you absolutely cannot live comfortably without.

Thankyou, iwbiek, coming from you, that is obviously a compliment.

Seriously, though, I dabble, rather than dip, in economic theory and I don't always agree with the usual interpretations of leftist theory. For example, I don't agree with something I've read of a Marxist idea -- that value is a product of labour time. Although I do agree that value is a product in and of itself, ie it is not synonymous with money, I think value is a complex product of labour intensity, skill and environmental forces so even if you hold labour time constant, value can fluctuate wildly in a dynamic system. And the distribution of money drives all three arms of this fluctuation (as I attempted to demonstrate to EXC in the last post) so it's easy to see that qualitative enhancement underpins the justification for socialism.

Morevover since the dogma of unlimited quantitative growth has become a burden these days, I fail to see how every free thinking person isn't seriously tabling socialism. I can see why people brainwashed by remnant "red plague" propaganda aren't considering the merits of the left, but the well informed I just shake my head at and think what more could they possibly need?

At any rate, I think my approach might have been a little too soft for Rosa and my first love of course is physical theory rather than economics, so I guess I'm a little more a Marie Curie but possibly, maybe I was related to Rosa Luxemburg in some other life,

well, i've never really pinned you as a marxist, i just wanted to applaud your monologue. 

you're absolutely right, and marx talks just as much about labor conditions as he does labor time.  that's why he split the working day into necessary labor time, i.e., the time necessary for the value created by the worker to equal his total wages for the working day (the time necessary to sustain the worker), and surplus labor time, i.e., the time during which the value created by the worker is nothing but capital, either necessary capital for maintaining or replacing the instruments of labor or pure profit.  of course, the capitalist wants to minimize the necessary labor time and, since he cannot prolong the working day indefinitely, this provides the impetus for developing machinery.  also, marx was well aware that the worker fatigues and runs down after a time, which is also why the capitalist wants to create better and better machines to take out the human element as much as possible. 

marx definitely took labor intensity and skill into account, but, like most 19th century thinkers, he wasn't very concerned with the environment.  for example, it's clear from his writings that marx never dreamed that resources like fuel could ever run out.  now we know better.

it does indeed.  marx clearly found money absurd but was wise enough to know that humanity was too deep into the system to be weaned off it immediately.  in fact, a strong currency was yet another one of his requirements for building socialism (and yet another one the russians were unable to meet).

hey, all i'm saying is you could have given the same monologue you threw at exc at any manchester picket line in the early 20th century and it would have gone over very well.

actually, now that i think about it, i am completely uninformed about the history of the labor struggle in australia.  was there ever such an upheaval there as there was in europe and the states?

I'm not against helping people. In most cases I don't think the government does enough to help people. They hand out welfare on a permanent basis which is just treating the symptoms and not fixing the underlying cause. I'm only against systems that amount to paying people not to work. In the case of New Orleans, aid should be given on a temporary basis as part of a national social contract.

But why did NO disaster happen? Generations of poverty where the only federal aid was some welfare checks and food stamps instead of training people how properly build and maintain levees.

When have I dictated what choices a person should make? I believe in make your own bed and lie in it. If you can't afford a bed, society can help you on a short term basis get a bed then own it for yourself.

When you have socialism, you effectively dictate the choices people should make in life. The lefties here all want whatever medical services are available to be paid to everyone no matter what choices people make with life. So then we must have a huge percentage of GDP going to the medical industry. So people don't have other options available to do with their money as they please.

Life is a series trade-offs. You have social programs that amount to paying for inefficiency and restrict everyone's liberties.

Why can't everyone "make it"? Why can't we have an education/rehabilitation system that enables everyone that wants to "make it" make it? And accept the fact that some people choose to be poor, rather than make the sacrifices to not be poor? A lot of the rich give it away, to start universities, charities, etc... or start new businesses that employ people. Even if they go out an buy a yachts and mansions, they employ a lot of blue color works that would otherwise be poor without a job.

In the case of public safety, the government has a strict role to play in regulating the quality of the work. We need to have work rules for Airline pilots, Train engineers and mechanics. So if the government did it's role, you wouldn't have workers producing shoddy products that endanger safety. The businesses  that have safety problems would be fined/sued/shut down, they are committing fraud. So they would need to do whatever it take to fix their safety problems. The consumer would pay a tax to make sure the products they use are safe.

