Anyway, isn’t this just the bullshit “Walkaway” movement which was breathlessly promoted by GOPers which didn’t amount to shit, but translated to White Folk?
There was no Democrat party 30 years ago, Republicans have been using that term for like 8 or 10 years, in my experience.
There still isn’t one, but many Republicans have a hard time spelling or pronouncing words correctly, so we shouldn’t be too rough on them about it.
Actually, most Trump voters aren’t working class, and most of the working class aren’t Trump voters.
Old white racists are overwhelmingly Trump voters, but they don’t make up most of the working class.
Hell, I embraced the Democratic Party because of socialism. Can I have some more, please?
The rise of AOC and Sanders in the Democrat party is not an affirmation of Democrat values or platforms on steroids. It’s a repudiation of the tired and failed policies from sexual predators like Biden and Kennedy and Al Franken and Anthony Weiner and Clinton and Harvey Weinstein.
So when Democrats leave over socialism, it’s because they yearn for the status quo and the perks of being able mistreat women and get away with it.
No, when Democrats want those perks, they join the party whose leader explicitly espouses such behavior.
What’s the important difference between “socialism” and the capitalism of the consumer economy? Any capitalist with two brain cells to rub together realizes that a consumer economy without consumers with expendable income is a dead economy. Like the first robin of spring in a snow bank.
So, they know that. And their solution is to scrimp and save on labor cost in the hope that the other guy, their competitor, won’t do that, the other guy will support the economy. And they skim off the cream.
How many times have we seen this in action? GreedCo is in a bit of trouble, stock market-wise. So they bring on a new CEO, who promises to “cut the fat” in labor costs, be “lean and mean”…and the stock price rises on the enthusiasm of the investing class. The labor movement is the second best thing that ever happened to the American economy, the first best was WWII, which we won and everybody else lost.
“Socialism” is a term that belongs to the ages, like Joe Hill songs, Pinkerton strike breakers, labor agitators. I don’t know where progress will end up, what we will call it, but “socialism” belongs to copasetic cats in a zoot suit with a reet pleat and a drape shape. Boodly acky sacky, want some socialism, mama!
“Socialism” means “Someone else is getting something, and I don’t think they deserve it because they are lazy/undeserving/different.”
For some, they don’t like “socialism” because they were completely and individually responsible for their own success, and didn’t rely on ANYone else. Because they were born in an orphanage, and paid for their own schooling (taught themselves to read and write), have never been in a public library, built their own roads to the cabin in the woods that they built themselves out of tools crafted out of sticks. Society has given them NOTHING, so why should they give anything back?
An orphanage?! Paid for with my tax dollars?! This person sounds like a dirty communist.
No, Trump doesn’t espouse that behavior, because if he did, he’d be unfaithful to it.
The difference is that socialism seeks to direct economic behavior from the top down, whereas capitalism is a rules-based system that allows for emergent, bottom up organization. Like every other evolved social species on the planet.
This is truly the fundamental difference between the two. There are degrees of socialism, and degrees of capitalism. But capitalism ultimately requires that the majority of capital be held in the private economy, so that market participants can make economic choices with it.
This is what is wrong with the notion of taxing away ‘the rich’. It moves money out of the private economy and gives control of it to central authorities. And that’s why the damage happens - central authorities simply do not have the information required to make efficient economic decisions. They can’t coordinate economic activity well because they don’t know even remotely all the factors required to do so. Some of that information doesn’t even exist until it emerges as part of the price system due to individuals bidding prices up and down based on their own knowledge, skills, and goals.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the same flaws can’t happen in a capitalist economy. Monopolies, crony capitalists, huge corporations that centralize decision-making… all start to take on aspects of central planning, or allow themselves to be manipulated by central planners so long as they personally profit from it. This is why being pro-market is not the same as being pro-business. Businesses can be corrupt or stupid. Businesses are not always right, or moral. But the market is better at regulating economic activity in a complex economy than anything else we have when it’s functioning correctly.
If the term ‘socialism’ bothers you, we don’t need the term at all. We can simply identify the policies that the ‘socialists’ want. For example, 90% tax brackets on the ‘rich’, or nationalizing the energy infrastructure, or government jobs programs, or whatever. Call it whatever you want, it’s still central planning of the economy to some degree, and the difference between social democrats, socialists and communists is more a matter of how far they want to go than a fundamental difference in thinking.
Demand-side economics is cargo-cult thinking. Look, healthy economies have lots of consumer spending! So if we just artificially goose consumer spending, we too can have a healthy economy! I remember a city, I think it was Chicago or Philadelphia, which found that the cities that had a vibrant business class tended to have large business centers catering to them. So they thought, “If we build a large business center, we too can have a vibrant business class!” It didn’t occur to them that business centers emerge from the needs of a vibrant business class. They don’t cause it. But hey, it allowed them to ‘do something’ about all those businesses driven away by high taxes, corruption, and over-regulation.
This is the modern equivalent of a south-sea islander noticing that metal birds came and landed and brought lots of good things after people leveled the ground and put weird things on their heads and talked into strange discs. So, they built runways and made headphones out of coconuts and built bamboo airplanes to sit beside the runway, but what do you know, the metal birds failed to show up. That’s what happens when you get cause and effect backwards, or try to understand and manipulate a complex system from the top down.
