Hello.

So, wich do you prefere?
I, do prefere communism. Why?

Todays society, the result of capitalim is a total disgrace. People are starving around the world, children are dying! Look for your selfs!
We must do something! Now! I beleav in an equal society, were everyone have the same possibilities. Were the rich wont use the lesser fortunate to gain profit. An example of capitalism.

I have a dream, a vision of a bether world, were people live in peace, love and harmony, were the goal is to be friends and help eachother, not to earn mony. Yes, it is a dream, but as long as people beleav in it is possible. We must beleave.
Hope must not abandon us my comorades. Without dreams, no hope, without hope, no future.
This is my goal, and I will fight for it!
Remember that everything is possible if you beleave in ít. You can make a difference, so beleave in your dreams.

Best regards //Turandil (don't dare to show my real namn, cuz the Cia would wack me) :)

- What did you tell that man?
- I told him to work faster.
- What gives you the right to command over him?
- Because Iam paying him.
- How much do you pay him?
- 1 dollar a day.
- Were do you get that money?
- I sell stone.
- Who cut the stone?
- He does.
- How much does he cut a day?
- Oh, he cuts alot.
- How much do you get?
- Around 5 bucks.
- But then ist him that pays you 4 bucks to be ordererd to wor faster by you.
- Yes, but I own the tools and machines.
- How did you became the owner of that?
- IO sold stone and got so much mony a day so I afford it.
- Who had cut the stone?
- Eh, shut up!

800 000 000 people are starving or is underfed althoug there is more then enough food for 6 billion people.

Every day 40.000 children in U-lands die dou to no food or no medecin.

Why? It is not profitable to save this poor people. But we send money to them. Yes, but they send you more in debts.

The 358 richest people in the world owns as much as the 2,3 billion poorest - 45% of the worlds population.

In China 8.7 % of the population 60 % of all the mony.

Absolutly no socialistic nation, but a pure capitalist state diktatur, with a very bad social ensurance system. Sovjet was no communist state either, but a stalinistic state and thats alot of difference. Well, they tried to build up communism in a land were most people are anfalfabets and the lacket heave industry and were very poor. Not a good condition for a communis state. And they were facing war on several fronts. Never the less the succees to raise the prodiction of several important stuff with over 1000%. Thoug much went to the military so the people didnt fare well. Then Stalin seized poewer, and took Sovjet far away from communism, so please don't talk about sovjet when talking communism.

USA have 5% of the world population but 75% of all serial killers.

29% of the white americans thinks that the blacks are less intelligent then the white.

You condemn Terrorism, Facism, Dictators and those guys. But no nation in the world history have supported as much of these as the United states. (no, not even sovjet)

Socialism isn't dead!
Socialism is something new, capitalism had hundreds of years of development.
We can look back on the misstakes in eastern europe so we can change the outcome when we build socialism in the world. In a socialist country, the politicians must live in the same reality as everyone else same sallaries, same houses, same treatment ar hospitals and stuff. No one should be able as now to sit and decide about taxes and other things without facing the consekvenses of the decisions as the people do. And if they are corupt or doing something wrong they should be fired imidiatly.And capitalism is not working!
The teknic has developed and the pruduction has increases, we have possibilities to satesfy the needs of the people. Nevertheless more and more people is getting poor and more and more is forces to live under terrible conditions. This is just not in the third world, also in USA and Europe the misery is spearing in a terrifying way. Over 400 years of history capitalism has not suceesed to solve the most important needs of humanity. Capitalism is still meaning a terrible misery and suffering. Time demands a new, more humane soceity, were pruduction is planed out from the needs of the people and the environment, not from the demands of profit of the capitalists. The misery is growing, we are forced to cut down in many inportant places. The environment is fairing very ill, we need a bether soceity, we need communism!

Under Socialism and communism the machines and tools for example is owned by the people of the society. Noone has the right to use anyone else! Socialism appears out of capitalism.

In all nations there is a ruling and one opressed class. The capitalists rules over the working class. The more mony, the more power, that is unquestionable today. Democracy? Not really.

Socialism/communism is the opposide, here the majority rules over the minoroty, this is called the proletarian dictatur, and thats much bether then the dictatur of the capital.

So is ith theft to "steal" the mony from the rch?
No, because they stole it first! Today, a minoroty got extremly much more mony then the working class, he could not possibly be alowed to have so much mony. How did he get it? For example. Every hour a worker works he get some money. But thats just a few percents of the worth of the poduction. Of the rest some goes to taxes and the mayoroty of the mony goes to shares. And because 2% owns 98% of all shares they are making really much mony on the suffering of that poor worker.

