[QUOTE=Liberal]
I would just like to make it clear for any future discussions that when I use the term “socialism”, I mean “government ownership of the means of production”. I see the term being bandied about for things like medicare, when that is actually a form of wealth redistribution. Socialists may or may not redistribute wealth.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you. Socialism is essentially about production, not distribution.
[QUOTE=cricetus]
I can’t believe anyone cares enough what he thinks enough to pit him for it.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t really care what DeLay thinks, I just hate this kind of mischaracterization and I’m trying to drag the goalposts – and the 50-yard line – in American political discourse to where they belong, i.e., where they are in the rest of the industrial democracies, where anybody who characterized Clinton or Obama or Edwards or even Kucinich as a “socialist,” let alone a “Marxist,” would be laughed out of the room.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
You wrote
if you are saying that anyone advocating anything that you would call socialistic (which seems to be anything less than a totally free market) might be called a socialist - depending on the reader, you would need to apply the same insinuation you applied to Clinton to Mitt, Obama, and close to the entire US congress. (Ron Paul might be pure.)
[/quote]
Sure, with the understanding that a fair placement of people along a spectrum where one end is socialism will have Senator Clinton placed closer to that end than Governor Romney… and Rep. Kucinich even closer. At what point along that spectrum one may be CALLED a socialist is not a matter of universal agreement, and as others have pointed out, would vary dramatically depending on what country’s standards were used. But as you hint, almost any national politician would agree to keep Social Security in some form, and it’s a socialistic program as well…
So much equivocatin. Universal Health Care is A SOCIALIST PROGRAM. It’s Socialism, like Social Security, Workman’s Comp, Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment. Quibbling about whether or not it’s socialism is playing into the right wing media hype machine. Implicit in the accusation of it being socialist is that there is something inherently wrong with socialism. Every western nation has socialist safety nets, it’s a matter of how we want to balance them.
Standard operating procedure. To get elected, call the opposition commies. To stay elected, invade a small nation.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
I would just like to make it clear for any future discussions that when I use the term “socialism”, I mean “government ownership of the means of production”. I see the term being bandied about for things like medicare, when that is actually a form of wealth redistribution. Socialists may or may not redistribute wealth.
Philosophically, socialism is based on the principle of denying the validity of property rights. Wealth redistribution is based on the principle of recognizing the validity of coercion in the pursuit of egalitarianism.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you. Well said as usual. The government employing all doctors and owning all hospitals would be socialized medicine. A single payer system with private doctors and private hospitals is not socialized medicine.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Thank you. Well said as usual. The government employing all doctors and owning all hospitals would be socialized medicine. A single payer system with private doctors and private hospitals is not socialized medicine.
[/QUOTE]
And since liberalism, in the classical and worldwide sense, is based on recognition of the validity of property rights, socialism and liberalism are opposite worldviews.
Exalting property rights is as inane as utterly denying them. We are monkeys, John, and monkeys are inherently communal, social animals. Is a tribe “socialistic”, if they lack the vocabularly to express concepts like “ownership of the means of production”? Or are they simply human, in the most unadorned and uncomplicated fashion?
This is the fundamental flaw with abstract constructions of political science, they are contradictory to our natures. Marxism is a hot-house flower, like Objectivism, it is an academic construct that has little relevence to what we really are, it is fragile and must be maintained by force of law. Given our druthers, we gravitate to a muddled mish-mash of sharing and private possession, we admire the entreprenuerial innovator but detest greed, as well we should. Abstract notions of the nature of property are just plain silly.
Well, in a few months, Obama can call DeLay “jailbird”.
And after a few nights in the big house, DeLay will know much more about “assholes” than he ever wanted.
[QUOTE=mswas]
So much equivocatin. Universal Health Care is A SOCIALIST PROGRAM. It’s Socialism, like Social Security, Workman’s Comp, Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment. Quibbling about whether or not it’s socialism is playing into the right wing media hype machine. Implicit in the accusation of it being socialist is that there is something inherently wrong with socialism. Every western nation has socialist safety nets, it’s a matter of how we want to balance them.
[/QUOTE]
Sure it is. Next, you’ll be telling me that state (or federally) owned roads are socialism as well.
[QUOTE=elucidator]
Exalting property rights is as inane as utterly denying them. … Abstract notions of the nature of property are just plain silly.
[/QUOTE]
And yet your own tenets depend on such abstractions as inanity and silliness, not to mention sharing and greed. A man who describes his own worldview as a “muddled mishmash” has no standing, it seems to me, for criticizing people who more precisely define their terms — definitions which you either ignore or do not understand in formulating your objections.
At least it is the case that, in comparing what the world’s greatest philosophers have described to monkeys, you jabber like a monkey. But while you scratch your armpits and sniff your own butt, letting out the occasional witty yelp, other men are doing what men do — formulating ways of looking at the world based on observed principles of actual human behavior.
Inane indeed.
Well, you don’t define your terms so much as let them define you.
[QUOTE=cricetus]
Well, you don’t define your terms so much as let them define you.
[/QUOTE]
Something tells me that **Luc ** will not drop by to chastise you for your abstraction.
Bad cricetus, bad! Go lay down my your water dish!
There. Feel better now?
No. You?
Well, I feel better!
Now, I knew that! Why didn’t I know that I knew it and feel comfortable about it a long time ago?
I’ve known only a handful of people who have lived up to the most liberal labels they have chosen. I admire them, but they are rare in my experience.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
The Ba’ath Party, for example, was socialist in Iraq. But Saddam kept for himself the vast majority of wealth from production. Very little was redistributed.
[/QUOTE]
No. Socialism is about collective ownership of the means of production. Not ownership of the means of production by one person, even if he’s so all powerful he can call himself “the government”.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Well, Godzilla is a lizard. It’s all about bracketing the target. You establish that he’s an asshole, and now we can start discussion on what kind of asshole he is.
[/QUOTE]
Tom DeLay is a spherical asshole. No matter how you look at him, he is still an asshole.
Compared to DeLay, who isn’t a Marxist?
[QUOTE=Guinastasia]
Compared to DeLay, who isn’t a Marxist?
[/QUOTE]
Is Jesse Helms still alive?