I'm ready for class war. Bring on the socialism!

Great Debates
1

I’m coming out of the closet finally. No more pretending to be reasonable and moderate. I don’t really care if you disagree, but you should probably know what your political opponents are thinking, so if you’re a gun-toting Ayn Rand reading bible thumping inheritance recipient, listen up.

If you did not earn your money, I want the government to take it from you. This includes everyone whose parents bought their university acceptance slips, anyone who inherited a bunch of money, anyone who gouged the price of a commodity, almost everyone who got rich through a lawsuit, ambulance chasing lawyers, and a million fat corporate executives.

I want to take away your guns.

I want your religions to lose any government protection. I want your religions out of my schools. I want your religions out of my courts and out of my government policy. Ultimately, I think it would be best if everyone simultaneously agreed that worshiping spirits is ridiculous, but since we haven’t found a way to cure stupid I realize it’s impossible.

I want every government restriction on unions gone. Organized labor has been consistently opposed by every administration since the inception of unions. Workers and company owners need each other equally, but without organized labor the workers can not bargain on equal footing. I want company executive salary to be tied to a multiple of the pay their workers get. Money is power. The the more money you have, the more power you have to take even more, until almost all of the power is held by a very small number of people, who are acting in their own interests with complete disregard for anything else. This is unacceptable and not reconcilable with a just society.

I want gays to marry.

I want any kind of government censorship abolished.

I want the size of the military budget reduced to less than 10% of what it is now. I want mandatory impeachment for any president who wants to invade another country, where he states under oath exactly what his reasons are for the invasion. If investigation finds these reasons to be untrue, the president should go to jail. You better be damned sure of your intelligence reports and motivations before you send a bunch of 19 year old kids to die, and kill a bunch of civilians.

I want all recreational drugs legalized, and regulated by the FDA. Let medical experts decide whether a substance is too dangerous to consume, instead of politicians and churches.

I want the USA to disarm its nuclear arsenal first. All of it, without any conditions.

I want nuclear power plants everywhere.

I want free health care.

I want nationally accredited private schools gone.

I want free college tuition everywhere, where your acceptance to a particular school is based only on your academic qualifications.

I want any executive who accepts a performance bonus from a failing company that laid off workers to go to jail.

And I want a pony. I’m more likely to get all of the above than I am to get the pony.

2

I’m thinking of becoming a Kerry liberal. that means my rich ass wife will only pay 12% in taxes and I’ll just pay whatever floats my boat.

3

So you want to completely annihilate the concept of charity, and deny parents the right to spend their money to help their children, as well as giving yourself the power to bankrupt anyone you personally decide “did not earn [their] money”?

You should have put this step first, before your attempt to perform the largest theft in recorded history.

Even with unions you can’t legitimately bargain on equal footing, unless you are contributing something that your employer cannot do without. Your other alternative is to be deliberately disruptive, which is not a legitimate tactic.

No, what you want is health care and college tuition funded by taking money from innocent bystanders.

At least some of your desires have merit.

4

You might as well just drop a nuclear fucking bomb on America and save yourself all the work, because I can’t see the country continuing to exist under the conditions you’ve proposed. All I can say is, I’m damn glad that you’re not in charge of America.

5

I don’t want the government deciding the best health care options for my family and me. I can do it just fine on my own.

6

So you want a country that is completely unable to defend itself where all the entrepeneurs leave to start businesses elsewhere huh?

7

Daddypants You don’t get to choose your healthcare options as it is now.

8

You most certainly do get to choose your healthcare options now. I know first hand, I was taken to a hospital for (relatively emergency) surgery on a shrapnel inflicted injury to my left index finger, which required surgery to heal.

I was given a plethora of options on where, and how I wanted the surgery, once they made sure I wasn’t going to die from blood loss or infection. That seems like options to me.

One of three, does that count?

Does this include Land? Or Homes? Or property of any sort?

Can I get around this by purchasing 300,000 acres of land in Nebraska and giving that to my kids? I don’t know how much 300,000 acres of land runs, but it’s probably more than I can afford, better to make it 3 acres of land… :stuck_out_tongue:

Why? Because guns kill people? You want to deprive people of a right, a liberty, a freedom, because of what? What’s your motivation here?

Disagreed. Freedom of religion is directly dependent on Freedom of Speech & Press. Removing the protections of religion is going to infringe on freedoms of press & speech.

I want religions out of schools that receive public funding. I don’t give a damn what you do with private schools.

Agreed.

One can believe in the divine without being stupid, it’s incredibly arrogant and self centered to believe otherwise. Despite the fact that I agree with you.

I’m ‘meh’ on labor unions. I think they need restrictions, because they have a tendency to leech and leech and leech. Unions were far more important when we didn’t have OSHA.