I think it is the privatpossetion right of the meadey of production well the rigth for indeviduals to own companies that is the cause to the (dont know the english word, really hard to write so much on english)Without on any way taking part in the pruduction the shareowners and other capitalists are stealing a large potion of that profit ´that is made by the workers. In socialism/communism that profit finds it way back to the workers.

ALL will NOT earn the same mony, work more earn more. Need more, earn more. No one wll get the possibility to make mony on other peoples work.

I want a planed economy so we can bild a faire system were the needs of the people comes first!
Look around! Study the failure of capitalism, all is about profit, understand. People have no jobs, when there are great needs to satisfy the sociity, rests of mony and clothes are burned so the prices on the market wont drop, at the same time there is people starving to death.
The companies are warring eacother with terrible consekvenses for húmanity and the environment.
Instead of working to gether they are working against eachother so they will be the biggest company and earn most mony. We need to plan the economy, so we can setesfy the human beings on this planet. To avois economic crises of capitalism, to secure all citzens right to work, food ans shelter and to develop the production on the best way we need to plan! And to to this we need socialism.

I have a dream, a vision of a bether world, were people live in peace, love and harmony, were the goal is to be friends and help eachother, not to earn mony. Yes, it is a dream, but as long as people beleav in it is possible. We must beleave.
Hope must not abandon us my comorades. Without dreams, no hope, without hope, no future.
This is my goal, and I will fight for it!
Remember that everything is possible if you beleave in ít. You can make a difference, so beleave in your dreams.

Best regards //Turandil (don't dare to show my real namn, cuz the Cia would wack me) :)

I like critics, so please tell your opinions, its just good. I will try to answer ansers.

Communism is of course a better concept and theory...

but the principles of human nature make it impossible. :( :cool:

I agree that communism is the best of the two, but for some reason it never works out except for the theory. Be it human nature, I don't know, just a damn shame.

Talked about this elsewhere to, Roup --

A problem in practice:
(1)Those who suggest that no modern Communist country actually practices 'true Communism' are putting the cart before the horse: they define Communism as 'the system that must work', and so when it fails, it couldn't have been Communism. They have this problem because true Communism cannot ever exist: when implemented in a large group, it requires workers who are not self-interested.

A much bigger problem:
(2)Marxism makes theoretical sense "excluding all other factors and knowledge that you may have" only in the sense that Peter Pan could be a true story "excluding all other factors and knowledge that you may have." If thinking happy thoughts could really make you fly, Peter Pan would be internally consistent.

I am not referring to the "this would work great only people aren't nice enough" argument. I'm referring mainly to two precepts on which Marxism bases its conclusions. One is a foundation on which the entire thesis is based, the other is somewhere between theory and practice.

First, Marx bases almost all his economic arguments around the Labor Added theory of value. If you buy wood for a chair for 5 marks and pay a guy 3 marks to make the chair, it is "worth" 8 marks. But the capitalist sells it for 10. Unfortunately, the Labor Added theory of value is absolute crap. Nothing is worth anything in and of itself. Anything is worth what someone else will give you for it. Period. That's it. The entire castle of Marxist economics is built on sand.

Secondly is the role of prices in conveying information. Any centrally-planned economy is doomed to fail, not due to the avarice of its participants, but because humans are not smart enough to be able to accurately predict, know, and serve the needs and desires for the plethora of goods in our society. The only mechanism able to do this is a market-based price system which sends such information instantaneously around the globe.

As Francis Fukuyama put it:

"The complexity of modern economies proved to be simply beyond the capabilities of centralized bureaucracies to manage, no matter how advanced their technical capabilities. In place of a demand-driven price system, Soviet planners have tried to decree a "socially just" allocation of resources from above. For many years, they believed that bigger computers and better linear programming would make possible an efficient centralized allocation of resources. This proved to be an illusion. Goskomsten, the former Soviet state committee on prices, had to review some 200,000 prices every year, or three or four prices per day for every official working in that bureaucracy. This represented only 42 percent of the total number of price decisions made by Soviet officals every year, which in turn was only a fraction of the number of pricing decisions that would have to have been made were the Soviet economy able to offer the same diversity of products and services as a Western capitalist economy. Bureaucrats sitting in Moscow or Beijing might have had a chance of setting a semblance of efficient prices when they had to supervise economies producing commodities number in the hundreds or low thousands; the task becomes impossible in an age when a single airplane can consist of hundreds of thousands of separate parts."

Note, this has nothing do with Communism in practice. It's flawed before you even try to stick it in the Real World. Even if we were all perfectly uninterested in our own welfare, and community-minded to the point of martyrdom, Communism still "wouldn't work."

