Which is why European countries have such terribly low GNPs. Oh, wait . . .
The essential Capitalist dogma: If you do not hold down a job or want to hold down a job, then you are lazy and defective.
Naturally, socialism tends to be advocated by those that don’t think it is desirable for humanity to be stuck in a haze of 40 hour work weeks… which makes the nice little Capitalist argument…that people advocate socialism because they are lazy.
It’s kind of nice, define all those who oppose your point of view as lazy and defective, then don’t take any point of views other than yours seriously because they are the POV’s of the lazy and defective. All the while, ignoring data and statistics regarding the productivity and economic strength of highly socialized countries.
For what? So you can continue to say people ought to spend there adult lives working menial jobs at low pay rates, that produce low quality of life? What does this get you? The illusion of personal responsibility? Why does ‘personal responsibility’ in the domain of economics matter?
No, being lazy does not make one socialist. I would say the binding glue, which makes people socialist is the fact they all think they are being suppressed.
If you mean socialized welfare counties which have the free market has their main economic model then I agree. A mixed economy is far superior to a pure socialist or capitalist economy.
I would replace “suppressed” with “exploited” and replace “they all think they are being suppressed” to “they think Capitalism is essentially exploitative”. If we leave it how you have it, then does that mean people in a extremely socialized nation are no longer going to be socialist, because they no longer think they are being “suppressed”. Likewise, it doesn’t account for the Intelligentsia(Marx and more specifically Lenin) advocating a higher quality of life for the proletariat, when they already have a comparatively high quality of life.
The intelligentsia will never support capitalism. Here is a good article why.
cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
Suppressed and exploited are both good words. Many socialists ( it could, in fact be all, whom I have met ) think there is some bigger force, which is trying to keep them down. They do not think that they may be in a menial job because of what they have done. Always, the error is in the system and not with the person in question.
A person in a genuine socialized country, which as far as I understand has not existed may still think they are suppressed. I would argue that socialists in North America and Europe are not suppressed but think they are. Why would it be any different under a socialized nation? Some people may well think they should be in a more demanding job under socialism too. It would be interesting to see if socialists in the US think they are more suppressed then people in Scandinavia. It could well be they don’t think they are suppressed, I don’t know.
This thread is a discussion of which circumstantial ad hominem to label socialism with. Who cares who supports it or why they support it? The questions that matter are if the reasoning is sound, and if it works.
Socialism is a self-destructive system.
What’s the point of working if the government can buy you food, give you healtcare, and give you a place to live at someone else’s expense?
That is based on the notion that the only reason why people work is for the money. While some jobs may require more compensation than others (most modern socialists do agree on a gradation of wager) but overall people want to work and feel productive. Indeed, when you rob people of the potential to become productive is when they become bored and from that boredom you get the creation of alternate economies that are . . . problematic. After all, most criminals aren’t lazy people, they are very motivated people just in all the wrong ways.
You are unwittingly applying a Capitalists paradigm to a socialist system. Food, health care, shelter, are commodities under a Capitalist system, but under a Socialist system they are rights…by virtue of living in a socialist society one has food, health care, and shelter. They are not things that you “buy”. They are not “someone else’s” expense, in the same way that in the United States we don’t consider roads built for a small community built at “someone else’s expense”…Generally, By virtue of living in the United States you have access to adequate transportation infrastructure, even if a relatively small proportion of the population will be using it. The same goes for said necessities of life in a Socialism.
The point being that what is a “government given”, and what is “the expense of others” is a value judgment. Different cultures and ideologies have different value systems, and thus different notions of “government given”. One may think, in a Capitalist system, that one works to ensure the basic necessities of life, and perhaps one would be right that if these were provided for there would be no reason to work. However, a value system and ideology that sees basic necessities as given, provides alternative reasons to work…
I would apply the same argument to Xunzian’s assertion that people want to “feel productive”…They have been raised and taught that productivity is an end in itself…A very bizarre notion if you ask me.
I not sure where you get your socialist ideology from. It isn’t inspired by any socialist thinkers I am familiar with.
To say things actually do function better as monopolies, the Bank of Sweden recently awarded a prize (that many people consider to be the “Nobel Prize” in economics) that detailed areas where market forces are counter-productive. So the blanket statement “monopolies are bad” is naive in the extreme. Take, for example, railroads. A monopoly ensures standardization of track sizes, routes, ect. Now, where you want the small-term benefits of market forces (driving prices down), having a government makes this whole process a good deal smoother since it forces that standardization without sacrificing the local-scale benefits of capitalism.