I don’t want them to marry. I want them to have the right to get married. But I don’t understand why you’d want anyone to get married.

Yeah. Me too.

I think that the Military Budget should probably be more like 50-80% of what it is now… but then again, I think that the total budget should be like 50% of what it is now, with the majority of Federal Programs deferred to State Level.

Why? Because the USA has such a history of launching them unprovoked?

Fuck it, keep the nukes.

I’d prefer only to have them where needed, and to use other forms of renewable energy where it’s possible.

And I want a million dollars, however in the real world we have to work on restraints of what is and is not feasible. There’s no such thing as ‘free.’ Someone has to pay for it, and someone has to administrate it.

I want the freedom to administrate my own health care, even if it requires I have to pay for it.

Why? Because six of the best doctors in the country shouldn’t be able to get together and say ‘Hey, lets teach other people what we know!’?

You’re forgetting the part where there’s no such things as free, aren’t you?

C’mon, man. You should have the intelligence to see that free doesn’t exist. All things much be payed for. If you’re not paying for it, someone else is. And I don’t want to have to pay for you to do anything.
You don’t want people having money they haven’t earned, right? But you’re okay with them getting goods/services they haven’t earned?

9

Mosier, how quaint for you to think that your list wil solve even one of the problems you think they will. You have, from your OP, nothing even remotely closely related to something even close to the ballpark of an clue as to what class war is.

It means bombings, and general disruption of normal live, it means lawlessness, it means others (not you) will decide how those “fantastic” rules you mention apply (and belive me they will also apply to you in ways you can’t imagine), it means untold suffering by the poorest in society, it means human rights go on a Sabbatical, it means you replace a bunch of “fatcats” with a new bunch, it means living in constant fear as to wether tomorrow there’ll be electricity, running water or a functioning police force.

Only someone with the ignorant arrogance* of being able to say these things on the internet can actually think that your list has any practical application in real life. Class war is nor a game, is not about being moderate or radical or progressive; it is death and destruction. Lucky for you that you haven’t seen what happens. I have, I have recieved death threats in my house (due to my dad’s job) by the same group who had already killed 2 or 3 guys in similar positions.

You sound like the guys who hit a homerun against a top pitcher when he was in high school, still thinking that you can beat him.

10

If a person is a recipient of a welfare check, food stamps, Pell Grant for college, medicaid & medicare reimbursement, Federal hardship money from a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina… then he didn’t earn the money either. Therefore, all that money should be taken away too (to be consistent with your proposal). That’s an interesting infinite loop you’ve constructed!

This is not true and has never been true. Owners can replace workers with other workers (outsource, offshore, temporary contractors, or robots via technology.) Employees can’t replace owners. Employees can’t even create a company without owners. See any state government website for the legal paperwork to form a company, LLC, or partnership. Download the PDFs and notice that all the forms require names & addresses of the owners and not the employees. I have no idea why people don’t understand this very basic fact. I guess it’s because 99% of the people have never “formed” a company! Therefore, their ignorance deludes themselves into thinking that employees are equal to owners or that <gasp> they’re actually more important than the owners.

There is one way that employees are “equal” to owners… and it’s the way that actually matters: the employees are free to strike out on their own and form their very own company! All the USA states do no discriminate employees from becoming owners. To ask for “equality” in an employee-to-owner relationship is upside-down-retarded thinking. Your “equality” lies with the state government that grants you a charter to create your very own company. Your equality is not with the owner. It never was and never should be.

I think it has already been established that everyone on the planet wants free health care. Even libertarians would want free health care. What nobody has figured out is how to fund it in a sustainable way to provide services for everyone. Even Sweden, Britain, Germany haven’t done this.

11

Oh, and people shouldn’t be allowed to own guns, especially because the supreme court ruled that you don’t have a right to be protected by the police.

12

Not free health care but single payer that is attempting to supply health care ,not in the business of denying health care. When you get greater profits though denying ,you have a systematic flaw that can not be fixed. Our system is broken.

13

Here are the OP’s positions that I would have to hear a lot more about before I would consider agreeing with them:

Mosier, you seem to think that the rightness of these positions is self-evident. I assure you they are not. You seem to want a world where no one is allowed to excel, apparently because that might give them too much power over others. I frankly don’t find that sort of world very appealing.

You’ve said what you want; now if you ever want to attain these supposed ideals, you’d better start explaining how they are going to benefit the rest of us.

14

Its both heartening and refreshing to have someone sanely offer a political stance more radical than mine own, it makes me feel all centrist. Which I feel about as often as I feel fabulous. A few kindly meant words of demur…

First off, its less about beginning a class war to win, as ending a class war we’ve largely lost. And its about values, to some degree. So long as relative poverty is ameliorated, so long as the least of us have decent housing, health care, education, etc. then I don’t really care if someone can buy more loud, shiny crap than I. Much good may it do them. It is far, far more important to *provide for *than to take from.

