I don’t think so. Their vision is much more decentralized – no Five-Year Plans or anything like that, no single state bureaucracy managing the national economy. Seems to be more like the original vision of “Soviet Power.” You might remember that – before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, there were already a lot of factory soviets (the word simply means “councils”) – self-organized workers’ committees, entirely independent of management, of government, and of any political party. The Bolsheviks began their revolution with the slogan “All power to the Soviets!” and ended in reducing the soviets to instruments of the party’s rule. The SPUSA would want the soviets or some American equivalent to run factories, etc., for real.
Caveat/disclaimer/apologia: I’m a member of the SPUSA because I wanted some socialist party (an actual party, not a mere educational organization like the DSA) to belong to and the SPUSA seems to me closer than any of the other existing ones to the mainstream tradition of American anti-Soviet democratic socialism. (And because all the few members of it I’ve met so far really impress me as down-to-Earth, smart, and likeable; unlike some really disturbing weirdos I’ve met from Trotskyist or Stalinist parties.) (Hey, stop that snickering!) But that doesn’t necessarily mean I endorse every element of the platform. My own vision for America would be something much more moderate and closer to what is now the mainstream of thought in Europe (or maybe just a little more radical than that). For reference, I once was active in the moderately left-progressive New Party. And if the very ideologically similar Working Families Party or the Vermont Progressive Party were to go national, I would join up.
But, having begun this series of threads to debate how America would be if ruled by any of its actually existing national third parties, I didn’t think it would be fair to frame the debate for this thread in different terms.
A distinction without much difference. Industries would be transfered from their current owners to some other owners and new, private industries would not be able to be formed.
BTW, since there is no reason cooperatives like that can’t operate in our present system, why do you suppose that almost none do? Why do you suppose that all the innovations you are using to post on this message board were developed at private companies or public corporations and none at worker owned cooperatives? Frankly, after hearing your views on this subject I wonder how you can credibly charge someone like Bush with ignoring reality.
I am confused… where in my post (directed towards Evil Captor) did I say that there are (or aren’t) starving people in the US?
I believe, as you seem to indicate, that there are some, but compared to the overall number of poor folks, the numbers are rather low.
The US Government does feed some of the poor. So do private charitable organisations, as well.
My point was that, in the US, there are more than one way to get social improvements done. Grassroots charity and private buisnesses can achieve these things, too.
Mandating things through governmental legislation (especially to the point of nationalising industry and resources, or adopting communes a-la-Stalin) does not seem to me to be the best, quickest, or most efficient means of acheiving a social goal. (Such as stamping out poverty.)
In short, it seemed to me that Evil Captor’s post said “Because there are poor (starving) in the US, Capitalism has proven to be a failure as a socio-economic model.” That’s what I was disagreeing with.
You didn’t, That’s why a said “implicitly”. It’s because you didn’t counter his claim that the US doesn’t feed it’s poor, which I think is the major problem with his statment-- not whether or not the Soviets did. But no big deal. I just wanted you to clarify what you did mean.
Also, did the USSR not have any private charities? They may not have used the term “private”, but surely there was a way for citizens to give money voluntarily to orgnazations that helped feed the poor, even if those organizations were government run, no?
Do you know how much money the evil - ‘profit seeking’ oil industry pours back in terms of investment in R&D, exploration, and infrastructure?
Have a look at table 2 in this PDF cite. From it, we learn that in 2004, the top 9 oil companies earned a cumulative income of 87 billion dollars, on total revenues of 1.2 trillion, or 7% of revenue. And that’s the year when everyone was screaming about ‘excess profits’. In 2002, the industry only made about 4.3% profit. Of that, most is re-invested in exploration, refining, upgrading, etc. The remainder is paid out in the form of dividends to stock holders.
If Chavez is diverting more than 4-10% of his oil revenue into his social programs, he is not reinvesting in his oil infrastructure at the same rate as private firms are. The history of nationalized oil infrastructure is that they generally get plundered in this way - just like politicians who run up huge debts, governments that own major cash cows cannot withstand the urge to spend the money now rather than re-investing in the future.
Really? If there’s no demand for it, how do you determine that there’s a ‘need’ for it? Because you’re smarter than everyone else?
