That, and I think that healthy collectivism that preserves values individual liberty tends to create a culture of cooperation rather than a society that is predicated on individual competition. If people mature believing that “It’s everyone for himself, and sometimes you have to lie, cheat, and steal to get yours,” then criminal behavior is an inevitable extension of that. On the other hand, if there is faith that the average person is generally going to have access to good healthcare, good housing, good education, and a good standard of living, and that those who power share the values of endowing people with the resources to make that happen, then there’s probably going to be less demand for crime.
Collectivism, in and of itself, isn’t sufficient. You can have unhealthy collectivism that serves a bureaucratic master, which is what communism was, which is what China is even now (to some degree at least). You can have health forms of collectivism and individualism, just as you can have unhealthy forms of each.
Jante law survives because it describes a set of cultural attitudes that influence every aspect of Nordic life. Somewhat less so each year, but it is impossible to understand societies without understanding the cultural norms and mores. Countries such as the northern european countries that have strong norms that are shared by almost everyone can afford bigger governments and more taxes because they know that those in power can be trusted not to waste their tax money and those around them are paying the taxes as well.
Perhaps our political system is trusted less because we have political leaders telling the public that politics is inherently corrupt. Granted, those political leaders generally follow that message up with a call for votes so they can fix the problem. But you have to suspect that some people enter politics because they’re seeking to participate in all the corruption they’ve heard exists. And when they gain office holding that belief, they then make the corruption a reality.
Not even close. I mean, I may be from Norway but I have lived in the US and UK. In many ways the UK have more of the Jante Law than Scandinavia, but only in the middle classes, I’d say. But I think I have a fair insight in the cultural “norms and mores”
And the Jante law was a parody. Even back in the '30s when it was written.
Well, I don’t really think that individuals in Norway pay significantly more taxes than in the US. Higher PPP cost of living maybe, but with higher wages.
But in any case, I am not certain what comes first, good government or trust in governments?
Except it actually does. You have a political philosophy (“socialism”) and “socialist” parties in almost every multi-democracy in the world that self-identify as following that political philosophy and share roughly the same set of policies and ideas for implementing it. Then that set of policies and ideas is the meaning of “socialism”. Any other meaning is, well, meaningless.
Only because (thankfully) that kind of government never became the norm. A democracy means a multi-party representative liberal democracy, as that is what most people mean by democracy (despite the cries of “but its a republic!” by the right in America).
Dictator had a very specific meaning (a temporary leader appointed in time of crisis) that does not apply to those African despots, but it changed and it is perfectly correct to describe them as dictator.
So you are saying that because there are parties called socialist that follow non-socialist policies that changes the meaning of socialist. But there are rulers and nations calling themselves democratic while following non-democratic policies, that does not change the meaning of the word democratic?
Seems arbitrary. I am sure there are a lot of other areas where people call themselves things they are not, in which ones does that change the meaning of the word?
Anyway, when the Danish PM goes out and corrects the US that no, the Nordic Model is not socialist, andproceeds to explain the difference, that is in fact a sign that we do not self-identify as socialist. Observe the total lack of corrections from other parties and governments.
That is of course the main body. There are, as I stated, left wing parties with socialist in the name that actually mean it. They are minor parties that market themselves as left of the main parties though. But these parties would also agree that the Nordic political setup is far from socialist. Its their mission to change it into something that is.
Almost by definition, socialism impedes freedom by taking a certain amount of resources and decision-making away from the people and giving it to a central government with the power to coerce people into doing what it says. That’s the only reason we have government - to force people to do things for the ‘common good’. The more of that you have, the less freedom you will have.
Socialists get around this by re-defining freedom. Hugo Chavez started his reign of stupidity by claiming that everyone had a ‘right’ to a flat screen TV, and so he fixed the prices of them low so that everyone would have the ‘freedom’ to buy a flat screen TV. To give them that freedom, of course, he had to take away the freedom of the people who sell them to set whatever price they want. And so, those people simply refused to sell TV’s at a loss. His reponse to that was to take away even more of their freedom by nationalizing their stores. Then he discovered that the laws of economics cannot be waived away by fiat, so pretty soon no one could buy flat screen TV’s at any price.
He then repeated that mistake and doubled down again, and again. Each intervention was ‘for the people’, but each one made things worse, and led to even more interventions.
In essence, we just finished watching the richest country in South America take a 20 year walk down Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and now they can’t even feed themselves and we have a humanitarian crisis.
This is the real problem with central planning, whether you call it socialism or not. Central planning is not efficient, and it leads to distortions. Central plans fail, and then politicians double down by forcing people to engage when they wouldn’t do so willingly. A law creates an unintended consequence, which leads to more laws to correct the unintended consequences. Those in turn create even more unintended consequences. In a democracy, we manage to limit some of this damage because we can kick out the idiots who made the mess and elect people who promise to undo it, but the mess is still made.
Someone above laughed at public education being an example of how central planning can take your freedom away. I’m willing to bet that person isn’t a mother in an inner city trying her best to get her kid educated.
