Capitalism vs Socialism

It doesn’t make any system look good or bad because it’s all over the place. It makes one scratch his head and ask “what does it mean, if anything?”

If you call Saudi Arabia socialist, then you are tossing away a key concept of socialism which is that “the people” have the political power.

What you are really saying is that any government that spends a lot of money is socialist.

Apple / lack of apple.

Didn’t you post at least two examples of capitalists who want their taxes raised? (I forget which thread it was in.)
I think that KT spent several pages discussing gov spending and regulation with you. No need for me to repeat it.

That’s why the power has to be in the hands of “the people” instead of the despot. Socialists understand.

I did. I looked up the report. Fortunately you did not need to plot Saudi Arabia on the graph, (or China or Singapore). Freedom scores : Finland 100, Saudi Arabia 7.

That was my lame attempt to move the conversation on to something more productive … if we want freedom, what exactly do we want to be happening? What kind of compromises are acceptable or unacceptable? What are the biggest threats to freedom?

Ok, that might be better, but it seems to me you still should measure the actual freedoms. Harder to get a number, sure, but a vastly better measure. I think his ’ they are all over the place’ is a good argument against it. And to demonstrate that it’s true, you are going to have to figure out the level of freedom directly. I mean, the speed that crickets chirp in the evening in different countries might correlate with freedom somehow, but might as well measure freedom, as well as you can. And yes, I can see where gdp percentages might have more easily argued correlations, but then perhaps humans somehow affect cricket chirping or their spending does, lol. It seems like the kind of statistic that will be used to draw poor conclusions whereas measuring actual freedoms gets you down to the core more directly. Of course there will be controversy and one will have to weigh different freedoms against each other when ranking, but that’s a good debate. One worth having.
I wonder how the USSR and communist China in, say the 70s would have done on that scale. I am guessing that public spending was very high and freedoms rather low.

I think that says more about you than the research.

Good point! That’s true, but in this case socialism is a function of government spending and not the extent to which the people have control over the government. I can’t think of a way to quantify democracy. Can you? I’ll be more than happy to research it if you can.

Yes, government spending is an attribute of socialism. Just like democracy is an attribute of socialism. Saudi Arabia has a lot of government spending and large welfare, but the people have no control over government. So on one hand it seems socialistic, but on the other not. But at the end of the day, the money is being spread around to the people and that has to be considered socialism. In Egypt, the money is not spread to the people and the people have no control over their government, so Egypt is anti-socialistic.

Now you got it!

Buffett and Gates and the Patriotic Millionaires are crusading to raise their own taxes, and they have capitalized off a capitalist system, but Buffett said if he ran for president, his campaign would look a lot like Bernie’s. He advocates taking care of the population that made him rich. He thinks the burden of government spending should be on his shoulders and not those of the lower classes. Buffett supported Hillary for president (because he didn’t think Bernie had a chance of winning). Essentially, Buffett is crusading to reduce his capital and that of his peers for the purpose of taking care of society. And republicans hate Buffett almost as much as Paul Krugman.

Capitalists, such as Peter Schiff, want zero minimum wage, no taxes whatsoever, no welfare, no regulation, and no government ownership. They believe the invisible hand of the free market will usher in a utopia. Per Noam Chomsky, this is a distortion of the teaching of Adam Smith (I haven’t verified that).

He argued that the capitalist desires government regulation for their own benefit, and that includes government spending by the military on R&D for the corporations (socialization of costs/privatization of profits) and government spending on infrastructure that corporations use, but on the other hand, it depends where the government money is coming from. If the corps themselves are being taxed to fund the military research and fix the roads, then it’s not plutocratic/capitalistic, but socialistic because the military and the road crews are regular people receiving wages from the corporate tax. On the other hand, if government spending is coming from gas taxes and other taxes on the poor, then it’s not socialistic since the poor are funding their own welfare and government workers are supplying their own wages.

It’s definitely more complex than just one statistic, but all I’m doing is showing the general trend as it relates to government spending. As Chomsky said, I think we can draw some conclusions from that.

Yes, I agree.

So your point is that both Finland and Saudi Arabia spend government money, but one has freedom and the other not? This was covered above, I think.

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Republicans.

Noam Chomsky: Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history

Lack of education. Educated people make better political decisions.

Did you see this chart I posted at the beginning of the thread?

I don’t know about freedom, but public spending was pretty low in communist china in the 60s and 70s. The Chinese are arguably more free now. There isn’t much data on Russia.

Here is a better chart of the freedom ranking vs private consumption % of GDP:

I realized that China was a crap shoot. But My guess is Russia was necessarily very high on public spending. There was no other real possible source. The military was huge compared to GDP.

I guess I’m seeing Phyllo, whose come from a socialist or perhaps ‘socialist’ country that was abusive and not free and I think had pretty high public spending. We are in an new kind of era. You have Scandanavian countries who are highly aligned with the US and have relatively low military budgets. and they are right now degenerating into ‘free market’ capitalisms. Slwoly, thatcher and reagan seeping in slowly.

But perhaps it might help to address his concerns that socialism may lead again to the types of experiences one had behind the Iron Curtain, where public spending was high, since there wasn’t so much else there to spend, and freedom was low. and worse.

Russia also has a lot of oil, so they could have functioned like Saudia Arabia: social spending, but no democracy.

I added a bit above.

Oh, oops, lol.

I wonder which country. Anyway, yeah, there’s government spending and extent of control of the people over its government and maybe a few other ways to quantify socialism. Government spending doesn’t define it wholly, but is one aspect of it.

But if the people were in charge of their own government, would they vote for more or less government spending? Probably more. So although the people aren’t in charge, they’re still getting more or less what they want. But in places like Egypt, they get nothing: no control nor welfare.