If you can show me that an honest-to-god market failure has occured here, and explain how, I might buy your story. In fact, I’m about to offer you one…
Weren’t you just complaining that there aren’t enough railroads? Has it occured to you that there might not be as much demand for rail because the government built this huge, free highway system? There’s your market failure - you can kill a market for something by using government money to heavily subsidize the alternative. So what do you want to do, create another public works project to build more rails? How are you going to get people to use them? Heavy subsidizing? Taxes on roads? Fiat?
If the railroads aren’t currently running at full capacity, then building more of them is lunacy.
Uh, yes? Why would you assume it wouldn’t have been? There have been private mail carriers since the dawn of communications. They’ve just been held in check by government regulations to protect the government monopoly from competition. So companies like Fed Ex had to build their business models to skirt around prohibited forms of delivery.
If they don’t mind yet, it’s either because they’ve been promised immunity from the confiscation, or they are in bed with the government and expect THEIR business to benefit from the plundering of others.
You seem awfully confident in that, especially since a few people opposed to Chavez have already died under mysterious circumstances. And it’s interesting how you’ll scream and kick about any perceived violations of liberty from Bush, but when Chavez tries to take complete power, eliminate term limits, and stifle the opposition by shutting down their communications, your response is a shrug and a, “hey, Stalin was worse”.
Ah. So as long as you can find someone more despotic than Chavez, he’s A-OK in your book. As for the compensation for expropriating private property, it sure must be nice to decide how much money you’re going to give the with the gun to his head. If Chavez isn’t buying these companies at market value, he’s stealing them, no matter what HE thinks is ‘fair compensation’.
No it didn’t.
Nonsense. The countries that have been quickest to improve their standards of living and working conditions have been the ones that have embraced free trade.
Oh, where id Abe Lincoln get his degree in economics from, again? If you want to go the old historical root, why not check out what the Smoot-Hawley tariff did to help the American people.
Probably like Ontario when the NDP ran it - into the ground. You think Bush’s approval rating was low? At one point, the approval rating for the NDP government in Ontario sank to 6%.
Ontario was in recession, and Rae, like a good socialist, tried to spend his way out of it. The result was huge deficits. Eventually, he had to enact ‘austerity’ measures like forcing every public employee to take 10 days off per year without pay. So the unions hated him for that too.
The Progressive Conservatives were elected in a landslide in the next election.
[url=http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Goldstein_Lorrie/2006/10/22/2095975-sun.htmlHere’s a fun recap of the NDP years in Ontario, for those who have forgotten just how awful they were.
Rae, Btw, was just the kind of socialist this board would love. Rhodes scholar, mild-mannered, big plans to implement socialist policies better and smarter than the people before, modern thinking, lots of diversity in the cabinet, yada yada.
Oh, Lordy. Bob Rae. Because I was laid off from work thanks to his policies, was living in Ontario at the time (barely existing might be a better way to put it), and wasn’t a public sector employee, I ended up taking 365 “Rae Days” without pay in 1991. (In fairness, I was collecting unemployment insurance, but that is a federal program.) Nobody was hiring–they couldn’t afford to.
That was easy. My point wasn’t so much that the average joes in the Soviet Union were on the whole better off than the Soviets – clearly the US middle class was better off than the Soviet middle class – but that the people at the bottom were in respect to homelessness and joblessness. You got a job, a place to live and food to eat by virtue of being a citizen of the Soviet Union. Whereas US capitalists in the 1930s were content to let poor people starve, and modern capitalists are content to let them go homeless and jobless.
The Soviet economy was not nearly as efficient as the capitalist economy, but the people in charge had the WILL to make them go away, and make them go away they did, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say of the current US “leadership.” We could probably solve all these problems without any great dislocation to our economy or our society, if we had the will. The problem is, we don’t. Or, some of us don’t.
My family would be HAPPY to move in with yours, it’ll be a great adventure for all of us! We’ll share and learn something, perhaps have a group hug afterward, maybe even sing Kumbayah!
Seriously, I’m not about to defend a proposal I didn’t make.
If you were politically neutral, as many regular folks are, basically, what was the problem? Only those loud-mouthed folks of the sort who post in political forums on message boards were in jeopardy. Granted, they were in pretty severe jeopardy… But regular criminals wet themselves at the thought of littering in the old Soviet Union.
