- cross-posted to:
- usauthoritarianism@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- usauthoritarianism@lemmy.world
This is actually an older news story, and it does appear as though she recovered from this before her death.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14389544
How? Specifics. Or should I answer as vaguely as you: “I and my friends will steal your socialized gains for ourselves without anyone noticing”.
There are numerous ways, but the very fact that you believe it would be a simple matter of stealing gains proves you are historically and logically illiterate.
The fire department isn’t run by people stealing funds, nor is the post office, nor is the education system. Those work well.
Yeeees, there are magical ways to achieve that, but you will call me illiterate instead of giving a single example.
And if you think the post office or the education system works well, you are willfully blind.
Better than private schooling, haha.
Capitalism requires stealing from workers, meanwhile you are saying that Socialism is bad because stealing could happen. Do you not see the contradiction?
No, don’t change the topic to the same vague straw-man nonsense.
How are you socializing the investments and gains in a way that would allow investment into new industries? Or just how do you incentivise people to invest in general if they can’t collect dividends? Because that is the biggest issue capitalism solves, that communism can’t (not nearly as efficiently at least). The less than ~25% of output (GDP) capitalists get for directing investment and all the other management roles they serve is the inefficiency of capitalism.
PS: The reason capitalism is more efficient is not necessarily because less is “stolen”, but because the “stealing” part is done in a controlled manner similar to tax. Normal “stealing” (corruption) causes far more damage then just the amount stolen because it is not stolen from areas where it is least needed.
You seem to be assuming I said something entirely different, lol. You can do this investment via democratically elected planners and workers councils. There would be a government.
Capitalism is by far worse because the profit motive ensures the most exploitation occurs that is possible. Corruption can also be legislated against and accounted for, Capitalism’s exploitation cannot, it is the point!
Additionally, in Capitalism you have a class structure where a tiny minority control all of production and are entitled to most of its gains, and this class is unaccountable.
In capitalism, the “capitalist class” is accountable to the elected government. The profit motive is separated from the legislature (except when you legalize bribery like in the US, every good idea can be implemented badly).
If the same government has a profit interest in increasing output, then worker protection, safety, environment etc goes out the window far more drastically then in capitalism.
And if the government does not have a profit interest or a weak one, other interests are prioritized. You get Soviet style economy where nothing really gets done and the whole society is poorer. Or do you deny the fact that the “oppressed capitalist worker” is better of financially than the Soviet Union one was?
The elected government in any system is beholden to the class in power, not the masses. In Capitalism, that is the Capitalist class, which is why the cycle of constant “lesser evil” voting continues.
The government does not have a profit motive, but a needs motive.
It’s funny that you bring up the USSR. Despite having drastically lower income inequality than under the Tsars or in modern Capitalist Russia, GDP Per Capita steadily grew before collapsing once it liberalized, resulting in 7 million excess deaths. The citizens of the USSR also were entitled to free healthcare, education, and retiring with a state pension earlier than their US competitors. They also went from a feudal society to space in half a century.
The USSR was absolutely corrupt, no question about it, but even in it’s corrupt state it was better for the poor than Capitalist Russia is today. We can pretty clearly track this by metrics. Russians of today have more access to luxury goods, but wealth inequality has skyrocketed and the poor struggle far more now than they did before.
The idea that “nothing got done” in a country that made it to space before the US is ludicrous, as well as the idea that the USSR was somehow poorer than under the Romanovs. You’re inventing reality!
This is because your highest condemnation of Socialism is that what may happen in Socialism is required by Capitalism.
The income statistic in the soviet block was greatly misleading due to simple unavailability of goods. The issue often was not not enough money but nothing worthwhile on the shelves. At least as my parents described it.
The people had income, but it was just paper without value behind it. And yes, the motive of the government was weapons and vanity projects like the space race, so those did happed.