With socialism, few people would want to be a tire fitter. The lefties here think you get basically the same pay/benefits no matter your career choice. So why be a tyre fitter if you can choose an easier profession and get the same guaranteed pay/benefits?

I would like the tyre fitter to have apprenticed in his field before he became one. Minimum wage/benefit laws may prevent this from occurring. I would like him to use the most advance technology to make sure the tire is safe. Businesses and engineers that could develop this technology simple are not going to develop this if income is taxed at 60% or more as in Denmark.

Basically your argument boils down to the governments suck at regulating business when it comes to public safety, so instead fixing this problem, we should create inefficiency in the market and reward people for NOT becoming productive.

And if you set the minimum wage/benefits at a high level, low skill people will be priced out of the market. Their jobs will be automated away or shipped overseas.

I don't have disdain for any workers, except union people that use violent threats to intimidate business owners.

I think you are enamored with being compassionate rather than excepting how the world really works and working withing those restraints.

i thought i might quote a couple passages to flesh out marx's idea of determining value a little more, if you're interested.  both passages come from vol. 1 of capital.  the first comes from chapter 1, section 1, and it explains how a commodity's value is determined by the amount of basic human labor incorporated in it.  it's useful to note that marx was well aware of the qualitative differences between skilled and unskilled labor, but for the purposes of determining value, he reduces skilled labor to a larger quantity of unskilled labor.  i'm quoting from the 1887 english translation by moore and aveling, which is in the public domain.

now the second passage fleshes out how the value of labor-power is determined.  it's taken from chapter 6.  labor-power, of course, is nothing more than another commodity, but it is the only commodity capable of spontaneously producing surplus-value.

whether you agree with his analysis or not, i hope you can at least see that marx wasn't simplistic.

It's like a sports league. The government should be essentially the referee. Setting the rules for fair competition and making sure they are enforced. Now some libertarians would say let's not have rules or referees, so cheating takes place. The lefties would say in the 4th quarter if one team is ahead to forget what happened before, let's make the score even. So no one has an incentive to play the game to succeed. The game(economy) sucks because no one has much motivation.

I failed to make my point I'm not libertarian, I'm a rationalist. I'm hoping as part of move toward rationalism, we can not only dump religion but also political philosophies that don't work. Jefferson understood how an individual life and society must be structured: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness. It's like building a house the foundation must be the things necessary for survival. You can't make these things a right, they must be created though work and innovation. It's ridiculous to make a law they everyone must have food, shelter, medical, etc... because they only happen  though work not by having government pass laws.

Then when people have enough to survive and they are granted liberty, they can pursue their own happiness and make their own choices and trade-offs that is not dictated by any government.

The libertarians fail because they put liberty above life. The lefties are worse because they put the pursuit of happiness above all else. They think you can make whatever irresponsible choices you wish and it's up to government to always bail you out.

No you essentiall want to guarantee everyone can have a living wage no matter what bad choices they make.

Iwbeck admitted during the Soviet Union they had severe shortages of tractors, ie. tractor designers and mechanics. I don't know much about the history of the CCCP, but I'll make a wild guess and say they never had a shortage of musician and artists.

You're a woman, who would you rather date a musician or dirty tyre fitter mechanic, if they both made the same and had the same benefits? If you mess with the free market by guaranteeing pay and benefits for everyone, you will have severe shortages in the most vital occupations.

You want to have very little difference between the net pay of skilled workers and unskilled workers. So what's one's incentive to become a skilled worker? Why pay a fortune for college, if it doesn't pay off?