If you’ll note the little caveat I put in my post about the ones “who survived Stalin” you’ll see that I was talking about the post-Stalin Soviet Union, after Stalin’s mass murders.
Gross inefficiency, I’m down with that. I’m not sure “thuggish” is the right way to describe helping people get food, clothing and shelter, even when it’s done by an authoritarian government.
Historically, charity just hasn’t done much to solve problems like poverty and homelessness. Putting a bandaid on a bump and kissing a patient’s forehead may make a caregiver feel like they’ve done something good, but it rarely does much good when the patient has something like malaria.
Americans are compassionate, sometimes. No doubt about it. but historically, the evidence to support your assertion just isn’t there. Perhaps you have a cite that says otherwise? (BTW, i’m not taking about one-offs like Katrina and the Indonesian Tsunami. I’m talking about persistent social problems like poverty and homelessness.)
Seriously, I think it is bizarre what some folks will wave off or excuse, as long as it’s the “right” ideology. For those who advocate socialism, is it so superior to capitalism in your mind, that ANYTHING is worth enduring in order to establish or maintain it?
Are you maintaining that the excesses of Stalin are somehow part of socialist economics? I’d say the starvation in the US during the Depression was a direct result of free-market capitalism run amok, so I can see how such an assertion might be made. But I’d like to know your reasoning here.
I think it’s even more bizarre the way some folks will make up other folks’ arguments for them, just so they can refute them easily. I think there’s a word for it, even.
The thing about the NDP’s shenanigans in Ontario is that the outcome was so bleemin’ predictable except to ideologues like Bob Rae and his cronies. Take rent control, for instance. How many times have some of us patiently explained that when you fix the price for rent, you get housing shortages? So just for fun, I looked up what happened to housing after Rae instituted his 2.9% rent increase cap. Of course, rental housing came into short supply. Construction virtually halted - for example, despite a vacancy rate of only 1%, in 1997 only 252 rental units were built in Toronto. Homelessness became a big problem. When rent controls were finally eased by the Harris government, 5,162 rental units and 884 townhomes were built in the next two years, and vacancy rates when up to 3.9%, a much more reasonable number.
The Rae government tried the opposite tack in Sarnia - subsidies. Again, Econ 101 would tell you that if you subsidize something, you’ll get more of it. And what happened?
Of course, the NDP has their excuses. It’s not their fault. It’s the evil businessmen, or high interest rates, or the legacy of the last administration, or something. But the thing is, you only need to keep making excuses when you are continually wrong. I was tempted to write that the rent controls caused subsidies even before checking any cites, because I knew what the result had to have been. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t have to parse out special reasons why my belief in how the markets would react this time were wrong, because it wasn’t.
And of course, there are the unintended consequences. For example, the Harris government eased rent controls, but only after a tenant vacated. So what do you think happened? Two things, of course - landlords found excuses to get rid of tenants, and the eviction rates went up. And mobility went down. Hey, if you’re in a rent controlled apartment, and if you leave your next one won’t be rent controlled, are you going to leave? No. So the housing market becomes inefficent, people live where they do not because it’s the best place for them, but because artificial meddling by the government incentivized them to live there. Landlords start evicting people on specious grounds, so you need stiff fines and more policing of landlords. Laws are enacted. Freedom is stifled just a little more.
This is, as Hayek famously described it, the road to serfdom. One law begets another. One intervention in the market requres two more to handle the fallout and unintended consequences. And those laws have their own. Before you know it, you’ve got shabby little bureaucracies all over the place and people need approval from the tissue czar before they can blow their noses.
BTW, what the NDP tried in Ontario was explicitly Keynesian. Rae said, “We can either fight the deficit, or we can fight the recession.” Rather than attack the recession on the supply side by making it easier for businesses to invest, grow, and hire, he tried to stimulate the economy on the demand side, just like the Democrats on this board are always advocating. He raised taxes, and spent the money on social programs and subsidies to the poor and the middle class. The result was a fiscal disaster. And surprise surprise, it turns out that you don’t build wealth by consuming things. You build wealth by getting better at making things. Rae’s policy made it harder for businesses to invest, and easier for people to spend. And then they wondered why their stimulus and enlightened socialism didn’t rocket the province into a new age of egalitarian prosperity…
I can only shudder at the thought of the NDP gaining control over all of Canada.