And they do it under the banner of socialism. Or we have those like Hillary who are economic conservatives and social liberals: giving people tampons in the mensroom and corporations keep their power. Those are the worst if you ask me.

That Kamala Harris terrifies me. I’ll vote for Trump over her.

Not as long as the people have voting power. Get rid of electoral college and all that delegate crap. And as Bernie says, “If you’re a citizen and you turn 18, you’re registered to vote. Simple as that!” We could even make voting mandatory (like switzerland, I think).

There’s no way a tyrant could take over under those conditions, especially if the people are decently educated.

It says something about me for sure.

There is a Democracy Index.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy … untry_2018

You consider it socialism.

What? Your “consumption as % gdp” number doesn’t take into account where the gov money came from.

I don’t live in your fine republic.

Sigh

We (my parents and I) lived in Czechoslovakia until 1968 when the attempt to get “Socialism with a Human Face” ended with a Russian invasion and a kick in the face.

Then we were in Sweden for a while but eventually moved to Canada.

:laughing:

And the US is ranked #25 and considered a “flawed democracy” lol

At first glance, it appears to correlate tightly with government spending. I’ll work on it later.

If not socialism, then what is it?

Yes, I know. How do I quantify where the money came from?

Still in your best interest to support him lest the US decide one day to send some “US aid” your way :wink:

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Germany had a democracy and a highly educated population. They ended up with Hitler.

So what does that prove? That Russia didn’t want you to have prosperity?

Well hell, you have more socialism and freedom than I do. Heck, you can even daytrade stocks without needing $25k minimum. If not for the cold, I’d move to canada and partake in all the freedom.

I’m dubious that the germans were highly educated. The smart ones were jews.

I’m not sure about the democracy claim either.

And Hitler was more a result of the treaty of versailles and the reparations imposed on the germans.

quora.com/In-1930s-Germany- … racy-ratio

:-k Interesting reaction.

I have difficultly imagining any large body of people could possibly be educated in the 1800s. Sure there were pockets on intelligentsia, but nothing like today where almost everyone can read. But even literacy isn’t enough since Trump supporters can read, but are otherwise dumb as rocks.

And still my point about the jews being the most educated were first to be ostracized, which is common to totalitarian regimes to first persecute the intellectuals:

Totalitarian governments manipulate and apply anti-intellectualism to repress political dissent.[2] During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the following fascist dictatorship (1939–1975) of General Francisco Franco, the reactionary repression of the White Terror (1936–1945) was notably anti-intellectual, with most of the 200,000 civilians killed being the Spanish intelligentsia, the politically active teachers and academics, artists and writers of the deposed Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939).[3] In the communist state of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979), the Khmer Rouge régime of Pol Pot condemned all of the non-communist intelligentsia to death in the Killing Fields.[4]

Lots of examples here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism

Nazi book burners historyplace.com/worldwar2/t … okburn.htm

Now, if everyone were intelligent, then how could one separate the smart from the stupid in order to kill one and enslave the other? The fact that it happened is proof that the people weren’t that smart.

If everyone knew what Chomsky knows, then the only way to kill intellectuals would be to kill 100% of people.

If the germans were as smart as german intelligentsia, there’s no way Hitler could have happened. The fact that he happened proves they were stupid.

“The people get what government it deserves.” - Forgot who said that.

This is going on today in the right wing:

“I realize you’re under a bit of a penalty because all our professors are stupid liberals, but that’s the best we can do.” rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015 … ain_folks/

So you’re going to hang on to that idea, even though the high level of education in Germany is confirmed by many sources.

Sometimes educated people make bad choices. Stupid people are not the only ones who mess things up.

Your ONE source is “John Gordon, Keen interest in History”. Heck, I have a keen interest in history, why am I not a source? :confusion-shrug:

Further, “high level of education” is relative to the education of the rest of the world, which as I said, is hard to imagine being on par with today.

Germany back then was much like America today: the Jews are smart and the uneducated Christians protested their immorality. Hitler appealed to the stupid Christians to persecute the immoral Jews. Same thing the Right Wing is doing today, only with less focus on the Jews in particular, but liberals, academia, and sometimes Jews too, depending how far Right they are.

It’s the smarties vs the stupids.

It’s the Dunning-Krugers vs the Freddy Kruegers :smiley:

So it’s better to be stupid than smart?

Just want to point out that “private consumption” isn’t the metric it’s being used as in this thread. Worldbank provides the following clarification:

A few things to note:

  1. This is looking at households, so presumably excludes expenditures by businesses and non-household non-profits. But if healthier societies have a more productive business sector, this will lead to false-negatives for what we’re calling ‘capitalist’ countries.
  2. The inclusion of “payments and fees to governments” complicates things substantially. A more ‘socialist’ country would be expected to have higher fees to government as a percentage of GDP, but as it’s being used those fees would be scored as making it more ‘capitalist’.
  3. Even taken at face value, this seems to elide an important distinction, i.e. countries with large GDPs and small governments and countries with small GDPs and no governments will look the same, even though there is a clear and important distinction between them. I don’t think anyone is claiming that a failed state is a capitalist utopia, so a measure that scores failed states as such is misleading.

I think the discussion here got too heated too fast. It does not seem that ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ have been well-enough defined for a proper disagreement to be found. See e.g. Norway, which is often claimed by both camps as a success story. Similarly, re: Singapore, Georgist libertarians absolutely support government ownership of land (or what is effectively the same thing, a land value tax that captures all rents from land ownership).

Without a clearer definition of terms, it’s all vitriol and no vs.