Those socialist parties with socialist policies are as “non-socialist” as the US democratic system is “non-democratic”. Yes, technically according to the pedantic traditional definition of “democracy” the US is NOT a democracy, but in terms of what the word “democracy” means to most people in the 21st century it absolutely is.
OK, one more time. This is the actual quote of the Danish prime minster which I think sums it up quite well:
*"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy,” Rasmussen said.
“The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish,” *
We generally found that bit to sum it up quite well. We don’t self-identify as socialist, our economies are not socialist, by some measures they are more capitalist than the US. Our policies are not socialist. The traditional meaning of the word is in fact the one that is still in use.
So a flatscreen TV is a stupid thing to have a right to. It’s basically by definition a luxury. In fact, I didn’t quite believe that something this stupid actually happened. And google didn’t quite help me find it. So… source? It’s not super surprising - Venezuela has been a mismanaged chaos of bad ideas for the past decade or so - but it’s also not emblematic of what most of us propose und “socialism”. Here’s a hint - if your example of “socialism” has tried to shut down labor unions, it’s got fuck-all to do with the socialism I’m interested in. From that article:
This is how the libertarian socialist principle works: It does not celebrate increases in government power for their own sake, it celebrates meaningful popular participation. For example, Noam Chomsky praised the social programs and poverty reductions under Chavez, but sharply criticized Chavez for his “assault on democracy” when he concentrated executive power and imprisoned an oppositional jurist. Chomsky extended this criticism further as Nicolas Maduro further eroded the country’s democracy and plunged the country into an economic nightmare. This is what humane socialists do: If a government is introducing literacy programs and opening free clinics, we can praise it, but if it is imprisoning dissidents and squandering its revenue on solid-gold toilet fixtures, we will condemn it with full force.
So yeah, a luxury good? Bad idea. But let’s take an entirely different case. Medicine! In the US, there is very little socialized health care. Health care largely follows the market. In the UK, it is centrally planned by government institutions, with strict controls on what drug companies can and cannot do (for example, a drug company cannot buy the exclusive patent to a drug, then crank up the prices).
And anyone who wants to tell me that I’m somehow “more free” in the former system than in the latter is out of their goddamn minds. Sure, I’m more free to die of treatable illnesses, and I’m more free to go bankrupt trying to afford treatment, but those freedoms fucking suck and nobody wants them.
Hell, we saw this exact dynamic with Obamacare. People were stuck in jobs they didn’t really need or want because those jobs offered them healthcare that they could not realistically get any other way. Obamacare’s regulations gave those people more options. It made them more free, because they could get insurance that they previously could not have gotten.
Freedom is not merely a question of “I can do X in theory and the state won’t stop me”. It’s also a matter of what we can realistically do. If I constantly have that fear of losing my health care hanging over my head, I’m not really “free” to leave my job, am I? Your conception of freedom ignores a great many situations where you may not be coerced by the government, but you are very much coerced by non-state actors and by the society you’re surrounded with. Some of those make sense (“I’m not going to be friends with you if you keep being a fucking Nazi.”); others do not (“You will keep working for your abusive boss in piss-poor conditions or you will starve in the street and die of a treatable disease”) and can be addressed - in fact, many other countries have already addressed them. The USA has addressed some of them, such as the “freedom” to end up destitute in old age.
Also, let’s be clear. If your first and only example surrounding how bad “socialism” is is Venezuela, you might as well just bring up communist Russia and save us the trouble. None of the policies democratic socialists are proposing look anything like that.
Um… Not “someone”. All of us. Like, almost every single one of us. Because it’s a joke. It’s not worth taking seriously. It’s the kind of issue where Libertarianism reveals itself as less of a rational political ideology and more of an insane cult that exists largely for the sake of the super-rich. “Let’s do away with public education” isn’t an idea worth taking seriously, it’s grounds for laughing someone out of the room, and/or taking up arms against them if they’re in a position of power.
Hey buddy - take away public education, and what does that kid’s education look like? Does their mother teach them? No, she’s busy working, she doesn’t have time to also be a full-time teacher, nor does she have the education to do so. Will some charity spring in to do that work? Maybe a private school will pop up, which will be very lovely for the child to gaze longingly at because there’s no way in hell he can afford it. Why yes, many inner-city schools are kinda shite (neoliberalism probably takes some of the blame for that) - but a poor education is a hell of a lot better than no education.
Seriously, this shit is bananas. Public education has some problems. Some of them are fixable, at least in theory, and I welcome commonsense reforms like starting school later or doing more to encourage kids to exercise. But none of the problems in public education are fixed by simply doing away with public education. They’re just made worse. You wanna talk about freedom? Let’s talk about the freedom of people who are fucking illiterate.
@Monstro - I can see your point, but I don’t recall anyone making the direct correlation. I think the formula is, capitalism creates freedom. Socialism is not capitalism. Therefore, socialism is wrong. Then they pass the defense budget, paying for this massive armed commune - The United States Military. (What galled me when I was in was I had to pay income tax, so I was technically paying from my salary into my own salary. There’s you some capitalistic logic.)
