Seattle Bubble

Jon - socailism does not equal communism. Your reference to socialism in China and Russia show that you do not understand this point. Communism is a theorical idea of an economy that has evolved past money. China and Russia tried to reach Communism swiftly and failed as a result. Socialism is simply where corporate profits go to the many rather than to the few (i.e. the rich). The real world attempt at this is having those profits go to the government, since the government is a representation for the many.

Communism is simply when socialism is imposed by militaristic expansion. Theoretical communism is of interest only to other communists.

regarding competition, socialism and competition are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A good example is airplane manufacturers. Airbus is owned by many European countries. Boeing you could also argue is subsidized by the USA government through military spending. Both have socialistic tenancies, yet there is still fierce competition among the two to put out a better product than the other.

Another example is schools. Many schools are public, government owned schools, yet they have to compete with other private schools that still exist.

Many of the companies around these days are so large and multinational that it wouldn't much different if they were just multiple governments competing against each other. A world where there was the USA owned auto manufacturer competing against the Japanese owned auto manufacturer competing against the South Korean auto manufacturer competing against a German manufacturer, wouldn't be much different from GM competing against Toyota competing against Kia competing against Volkswagen.

Also, who's to say that one government can't have multiple divisions created to compete against each other, or have municipal governments compete against each other and the federal government.

There are many ways to have socialism while still having competition.

From the perspective of a customer, where transportation and other frictional costs are low, that is true. However, it is much more difficult for a person to move to a different country and culture if that is the only way to change jobs if they have developed industry specific skills. So that means that the company or its government will have monopoly power over those employees. That will inevitably lead to unionization, and that seems to always lead to explicit and implicit work rules that favor clock-punchers and against people who want to work hard and innovate. Unionization also causes wages to be set higher than in a competitive environment (witness Detroit), and that hurts consumers, who then have to struggle to pay the bloated salaries and benefits of people fortunate enough to gain employment in a government protected union shop.

Not only is socialism going strong, the US has been left in the dust by socialist countries. People in those countries have creature comforts galore, plus more vacation than Americans, plus secure retirement, including health care. Communism (akin to slavery in practice) failed in Russia and China, not socialism. Socialist countries are not devoid of capitalism, they are just more socialist than we are.

There are problems with gov't in every country (it's an evolving process), but the problems of our gov't are a lot worse than the problems in most socialist countries. How is it better to be highly innovative and work hard for 30+ years, paying $hundreds monthly for premium health insurance, yet still be able to lose everything, even $millions, if you have a health issue? How is it better for hard workers to pay $thousands annually into a gov't retirement plan, and have that money be routinely raided to shower fat cats with it, so that the workers can't retire? There is relatively little reward for hard work and innovation here in most cases; socialist countries offer a greater reward for that. One can still get rich in those countries too.

If you maintain your own retirement plan, then it won't get raided, except through government action. The only plans being raided are the ones set up through collective bargaining.

As for health costs, the reason they are so high in the US is because the rate of obesity is far higher here than in other countries. So it is our prosperity actually that is causing the problem. It will take some time for people's behavior to change, but all this talk about socializing health care is slowing things down by distracting people from really what needs to be done, which is simply better diet and exercise.

I'm actually not interested in more vacation. With all the people in the world that are living in extremely poor conditions, I really don't think we should be doing even less than we are now.

The US has a gov't retirement plan that workers are required to pay into, called Social Security; it's been raided. Meanwhile France's gov't retirement plan offers a higher standard of living and has not been raided; workers there are retiring on schedule whereas Americans are not. If everyone's retirement plan is solely their own, you likely won't beat inflation without high risk. If you do manage to save enough you'll still have to deal with hordes of beggars & thieves in retirement, those who didn't save enough. Why should I want to work hard enough to save enough to live comfortably into my 90s, when I might live only into my 70s? If I save enough to live into my 90s but then live into my 100s, am I a dumbass for not saving enough? I'd rather have retirement insurance, like a Social Security that actually works.


Obesity is a factor to be sure, but if you take good care of your body you can still be forced into bankruptcy over a health issue despite having premium health insurance and plenty of money. Doctors and hospitals here can charge anything for anything; if it's one of the million things not covered by your insurance then you're on the hook for the whole amount. Will you be scrutinizing the charges when you're unconscious? Our system would be just as broken if Americans weren't obese.


Then you support socialism = more cooperation for the greater good. Capitalism promotes a worse standard of living for the competition (e.g. Nike wants no laws supporting labor at its foreign plants). If everyone gives up their vacations, you'll find that the conditions of the poor remain about the same. That's because poorness is due largely to corruption and/or dictatorship, problems that everyone working more don't solve.

I very much agree. That's why I am so opposed to socialism, because it is so well suited to having a dictator siphoning off the wealth of a nation. If people get to keep what they produce, there is much less opportunity for that kind of theft.

Which of the countries below is not a democracy? People in socialist nations keep more of what they produce than those in more capitalist nations do; that's why they have higher standards of living than Americans.

I can't tell where that data came from, so it is meaningless.

Here is a source that explains it numbers.

http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf

They rank the US as #13. However, if you go to the bottom, you see that the US blows away the other countries except Luxemburg in GDP per capita. Norway is a close third. Canada would probably do well if you restricted it to the population that lived within commuting distance to the US.

The weight assigned to income in that study is 11.5. The life expectancy is given a weight of 15. The US gets a low score there because about 30% of our population is obese, as compared to 10% in most other countries. The divorce rate is given a weight of 14.3, which is a bizarre weight considering how many people do not even get married. And so.

Basically studies like that are nonsense made up by Europeans to get around the plan and simple fact that if you like having stuff, you are better off being in the US.

If you think Americans are better off when they can't retire, whereas Europeans / Australians do & with a decent standard of living to boot, what more can I say? I think a cursory look at the facts shows that more socialism is better. I get a lot more stuff due to socialism in the US, like the books I've borrowed from the library and the national parks I've visited.

While there is a long and rich history of communist dictatorships stealing from the citizenry, the current situation in the world is subtly different. While traditional communist despotisms like N. Korea are still around, perhaps the most terrible places on earth are in excessively capitalistic places like Africa, the slums in the industrializing world, or the ghettos of the first world. These are the places where your ability to get by, with nobody getting your back except informal networks of friends and family (or "friends" and "family"). History appears, to this observer at least, to be teaching that capitalism in the extreme is just as tyrannical as communism.

Also, in case you missed the memo, the United States has been a socialism in the proper since at least the 1930s. Of course, the era between say 1945 and present has been uniformly the most economically repressive era of this nations existence. Right?



So, in other words, there is in fact not that much correlation between how much money you have and how "good" your life is. If I were inclined to argue for socialism, evidence like this is very powerful. It does not support more capitalism unless you believe wealth alone is the most important goal in life. If so, I'm sorry for your dreary (to me) existence.

What that study shows is that if you are willing to pick some non-sensical metrics and factors you can put whichever country you want on the top.

If the residents of a country spend their money on granite counter-tops, then it makes sense to say that capitalism is not worth the problems it brings. In fact, this country is exceptionally generous in its foreign-aid and charitable contributions, both within the country and outside. Europeans doesn't have as much wealth to give from, but within the US, places like Mississippi, which ranks on the par economically with most of Europe, gives a larger percentage of its income.

As for fixing up US ghettos, we spend a huge amount of money there every year, but with little progress to show for it. That's because the problems there are not really monetary. They are caused by the breakdown in family structures that was caused when welfare programs penalized mothers for having a husband.