Yes, you are right. Mea culpa. And its extra embarrassing for me to make that mistake when I am ranting about how people get the terms confused.
:smack:
But they do have (along we almost all European countries) socialist parties (in fact the horrific attacks by Anders Breivik were targeting the Norwegian socialist party). Those parties are NOT running on platform of abolishing capitalism and democracy and replacing it with a socialist uptopia where the workers control the means of the production. Whether or not 100+ years that was the definition of “socialism”, it certainly isn’t anymore. It is a system of democratic government where the state actively intervenes in the economy to fight inequality by means of social programs paid for by higher taxes.
There have been many periods since the end of WW2, when those socialist parties were in charge of Scandavian countries (and many other Western democracies). Whatever you can say about the success or otherwise of those governments, they DIDN’T abolish fundamental rights and collapse into dictatorship.
There is a fundamental flaw (I would go as far as to say intellectual dishonesty) in the conservative argument against “socialism”. Its that it is perfectly A-OK and freedomtastic for a government to force you to pay taxes for the army, police force, judiciary. But if that govenment forces you to pay taxes for the army, police force, judiciary, AND public healthcare, thats a SOCIALIST DICTATORSHIP, we have NO freedom any more!
I believe there’s this great tool that we as a society can use to deal with those kinds of people. 
But we all live in societies, and our “freedom” is never quite “free” in this sense. Maybe in anarcho-communistic isolated living with no real footprint this makes sense, but in society, every action is largely defined by power structures, and limited by the ownership of others. My freedom to swing my fist is limited by your freedom to have an unpunched face. And it is largely through those types of limitations that we consider ourselves “free” in any meaningful sense. I am undeniably “freer” because of laws that make it illegal to enslave others.
Indeed, the very act of ownership limits the freedoms of others - if there is ripe fruit in my neighbor’s garden but my neighbor is on a 3-month vacation, I am not free to pick the fruit, even if I am starving and it will otherwise go to waste, because he somehow “owns” that tree. I am not free to walk across his property, because he “owns” the land. Whether this construction actually makes sense is a complex topic, but it hardly matters, because in order to uphold this construct, we need laws - a right that is not defended is hardly a right at all, and property rights will not uphold themselves absent people willing to enforce them. (There’s a reason “Property is Theft” is often a socialist rallying cry.)
Wat
Or, to name at least one better alternative, don’t!
…You go looking for an “attack on freedom” and the example you come up with is… public schooling?!
Ugh where do I even start with this? Maybe by pointing out that “do children enjoy X” is a terrible metric for whether we should be forcing them to do that. We force kids to do all kinds of shit they don’t want to do. It’s called parenting. Most kids don’t like to eat their vegetables, or clean their rooms, or do chores, either - are those horrifying attacks on freedom as well? :rolleyes:
Also, please note that some of the problems you list here are primarily problems with American schools. German schools, for example, do not have a problem with security guards clapping kids in irons - what the ever-loving fuck is wrong with your country?! Most German schools put in work to be attractive, and if the classes are uninteresting or dull, maybe a change in curriculum is in order. We also don’t have those traditional ugly school buses - we have a far more active public transportation network; I took the train to class when I was living in Neufahrn, and walked when I went in Mainburg, and our buses are pretty damn nice.
Other problems are problems in any freely social dynamic where people are stuck working together. Bullying exists in schools? Sure! It also exists in workplaces, social groups, clubs, households, and basically anywhere else where people are thrown together, and good schools can and do act against bullying.
And after that, what’s left? Curriculum that students aren’t interested in? Bus rides? Monotonous exercises? These are all problems inherent in any kind of schooling other than homeschooling (which for many simply is not an option, ). Charter schools cannot and do not solve these problems. Even more radical alternatives like Montessori and Waldorf have these problems, and bring their own problems with them.
Meanwhile, y’know what actually limits people’s freedom? Not getting a GED. That seriously limits your options as an adult in a meaningful way. The propagation of general public education has done more to further freedom than any shitty book by Hayek could dream of doing.
Be fair. Some of them are hilarious.