Forget it. Ain’t worth it. The entrenched fanaticism over gun ownership makes this fight not worth having. You see it here, one of the great bastions of sanity on the intertubes. Reasonable, rational folks (for the most part), until you talk about guns, then they have a sphincter seizure that constipates them for a week. Pick your battles.

As above. Vast numbers of our fellows seek a spiritual orientation, some accomodation should be made. Clearly, though, freedom from religion must be as fundmental as freedom of religion. But we can find a muddle way.

Pretty near, save that all institutions of power must be closely watched. let the fate of the Teamsters Union be a stern warning to us all.

Well, duh.

Double duh.

Sympathize with the motive, uncertain as to the numbers. Agreed that it is wildly overfunded, but need at least some notion of what is to be done with hundreds of thousands of honorable soldiers we would render redundant, we must build “off ramps” to ensure a fair and just position in our society for those who have been schooled in skills we would prefer they never practice.

Far out.

Not yet. Alas, but not yet. We cannot simply become the Amish of the world. The most important part of that is to lend assurance that other nations need not beggar themselves to produce these horrors to protect themselves from us.

May yet prove to be necessary, but I frankly doubt it. Lets see what we can do first.

(I skipped some of the easy ones…)

Too complicated. Better to change the attitudes that make such odious behavior possible, acceptable, and desireable.

15

Funny how few of your proposals have anything to do with socialism or class warfare. Or rather, most of your proposals the rich and powerful would gladly agree with. You somehow have the idea the wealthy elites who run this country are also ignorant bible-thumping hicks who love censorship and guns and hate fags and marijuana and nuclear power and government spending. Uh huh. It ain’t so.

So most of your proposals are class warfare in that they are not popular among the masses. You aren’t going to build a mass movement for socialism among the working classes if your mass movement is against religion, family, guns, and so on. Do you want the support of blue collar workers or not? Which is more important? Socialism or the culture wars?

If you want a socialist movement you’ll have to ditch all that stuff about hating Jesus and guns and soldiers. Or, if you want a progessive social movement you’ll have to ditch all that stuff about socialism. The elites aren’t in favor of deregulation and reduced government spending, they love regulation and government spending, because they control the regulations and spending. The first thing a rich businessman does when he makes enough money through free market capitalism is call up his congressman to see if there’s a way use the government to stop anyone from competing against him. Big business hates the free market.

16

I don’t think the the wealthy overlords are also ignorant hicks, but the two groups have formed a political alliance and each is working to further the agenda of the other.

I think the most important issue I mentioned is for the working classes to take power from the wealthy elite. The other issues, while important, are not as urgently necessary as this.

Clearly not, as you can tell by who they give their campaign donations to.

You don’t have to choose between a society which is not particularly religious and a society more socialist than our own. Almost every nation with citizens who enjoy a higher quality life than ours is both more socialist and less religious than ours.

17

I can choose my doctor, my specialist, my hospital and my course of treatment. The last major event I had (kidney stones) involved an emergency room visit with X-rays followed up by an MRI. When the pain killers didn’t work I was given options of different meds to try and after 2 weeks the surgeon gave me the option of having them removed which I chose. I weighed my continued suffering against additional cost and spent the money. 2 weeks, no bullshit, no waiting. DONE.

18

Even as a not-quite-raving lefty, I fear your neutered, namby-pamby America. I’m especially confused as to how anybody makes or keeps their money in this magically sucky America: not only can you not pass down wealth you’ve earned to members of your family, but you can’t, say, sue an asbestos peddler for poisoning you and forcing you into an mesothelioma-laden early retirement.

And the “religion is for morons” comment is, as gingerly noted upthread, ignorant at best.

19

How quaint that you feel the OP is unironically using the term “class warfare” to refer to progressive taxes and policy. It is not the radicals in the left that came up with this term to refer to civic processes rather than violence: it is the right that came up with the term to confuse people such as yourself by painting all of the advocates of these policies with condoning or even heartily encouraging violence to achieve these solutions, rather than a few violent-prone underground fronts. I read the OP as saying “sure, if you wanna CALL this class warfar, it’s no so bad by me!”

Or perhaps you are saying that the targets of some of the actions proposed in the OP (some of which are admittedly ill-advised,) would not submit peacefully to these restrictions, and incite violence on their own, such as many cases in South and Central America, in which case you are right, class warfare by legislation is often destruction – by the ruling class, that is.

20

Sure, it’s self-evident that siimply ***reading ***Ayn Rand is a heinous crime. :rolleyes: