I wasn’t saying that co-ops couldn’t succeed, just that their small share of the market meant that they were generally less likely to succeed than profit-driven companies. Again, the beautiful thing is that a free market allows for both employee-owned and privately owned companies–if co-ops are better, then no action is needed and they’ll succeed on their own.
I don’t really know enough about British politics to discuss this, but I was trying to give examples of specific things Naomi Klein supports, not just nationalizing energy.
But instead of looking at a poor proxy for pollution that is largely influenced by the size and development of a country, we can just look at measures of pollution directly.A measure of air pollution by particulates lists Bangladesh, Nepal, China, Pakistan, India, Laos, Bhutan, Myanmar, Vietnam, and the DRoC as the worst polluters. These countries don’t seem to be socialist so much as united by a lack of rule of law… so I guess the point’s a wash.
The companies I mentioned don’t have that small a share of the market in the UK; John Lewis is the third biggest company in the country and the co-op has more supermarkets than any other chain. The UK and US economies are not so different that they can’t be compared.
Of course, both those companies are profit-driven. That’s not usually against the rules for co-ops.
The article you cited talked about British people supporting renationalising energy companies, not just Naomi Klein, and incorrectly took that to mean renationalising oil companies.
Depends on the form of socialism. Stalin’s motto was, “The law should be phrased so that anyone can be arrested at any time.” Another was, “If a man is giving you a problem, remember, no man, no problem.” That’s not what we usually mean by “rule of law.”
I get where you’re going with this. I would never try to claim that the GOP is the better party for the environment. The Democrats are clearly superior in every aspect of that issue.
But since we’re talking about socialism, even the GOP are better stewards of the environment than countries with extensive control of industry. Even where those countries aren’t totalitarian, those who favor government control tend to surrender their ability to change their behavior. Elections tend to be one or the other affairs: You either vote for the party that favors government control of industry or the party that opposes it. That limits your leverage to change the government’s behavior since the only thing you can threaten to do is say, take health care away from them and give it to the private sector. Which 99% of lefties would never do. So they have to just take it as it is.
What you said earlier about government by the people and for the people having a strong incentive to look after the people’s interests is simply not true. It’s not even true in theory. Government’s natural inclination is to serve its own interests. Democracy is superior to dictatorship because the government must serve the people or get fired. But that has never meant it has to serve the people in every detail, because voters don’t fire governments for failures in one area of the vast apparatus. No government has ever been booted from office because the health ministry failed to do its job or the government-run oil company had a bad spill. That’s one of the pernicious problems with Big Government: it removes accountability from elected officials and places it with an unelected bureaucracy which in theory, is supposed to be overseen by the elected officials, but in practice, elected officials are rarely held responsible for their failures in a way that actually matters: by voting them out of office.
The theory of democracy that you cited was only true back when democracy was limited to government insuring liberty and equal application of the laws. Once you start getting into government providing goods and services, then there’s just too much outsourcing going on and no one knows who is responsible for what.
I think we can build a sustainable society, but we need leadership to prepare us for the sacrifices. Democrats favor doing something about climate change, but they don’t prepare Americans for the cost. They sometimes even insist there will be no cost, that there is somehow a free lunch.
Anything worth doing is not cheap. As long as Democrats keep proposing climate change fighting on the cheap, nothing will change. If Naomi Klein wants to see the change she wants, then the Democrats are going to have to be bold and abandon economic growth politics in favor of sustainability politics.
Of course, the odds of that NOT leading to the Democrats getting sent to the toolshed by voters are slim to none.
The problem with this view is that it ignores that the issue should not be a partisan one, after many years of looking at the issue it is very clear that merchants of doubt used a lot of money and influence to make it so.
But even so, a majority of conservative scientists are on the record of the dangers, and then we have conservative economists that already made calculations and most do tell us that the real irresponsible position is to not do anything and then let the USA and most of other nations face even more costs in the future if we just follow the advice of the do noting Republican congress.
Missing the point spectacularly, comparatively speaking the costs of transition do not equal the end of civilization, the real alarmists are indeed the propagandists of the Republican party.
Of course the odds are bad about that because no serious researcher or economist has proposed “to abandon economic growth politics in favor of sustainability politics.”, again, dealing with this issue will not lead to the end of our economic growth. Not dealing with this will most likely lead to monstrous costs that coastal cities will have to face when the oceans rise and that is only one of the most likely costs we would face. Republicans somehow never seem to be able to understand that they are being penny wise, but pound foolish.
Politicians don’t usually lead, they follow. THe public wants economic growth. They want jobs. They want to have more stuff. So the political system, to the extent it is willing to combat climate change, is only willing to do so if it doesn’t reduce growth much. That limits the options considerably. Klein’s book is valuable in that it tries to change minds about what our priorities should be. Politicians aren’t trying to do that. And it’s not just an American problem.
Given today’s technology, cutting emissions by the amount necessary to actually avert disaster would plunge us into deep depression.
So clearly you did not check the links. No surprise here.
Again, not my problem that you are advertising to all that you are not looking at the real costs of not doing anything and how most Republican scientists and economists do not see a reason to follow your alarmist claim here.
Avoidance of what Republican economists and scientists recommend noted again.
And if you want to answer the USA go ahead, but you are only then pushing a humongous contradiction for the simple reason that the Republicans are the ones that want to put a stop to the progress seen. The point remains that the efforts done in the USA are good, but not good enough to be on top of the lists of nations that are actually reducing emissions, Denmark is currently on top with the USA at #44.
As I have pointed many times before, we can still do much better and ensure that in the future we will spend less into saving our coastal cities. Again, I have not even mentioned the other likely costs of not doing enough or little. The point that the current Republicans in congress are Penny wise and Pound foolish stands.