I agree on help for temporary basis. I actually think they don't do enough for displaced workers. If a person asks for government assistance, they should evaluated by a social worker, psychologist and educator that will put the person in a program to quickly enable them to be self sufficient. But the lefties just want to pay people not to work, a recipe for everyone living in poverty.

if you can't spell my screen name right, at least use copy and paste.  there's no fucking "c" in there.

sorry, exc, but "i.e." are not magic letters that make bullshit true.  do some fucking research for once in your fucking life before you make a fucking reference to a country you admittedly know fuck-all about.  there were plenty of capable designers and mechanics in the soviet union, you numbnuts, especially considering how late in the game the soviet union was industrialized (and many western historians who are unsympathetic to bolshevism, among them sheila fitzpatrick, admit that russia's rapid industrialization could never have happened under a liberal bourgeois government).  when you do see pictures of soviet tractors, they're not john deeres.  they're soviet tractors.  the problem was a shortage of resources, due to the blockade by the capitalist countries.

do us all a favor: don't make wild guesses.  the technical institutes in the soviet union and the eastern bloc were always crowded and the humanities got a firm back-seat under stalinist regimes.  i've met more mechanically self-reliant people in the czech republic, slovakia, and the former yugoslavia than in either the usa or western europe.

of course there were artists and musicians in the soviet union, but life wasn't easy for them.  if they bothered to go public with their work at all, they risked censorship and possible incarceration.  whether they did or didn't, it amounted to little more than a hobby for most of them.  if they didn't do their work--whether it was industrial, agricultural, or bureaucratic--they didn't get a welfare check.  they got thrown into prison or a labor camp.  it was a criminal offense to be unemployed in a stalinist country.

Another thing that hasn't been pointed out is that having a social welfare system is cheaper in the long run than an extreme lacking in social welfare system like EXC wants. As has been said before, most people if they can't get a job they're willing to do that pays enough to live on aren't going to sit back and starve - and that goes double if they have family to take care of. They're going to get it another way - whether that's selling drugs, theft/robbery or whatever. Besides the costs to individuals/businesses the crime itself costs, more crime means more police will be needed. The trials will mean more prosecuting attorneys and public defenders needed - all cost tax money. More people will get jury duty - disrupting their lives and costing them and/or their employers money. Then once they go to prison - do you know it would be cheaper to pay someone more than what the average person makes in a year than to keep them in prison for a year? If they have kids, the kids will need to be taken care of by the system - more money - unless you're heartless enough to have them cast into the street to starve (which wouldn't actually surprise me now. ) Anyway, having social welfare systems is better than nt having them in the long run.

Actually a tire mechanic is likely to make more than a "musician. " Unless the musician is both talented and lucky enough to get a record contract, he's going to be poor - playing in bars doesn't pay much - though his income likely depends on his day job. If it's the type of guy who plays music but doesn't get any deals and smokes pot all day, he's going to have little or no money. The tire mechanic may get dirty at work but may also make a decent income. By the way, when I was working at the corrections center - many of the guys who never worked a day in their life and were in and out of prison had girlfriends - sometimes more than one. Often the girlfriend sent them money to buy shit.

Come on, EXC. You clearly insulted mechanics and women with your remark. The criteria by which most women decide who is good to date is largely unknown to men, and probably doesn't involve income too much. Implying that Eloise is a gold digger is particularly mean thing to do. I agree with iwbiek that you would be getting an ass kicking if you made remarks like that in public. This is why I called you 'rabid' earlier. You show up in threads and troll us with comments like what I quoted above.

My objection is that the justification given for socialism is the the wide disparity in wealth. The poor have to work their ass off to pay interest to rich lenders that just sit on their ass and collect interest. So why do we subsidise banks with bailouts and other subsidies? When the government borrows money to pay for socialist programs doesn't this just increase interest payments that must be paid back to the rich?

The other problem is when people do get into a financial pinch, they go to payday advance centers or borrow on their credit cards a ridiculous rates. Why not have a social services program that actually fixes their low income and high spending problems? Minimum wage and payouts are not solving the underlying problem of low productivity and living beyond one's means.

Nothing is inevitable if we can understand how things work and apply a rational solution to a given situation. One could have said in the past "It is inevitable that man could never fly". But rational thinking people decided to study how flight works, come up with theories on how flight could be achieved, modify their theories though experiment and study. Then man could fly. Unfortunately the same process has not been applied to economics or politics.

Unfortunately, most people pick their politics and economics based on what is "fair" or what makes them feel that they "care" rather than what works based on how the universe really operates. That why politicians pretty much operate like preachers.

OK, then what's wrong with distributing the wealth to the people who provide the best products and services to consumers?