An economy isn’t healthy when you stimulate the demand side. It’s not healthy when you stimulate the supply side. A healthy economy is one in which people coordinate their activities efficiently, where capital tends to flow to the most efficient and important uses, where there is a good match between the needs of the consumers and the abilities of producers, etc. In other words, a healthy economy needs a hell of a lot of complex things to be happening correctly, and simply stimulating demand is a silly way to make that happen.
Democrats have taken a very limited aspect of Keynsianism - the need to, on occasion, artificially prop up demand in times of crisis, and turned it into the idea that you can spend your way to riches if you just give lots of money to the people to ‘consume’. Spend more, get more consumption. The economy grows faster. The tax revenue pays for the spending, just like Henry Ford’s raises allowed his employees to buy his cars, paying for their raises. Free lunches everywhere!
The only problem is that it’s horseshit.
So why isn’t their competitor doing that? And if their competitor won’t do that, how are they keeping good people from leaving for their competitor? And how is their competitor staying in business when they are being undercut by the company with the cheap labor? And if the company is making extreme profits by paying less to their workers, why doesn’t some other company eat their lunch and take away their employees by offering a little more to the workers, and still making a good profit?
Answering these questions might give you a little insight into the market and help innoculate you against simplistic thinking about robber barons and dog-eat-dog capitalism and how the workers are completely helpless.
One last thing to think about - Of the 80 million hourly workers in the U.S., only about 550,000 of them make the federal minimum wage, or about .7% of hourly workers. In a world where only the government protects the workers from rapacious capitalists who want to pay the absolute minimum they can for labor, this should not be possible. So how come? And before you say “Unions”, only 6.4% of laborers in the U.S private economy are unionized.
That only happens if the market decides that the reason Greedco is tanking is because it’s paying its labor force too much. It could also be that the company is tanking because it paid its labor force too little, and is now saddled with a sub-par work force and poor products, and the market might cheer ‘investments’ in labor and raises for top performers and all that. In short, your scenario is a ‘just so’ story that fits your narrative, but in the real world it’s not true. Or rather, it’s only true in cases where a too-large or over-paid work force is an identifiable problem in the company.
If labor movements are great for the economy, please explain what happened to Britain between 1950 and 1970. Lots of labor unions, lots of nationalization, lots of taxes, lots of government. And a moribund economy. Heavily unionized coal miners demanded that coal be mined even when it wasn’t profitable to do so. Rolling strikes were commonplace, crippling economic activity. Sky-high taxes drove some of the best and brightest people out of the country. Thatcher was elected because the hard turn to the left Britain undertook after the war turned it from being a major world power into an economic basket case.
Given that Bernie Sanders is a self-described socialist, and three of the newly elected Democrats belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, it seems like the death of socialism has been greatly exaggerated.
Unfortunately.
You just lost your argument right there.
I noticed he is dodging the question. I think this is astroturfing. There’s no such movement.
Bah. I use that and I have been a Democrat longer than you, I will bet. Dont let your opposition choose what you call yourself.
Democrats better get used to the “socialists” because we are the wave of the future. Chicago just elected a mayor who had never held public office, never even run for one, and was considered outside of the powerful “machine” and therefore a longshot, largely due to the support of Democratic Socialists. Lori Lightfoot won in every single voting ward; something no other Chicago mayor has ever done!
And there are 2 city council members who are active members of the Democratic Socialists of America. And several others who might as well be based on their political stance.
The future is here.
mc
Mayor is the kind of position I’d expect to be won by someone who’s never held public office. And what wins votes in Chicago is hardly representative of what will win votes in the country as a whole.
Hey, you got it right once! Big pat on the back for you!
That may be true, but who gets to decide when it’s functioning correctly? If people wait for the people with the wealth and power to make that determination, it might be a long wait. For them, it’s already functioning correctly. Meanwhile, 40% of the population in the US can’t afford a $400 emergency. Some of those people might say it’s not functioning correctly for them.
So the US was socialist between 1951 and 1963 and then changed to capitalist?
Between 1951 and 1963, the highest marginal tax rate was between 91-92%.
Between 1932 and 1981, the highest marginal tax rate in the US was not lower than 60%. On average, it was much higher than 70%.
Reagan cut it down to 50% in the 80’s, and it’s been sliding ever since, adding enormously to wealth inequality for the last 40 years.
AOC’s idea wasn’t new, and it wasn’t radical. Marginal tax rates averaging in excess of 70% have already been done for 50 years in the US. Some of those years were economically expansive years.
This was pointed out [youtube] to Michael Dell by an MIT professor at Davos, at a gathering for the super wealthy. Dell’s argument was that he was capable of making much better philanthropic choices with his money than the government can. The problem with his argument is that he doesn’t have enough money by himself to solve the big problems facing the country.
When people were afraid that their healthcare was going to be taken away, people asked Bill Gates why he didn’t do anything about the healthcare problem in the US. His answer was that he didn’t have enough money to do that. Gates has billions. The healthcare issue requires trillions. It will take more than 1 billionaire to help solve the big problems of the country. It will take a bunch of them pooling their money together to do that. That’s more likely to happen with a tax.
Um, it was doing pretty well?
The problems Britain faced from its competition had more to do with inefficient management and industrial policy than with over-demanding labor:
I really was looking forward to reading this entire thing. Then I came across:
:rolleyes:
Oh well.