Part of the problem is the negative definition of freedom: freedom just means that you don’t have anyone actively interfering with your plans.
But that’s not really all that important a thing for human happiness. Much happier as freedom defined as the capacity to realize one’s desires.
Capitalism restricts freedom in a really important fashion: it says that you can’t use the materials you need, even if using them is vital to fulfilling your deepest desires (e.g., eating, not dying of disease, etc.). You can’t use them unless someone else–their owner–gives you permission, and they can deny that permission for the most trivial of reasons. And you’ll go to jail if you use those materials without permission.
That’s a serious restriction on freedom.
Socialism also restricts freedom, but it’s a balance: you can’t use those materials without permission, but sometimes the state grants the permission when the owner is being a butt. The owner’s freedom is restricted in a way that heightens the freedom of the non-owner.
Which system is more meaningfully free?
- A child starves on the street because the factory owner refuses to feed the child; or
- A factory owner must relinquish some money, and as a result, the child is able to eat.
I’ll take the freedom in that second system over the first any day.
That’s not “capitalism”; that’s “property.”
Those parties, as far as I know started out as actually socialist or communist a century or so ago. Then, over time they’ve changed or evolved their policies towards what today is known as social democracy. That does not change the meaning of the word socialism. Plenty of political parties have had names that had very little to do with their actual policies.
It is confusing, because there are also smaller parties further to the left that use the term socialist with some more justification in their names. And competing for voters with them may be part of why the major bloc parties retain their old names.
But it doesn’t change the meaning of “socialism” any more than lots of dictators in Africa leading parties or nations calling themselves “democratic” changes the meaning of democracy.
There are still countries out there that are actually socialist. North Korea and Cuba spring to mind.
What you describe is more social democracy, the Nordic Model or even the normal setup of first world nations, depending.
Early 20th Century “socialism” failed because it created a political class that held power of people. The people were trading in one form of oppression - that of private land owners, merchants, industrialists - for another.
Where (some) European governments have succeeded (until recently at least) is in using capitalism (which is a good economic system, but requires that wealth be redistributed so that power doesn’t concentrate into too few hands) to generate wealth and freedom, and also using its tax revenue for the common good. Moreover, they have recognized that redistribution of wealth cannot simply be achieved arbitrarily but rather through the decisions made by a representative government, which can change according to the interests of the people. Public monies derived through taxation are also used to fund public education and other important institutions. When there is balance of power among public and private institutions, and when there is public transparency of government and its relationship with private power, there is generally a higher degree of trust and faith in government. And I’d also assert there’s even a higher degree of trust in private power as well, as people assume that it operates in the common interest by tapping human freedom and brainpower to do good things (like create products and services we can use, and jobs and income we can use to buy things we need, or things we simply want)
In America, private power has become a corrosive force. Not only will it continue to undermine faith and confidence in the government, but it will also weaken faith in the private sector as more and more people take a dim view of the oversized influence it has on public policy and dialogue. All one needs to do is to look at how healthcare is becoming the issue in American politics - mainly because everyone is starting to realize how bad it is. And that’s precisely because of what I alluded to above: the concentration of wealth and power, its tendency to use that wealth as political leverage, and the complete lack of transparency in the system. How much does oxygen cost? How much does a consultation with an anesthesiologist cost? Which EMT is covered by your insurance policy? More importantly…why the hell should we even have to ask these questions? Because there’s no transparency, that’s why. And in economics, markets that are free - truly free - require transparency.
There is a fundamental shift in power taking place in American “democracy” and America’s so-called “market” economy, one in which the ability of interests to use wealth as leverage is more likely to occur than an open, transparent marketplace transaction. That’s not economic freedom. That’s not even freedom. That’s taking a new step each day in the direction of tyranny. And we seem to be waltzing there willingly, knowingly.
Boom. There you go, that’s the distinction socialists are concerned with. There’s a reason FDR’s “four freedoms” include “the freedom from want” and “the freedom from fear”. I don’t care if I’m free to amass 10 million dollars - In practical terms, to me, this is akin to the freedom to sprout wings and fly. I care if I’m free from being hungry and cold at the end of the day.
This gets the relationship backwards. Nordic countries are able to have large governments and high taxes because they are high trust societies. When people pay high taxes they trust that it is being spent well and that those in power are honest. For example insurance fraud in Norway is estimated at 15 million dollars US, while in the US it is estimated at 80 billion dollars a year. That total does not include medicare fraud which is estimated at 60 billion dollars a year. The Nordic countries score the highest for perceived lack of corruption. Another component is cultural Jante law is still around and affects politics in those countries.
Moreover, let’s say a few hundred landowners are “free” to impose perpetual serfdom on tens of thousands of peasants who are technically “free” in the eyes of the law but have no real economic freedom otherwise - what good is freedom, then?
Constitutional “freedom” is meaningless if it lacks safeguards that enable and empower someone to become free by virtue of their own self-determination. As always the question is one over the extent to which the law and institutions should go to ‘protect’ each and every individual.
Should it protect people who are perpetually irresponsible? That’s something over which reasonably minded people can disagree, I suppose.
I have no idea where you get your stats from, but assuming you’re accurately using statistics in the aggregate, then you’ve just undermined your own rebuttal. You’re saying the US has five times the amount of fraud in the aggregate - it has 10-12 times the population.
…do you REALLY think that’s a helpful response?
Because come the fuck on. The privileging of private property rights, along with the concept that these rights should only be altered through a mutual voluntary agreement in the free market, is the cornerstone of capitalism.
Was what I wrote really so unclear to you, or are you bizarrely scoring some sort of pedantic points here?
…but you need to also factor in the percentage of each population that actually has insurance.
80 billion is 5,333 times as much as 15 million. Which means there is about 500 times the amount of insurance fraud per capita in the US.
Yes, yes it was. I admit, I haven’t been following this thread as closely as I might. But when you wrote “Capitalism…” I thought you were going to say something about capitalism. Then you went on to say something that applies to any society in which anyone can own private property; and I thought, “Is he really equating capitalism with property? And thus implying that under any other system, like socialism, no one can own any personal property? If so, then yeah, I can understand why people are so scared of socialism.”
I am not convinced the horse is before the cart here. It may be that a government taxing and spending it well comes before the trust. Also, the histories of the Nordic nations have led to very different attitudes to central government, yet the Nordic model seems to work across all of them despite differences. I also wonder if Germany, Belgium, Austria, Nederland etc are that different ? I suspect trust and good government are more interlinked than a simple “we can’t do that here”
I suspect the fact that the US sluices 18 % of its GDP through a byzantine set of health care providers and insurers with little transparency or predictability nor any standardization beyond a cultural expectation of stratospheric prices has something to do with it. It is just a far more fertile ecosystem for fraud.
The Jante law is a set of attitudes written in the 1930s, describing the attitudes in a very behind-the-times Danish small town. It survives because it has a certain cultural relevance, much like the Flintstones in the US. But you shouldn’t expect it to affect policies any more than Fred Flintstone does.
My bad, I read million and million; you clearly wrote billion.
Going back to this for a moment, there’s little argument from me that there are cultural differences, which means that results will vary from place to place even if you have identical policies. Still, I think the earlier point that I made about transparency stands. But more than that, the bigger point I was getting at - perhaps clumsily - was that the right kind of socialism can promote liberty, just as the wrong kind of capitalism can promote oppression.
Perhaps we have more systemic corruption than Norway because our systems lend themselves more to corruption.
Yes, every society has private property in some form. What distinguishes capitalism, as I said, is the fact that in capitalism, if someone else has some things as their property,
That is decidedly not how property is defined under all systems with private property. Even in our highly capitalist society, you have WillFarnaby et al. freaking out about taxation, because it comprises a government impinging on absolute private property rights. In a lot of societies, including ours, there are limits placed on private property, and others are allowed to use yours without your permission: easements on property, rights to trespass in an emergency, etc.
To the extent that we allow this sort of use of property without permission of the owner, to the extent that we involuntarily transfer property away from the owner in order to help others, we’re already not capitalist.
If you’re not following a thread closely, it may be wise not to engage in one-liner corrections of what others say :).