I love socialism in my township.
I do not want the township run by a private company.
I vote for the trustees who I know personally.
The three trustees maintain the roads.
They manage activity at the recreation hall.
I also love private enterprise in my township.
I know the people who are doing the services and selling the products. I do not want government screwing around there.
Blast away------
what do you mean by “screwing around”? should government not have some regulatory power over businesses? at least the same way it does over individuals?
turtle, your post contains incompatible contradictions like socialism and private enterprise. The only thing you seem to be saying is that you don’t want government “interfering,” whatever that means. You should explain what you mean more clearly.
good point. hard to answer. government can protect but it can favor certain business interests. I would like a level playing field.
oh jonquil you have taken me to task again.
What I am saying is there is a place for socialism
and private enterprise in the same system.
Of course that is what we have now.
I like it to be in balance. Actually this is a stupid thing for me to write about. What I am really pissed off about is government giving to the rich and taking from the poor until we have slaves.
no turtle i think you make an important point - there is room for both socialism and private enterprise in the same system
pragmatism not purism.
It pisses me off too. What’s difficult to take is the way the government gets away with it, particularly when so many criminals are in charge and use government to feather their own nests.
The more you restrict private enterprise the less effective it will be. The incentive that private enterprise is based upon is that of growth and exaggerated reward - without that you lose the incentive, the system dives again and again without ever really taking off.
Likewise, the more you let private enterprise run free, the more it will grow beyond any rational socialist system - diverting all the wealth towards it and away from the socialist system, killing the socialist system.
The two are in direct antagonism, being absolutely mutually incompatible. Pragmatically they cannot exist side by side without compromising each other. This only tends toward a moderating State gaining too much power in trying to match the planned element of the economy with private enterprise, heading towards oppressive measures and bureaucratic nightmares (often confused with Socialism, which is state-less).
Purism is the only way.
Capitalist purism leads to massive inequality, the squandering of human expression for the sake of efficiency and produce, unhealthy speed, competition and exploitation in everything and repeated busts for every boom - devastating everyone, even the rich.
Socialism sacrifices environment-killing speed and human-killing efficiency for appropriate equality/inequality, a reunification of human expression with its social needs as well as individual needs (without taking them to an extreme), and mutually benefitting and securing the future for both the richer and the poorer.
When talking about a pragmatic compromise, it is worth remembering that ILPians (taken as an average sample of the population) tend to favor restrictions of freedom imposed by the free market as opposed to the government.
viewtopic.php?f=37&t=173082&p=2184174
To me, that suggests that we ought be more worried about how the market steals our freedom since we tend to notice it less.
When you picture the government do you picture a specific group of people?
When you picture the free market do you picture a specific group of people?
Is it easier to imagine something stealing your freedoms if you picture it as a specific group of people?
The Government: “Those people are so corrupt!”
The Free Market: “Maybe there’s math problems!”
The idea that the free market would be self regulating and further people’s interests through competition has been a complete oxymoron. Even more crazy is the idea that the free market and the government are now separate entities.
It’s not as if these are the only options.
This favouring only occurs due to what can be seen of the current government/free market balance - and like I said, attempts to compromise between planned and unplanned markets can go two ways and two ways only:
the current way lets loose the unplanned part of the compromise, which comes to dwarf any appropriate planning due to a need to grow. This then necessitates the growth of State moderation to keep up, the State gets too big and ends up too hindering and oppressive. Everyone blames the State along with any planned economics, which is associated with Socialism: Socialism becomes another word for Statism…
(the other form of compromise is no better, to stop unplanned elements of the economy from superceding a reasonably sized State causes them to never get off the ground because won’t be able to grow. Without growth the incentives wouldn’t be high enough, Capitalism would become hindering and would keep dying out - the reverse vulgarisation would take place: Capitalism would be blamed instead).
The whole favour of free market restrictions as opposed to government is simply a reaction to the current compromise.
Other than these two options, there is full-on Capitalism or actual Socialism (that doesn’t require a bloated state). My last post shows the choice to be an obvious one.
I have thought this before - and the same goes for the US Constitution, which has been elevated to an almost deified level. It no longer seems like people are involved with it and this seems to bring out a more favourable reaction amongst people, as opposed to what people think of today’s lawyers…
This would also explain the traditional preference of the commandments of God/gods: such laws had become removed from people, giving a more favourable reaction… until they finally became out-dated.
And the same goes towards scientific laws: they commonly get vulgarised as objective fact as opposed to manmade patterns. Likewise with logic, mathematics etc.
Another thing that free market has on its side is the culture of individualism through its basis in competition.
The Government unites its people against it when it does them wrong - the people know exactly who is directly to blame and they each know they have had the same wrong done to them as everyone else.
Free market perpetrators are scattered all over so nobody is really sure where to direct their frustrations. They communicate with each other through mathematical code, obscure to so many - not all physically meeting up together in special buildings.
So I agree with Xunian’s closing sentiment: “that suggests that we ought be more worried about how the market steals our freedom since we tend to notice it less.”