With violence the example is even more extreme. I have my problems with Weber, but we’ll put those aside for the moment and imagine a situation where the government doesn’t have a monopoly on violence – like in Iraq right now. Or Colombia. Not what I’d call paradise.
Maybe it’s because for the better part of my life I have been raised in a capitalist society, but I do think that universally throughout the world the only reason people work is so that they may make a living out of it, not so much because it gives them character. Sure there is a class that works for plain aesthetic reasons such as philosophers, musicians, sculptors, etc, but they are a very small class. For the most part, people do not work for the sake of working, i.e. most people are not so passionate in what they’re doing that they perceive doing their work as a benefit in of itself.
Besides, as some others here have said, why exactly would anyone want to work 10 hours a day, every day, and in the end reap the produce of only maybe 2-3 hours of their work; the rest of which goes to those to whom shelter, food, etc, are rights, but who do not have the means of getting. I say you leave that as a family affair. Yea, i know…it breaks my heart too when I see a seventy-something granny working at Burger King to pay off her bills, but I’d rather have my metaphorical heart broken and have her working to pay her own bills than my physical self broken so that she may sit around in a house I pay for. I wouldn’t have expected someone aliasing as “nihilistic” to be so sympathetic, so willing to work a little harder, actually, a hell of a lot harder, so that pitifully weak people might be guaranteed the right to live off his work as you wouldn’t be.
If I personally had a choice, I’d definitely live in a socialist society, but that’s because I have no private property to lose, and I am more than willing to not work and reap the produce of others…I’m special in that sense, for sure.
What is the motivation to work harder in a socialist society? What is the motivation to do better? The realistic answer is a whip or a gulag, but that’s not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is a realistic argument for altruism, which is the only thing that will redeem socialism in my eyes, and make at least me seem like a psychopathic, non-sympathetic, asshole.
See, that just confuses me. Most people I know are motivated self-starters that work because they want to. Sure, they need to “make a living” as well, but that is an aside as opposed to the primary purpose. Even my buddy who skipped the whole “college” thing and works as a clerk at a convenience store takes pride in his work. I figure you support people as best you can to let them do their thing, and try to provide peripheral benefits to those who perform highly necessary tasks like doctors and garbage men.
As for the working 10 hour days to only reap the benefit of 2-3 hours, that is precisely the problem with the capitalist paradigm. Since workers don’t actually own their means of production, there is a massive loss of efficiency. When the workers own the means of production, those 10 hours are a lot more meaningful.
Most Capitalists are in favor of the government providing these things.
That cannot be the only reason. Many billionaires are still working hard, Richard Branson etc… I doubt they do it for the money.
There is nothing to stop a union or a group of people, consumers etc… from setting up their own socialist company.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group
Both socialism and capitalism have their faults. They are not the only solutions though.
It’s a tacit assumption…
See scholarship during and just after the Russian revolution, when the intelligentsia are trying to devise a theoretical method for distributing goods.
Tortoise
What the government/society can rightfully claim a monopoly over, is a matter of culture and social value. The Government/society can rightfully claim a monopoly over anything the societies values allow it to.
It is within the realm of utility that I would disagree with your assertion. One is useful (has utility) insofar as they are productive. You know, that whole material dialectic.
This reminds me of productivity under Stalin. He initiated a system where everyone would produce as much as they could in whatever they were producing. He also made it so that people were trained specialists in one specific field, and encouraged innovation to increase productivity. His plan worked, productivity went up, but it was not useful…Why? Because certain sectors of the economy went up 10 fold in production, while others went up little to none. So the USSR had a gain in productivity, but it was done in such a way that it didn’t really help get necessary goods to the people. It was not organized…a 10 fold increase in production of A, that requires B to create C, means nothing if production of B is still at it’s normal capacity.
The point being, that high productivity of a useless item is just as worthless as low productivity of a useless item.
Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind next time I go to buy flatware, and have choose from 20 different styles from 7 different companies.
Yes, productivity for productivity’s own sake is missing the point though. It is productivity for the sake of social welfare that counts.
Yes in a democratic state. Why can it not?