Capitalism is a partisan subject, not for those who espouse freedom, but for capitalists and those who wish to suck up to capitalist thinking they’ll get some reward for it. All the truisms and facts of capitalism (markets go UP then DOWN then UP then DOWN) were created and propagated by capitalists. In fact, capitalism so permeates the United States, so-called schools of economics won’t recognize as valid any other form of organizing an economy, even though they’ve never bothered to consider the subject seriously.
Capitalists think there’s just their system and communism…or DO they? (Socialism is communism light.) Economists who say that can be found working as consultants for pay to capitalists… Capitalists are disqualified from discussing alternatives to their economic paradigm. They’re the epitome of the vested interest. Their objectivity is non-existent. I never listen to them, and I don’t feel obliged to answer to them. (The nerve!) Capitalism, after all, is a cult. We never try to reason with cultists. We just try to get them help.
Note that you attempt to equate “personal property” and “private property” which is a bit of confusion. Far leftists, especially but definitely not exclusively anarcho-communist types, make a distinction between the two.
Personal property is like… your hair brush, your family heirlooms, your bed, your room, and so on. No reasonable system really has any desire to infringe upon that*.
Private property is when people own things that others need to work or make goods, largely the “means/factors of production”. Especially when they’re not using them themselves. Basically anything used in the production of “goods and services” as they’d say. This can have some overlap with personal property, for instance, a landlord (esp. a non-tenant landlord) is using a home as private property, not personal property. The idea of a lot of far-left systems is to abolish this kind of property and establish them as common resources – that is, you have the common land (for both farming and leisure), common factories, common roads that people work on to produce things in their trade or they need to live, but all your stuff like your TV, your lamp, your engagement ring etc are still yours.
There is some conversion between the two. For instance, giving homeless people houses a landlord once owned but used as an Air BnB location is in effect, turning the private property of the landlord into the personal property of the person given it.
Note that there is some gray area here, for instance your home PC is arguably sort of a weirdo hybrid of the two if you’re also a freelance programmer, but most leftists likely wouldn’t want to take that away from anyone. They may advocate having sort of a “common office” with “common computers”, sort of like library PCs but usable for more technical work, but it’s such a far off idea those little details are not as widely discussed of a topic.
There is, of course, some taking of personal property in cases of extreme hoarding. For instance, redistributing absurd amounts of land, even if someone’s mansion is on it, or redistributing food that’s hoarded all the food to the point the rest of the community is starving. Obviously there’s a lot of wealth hoarding and such that can take the form of personal property, but the idea is that once you get “settled into” the system, people only need to intervene in extreme circumstances like some douche grabbing all the crops from the common farm and hoarding them all in his cellar.
Arguments about the definition of socialism are irrelevant. The very people in the US who say that socialism restricts freedom consider the proposals made in the OP as socialist. Thus, by their own definition, there are socialist policies which do not restrict freedom.
I’m pretty sure that what happened in the US is that stuff like this was successfully branded as socialist, so those for these programs decided not to fight it any more and try to reclaim the term. “Okay, so it’s socialist. How does that make it bad?” They’re getting things that people actually want labeled as “socialist,” in a long term strategy to break the hold that the term has on us.
As for the substance of the OP: yes, all of those things described do inherently increase freedom. No value can work on an individual level, or else you could have one single person free to do whatever they want and hurt and enslave everyone else, and that would be freedom.
Increasing freedom inherently must mean giving as much freedom as possible to the largest number of people while still maintaining an actual society. That’s even the goal of libertarianism.
The problem with libertarianism just how the concepts don’t work. Weakening the government means that those who have money become even more powerful, and having others who are more powerful than you restricts people’s freedom. What is necessary is a people that is strong enough to fight back against those with money–and the way we get that power is by forming a democratic government.
Granted, creating a government that can’t be exploited by those with money, giving them more power than everyone else, is a hard problem. And we’ve not completely succeeded anywhere. Still, the closer we get, the more freedom people have.
Ultimately, the only restrictions on freedom are those which restrict the freedom of others. In that respect, libertarianism is right. Right goals, wrong way to achieve them. At least, when it’s not being exploited by those who know it would only make them more powerful at the expense of others.
They are only irrelevant if you are going to use your own definition, as many seem to be doing, of what socialism is or isn’t. If you define the term to mean what you want it to mean, then it’s unsurprising that this makes it increase, decrease or remain the same wrt ‘freedom’, which you are also defining. Hell, if we are all going to define terms as we wish then even I could win a debate…from time to time…
I mean, arguments about what socialism and communism actually look like and how to transition were happening as far back as Marx and Bakunin, if not earlier. (Granted some of those arguments conceded both things were Socialism but one was a dumb idea). Socialism doesn’t have a rock solid description of a single, unique system. I would argue that Social Democracy does not meaningfully meet the few criteria we have for socialism, but yet people use one for the other anyway so…