I agree the military has become too over bloated. DARPA is one of the few parts that has delivered value to taxpayers. The military has become has become much like the education system, more concerned with protecting it's members jobs than delivering value to the taxpayers. But still it is money that is better spent than giving it to people so they can not work, not develop a skill, breed like rabbits and buy drugs with the money.

It's a disincentive to become a productive worker. So you just get more people with not the right skills to meet the demands of the market. Over time it snowballs, you pay for low productivity, you get more low productive unskilled workers. Subsidising low skilled workers instead of fixing the problem is not the solution.

It's not usually used as investment. It like when you have money you could spend it on partying or make and investment. Taxes could be justified to invest infrastructure. Like if you're country wants to be a leader in IT technology, they could build a fiber optic network and trained unskilled people to be network administrators. Socialism usually ends up being paying people not to work, subsidising people so they have no incentive to get skills that meet the demands of the market.

If the person paying the taxes receive a net benefit in return. But if this is the case, why not privatize the service?

If you have a financial deficit, yes you can borrow money to temporarily alleviate the problem. That's what the government's been doing for the last 30 years. Encouraging easy credit and living beyond one's means. The latest economic crisis is just the chickens coming home to roost. Living beyond one means or having one group of people subsidise another can not be sustained over time.

Great if it works, I'll help support it. Just show me the data that it works.

There really should be no need for these angry political/economic discussions. We're supposed to be rational people, that are skeptical of claims. We have a method though observation and analysis to evaluate the validity of claims.

Now the communists make a claim about their way is best. We've seen the economic collapse of the CCCP and Fidel's Island paradise, which should make us even more skeptical. So, now they claim if a few things were different it would be worker's paradise. But we must have a world wide revolt where all the business owners and investors are killed or imprisoned and their property stolen. Why can't the Commies just form a small community where they demonstrate what a paradise the world would be under the right implementation of Marxism? Then we could evaluate the economic data and the wealth and quality of life to decide if Marxism would work on a larger scale. But they find it necessary to have a violent revolution because they are so irrational. Just like Al-Queda can't convice us that Allah is great through a rational process, so it is necessary to have a worldwide violent revolution to force Islam on us all.

The socialist from Denmark claims their way is best. Now their may be some good things about the system. I think high level of investments can be justified if their is a net benefit to the people making the investments. But they tax work at 60% level so these workers are paying way more than the benefit they receive. You can just work at a low paying job and get about the same benefits/quality of life. So I'm am highly skeptical that wealth producing businesses and workers will want to stay in Denmark. But let's see if the system can be sustained over time. I'll change my position if the data shows otherwise.

The theists claim that prayer works. They could easily do double blind studies to prove to us that their is a God that answers prayers. But they don't want to have a rational process to evaluate claims.

The RRS endorses Obama even though half the time he talks like the Messiah the other half like a preacher with his "hope". He makes claims about all the giveaways he can provide to people and give a check to everyone under $250K. Where is the skepticism like there is with religious claims? Let's put him to the test and the RRS members that think wealth redistribution with no strings attached can work.

Then great. All the people that feel like you can tell the government not to take your money in taxes. You'll spend it on the charity you choose. I'll spend it on the charity I choose. What's wrong with that?

So, if the benefits where privatized, you'd still pay then right? Why can't you privatize all these benefits? I don't feel that I do get a return on investment when I pay taxes. So I'd rather only pay for something that is an actual investment or benefit.

I actually think governments don't do enough to help people with socialist programs. You just pass out money to people who can't pay. You don't evaluate their individual situation through a social worker and fix the problem. It's like a doctor that doesn't evaluate the patient and develop a plan to cure the problem. Social programs now just pass out welfare checks as a pain killer. Socialism, welfare and communism are the opiates of the masses.

It's like going to a doctor with a broken leg. The doctor just gives you crutches to hobble around on the rest of your life instead of setting and healing the leg. That minimum wage, you can be subsides from 18 till you die. Your problem of low wages is never solved. Same thing with food stamps and income tax redistribution. I'm not against crutches for a short time but most social programs amount to letting people hobble around on crutches their whole lives.

Please tell me you're kidding, EXC. You don't believe what's coming out of your own mouth here, surely?