[ October 03, 2002, 06:31: Message edited by: Laches ]

Turandil, I recognise that your ideals are motivated by goodwill and empathy with the poor, for which I commend you. But I nevertheless disagree with your conclusions that socialism will produce a fairer, wealthier and more free society than capitalism. To paraphrase capitalism's most impassioned apologist, Ayn Rand, there are only two ways of acquiring money, food etc: you can trade something for it, or, you can forcibly take it away from someone else. Capitalism is the system in which you have to trade something to get something. Socialism and communism are the systems in which everything is taken by force. To anyone who loves freedom, the latter is a repellent concept.

Let's look at your example, the man who cuts stone and the man who takes 4/5 of the earnings of that stone in exchange for providing the equipment, the roof over the workspace, the time spent finding buyers for that stone and whatever else might be involved in that transaction. In fact, even giving the stonecutter 1/5 of the earnings is capitalistic. The socialistic approach is, "There were 5 people who did not cut stone today. It is not their fault that you took the only stone-cutting job in town. Therefore, we will take your 1/5 of the profit and divide it evenly among them."

You might argue that first person should not be entitled to 4/5 of the stonecutting revenue, just because he owns the stonecutting machinery. You might say that he should have to cut the stone himself to earn the money. OK, so he fires the second person and cuts the stone himself. Now he takes 5/5 of the revenue. How is that better?

Now let's look at another example. There are two people who work at the stonecutting shop. They each earn $1 a day. One of them saves 50 cents a day and lives frugally on the other 50 cents. The other person spends the whole dollar right away. At the end of a year, the first man buys his own stonecutting equipment and stops working for his employer. He now makes 5/5 of the profit from the stones he cuts. Do you believe he should share 50% of those profits with the second man? Why? Do you believe, as you suggest in your post, that he has "stolen" the money to buy the equipment from the second man?

The issue of whether employers abuse their positions, and whether they pay their employees fairly, is entirely another issue not directly related to the inherent justice of capitalism. It is, like the corrupt bureaucracies that take over well-meaning attempts at communism, the danger inherent in allowing human beings to have any form of power over another.

I suggest a New Order: Big Bism. :grin: :angel:

Shralpnel can be my political advisor and Xenecor can be my intern. Baldak, my tactical strategist.

Oh yeah, Art's the janitor. :p

You grow corn in your fields. In the capitalistic system you have to work a lot to make money, in the communistic system you can let the whole crop go down the drain and still get paid. That's at least one of the reasons (though a simple version) why Poland isn't communistic today. And on the other hand, let's just say I don't want to start another USA conversation in here.

The best thing is clearly a combination of the two. We have that in Norway. And it's not China or USA who are the best country in the world to live in, it's Norway.

[ October 03, 2002, 13:21: Message edited by: Mollusken ]

I'm going to make this pure and simple from my perspective.

Communism is a nice idea, wonderful actually ... in theory. but it can't work. A society cannot operate without having a leader. The idea of communism is to have everyone as equal. if that was so, we would either, have no leader or everyone be a leader. With so many different views and perspectives, society would break down without a leader or having too many leaders and society will degrade into Anarchy.

Capatalism. You get what you work for. Those that are idle suffer. Those that work hard, life will pay off. Those that are idle and suffering are costing the hard workers money. Not good.

My preference? Capatalism. I want to earn more than someone that doesn't work as hard as me, full stop.

Note: this is from my raw knowledge that i have studied from Business Studies and History at A level standard.

Well, Laches and that neo-conservative Sprite ( :1eye: ) have dismantled your economics rather effectively, so let me concur to a point with Da Sniper.

Communism does work well in small units. The Israeli kibbutzes (is that how you form the plural?) are the leading examples. Communism doesn't necessarily require a worker without self-interest, but it does require a worker with a goal he holds higher than his own good. On the kibbutz, a worker is dedicated more to the community. Heck, think about your own family, which is no doubt essentially a communist dictatorship writ small.

But large groups (IMO anything that could be called a "town" and above) tend not to work for the simple fact that it's very difficult to find a goal for those large groups to agree on. Marx thought that class identity would be enough to ignite a worker's revolution, but it turned out that the workers identified more with their nation than their class. Russia and others have tried to use the defeat of a foreign enemy to inspire their people. But in the end very little trumps self-interest. Religion, perhaps, but the Catholic Church has already ruled out communism as a legitimate form of government.

Oh, and I can't let Turandil's wild claims about America pass. Where in the world did you get that unbelievable (literally) statistic that 29% of American whites think blacks are stupid? And what does that have to do with capitalism? Are you claiming that capitalism makes you racist?

"Capitalism is the worst system in the world -- except for everything else."

Amen Sharlp-ness, AMEN!

:holy:

Nonetheless, sign me up for Big-Bism. First North Carolina. Tomorrow the world!

Firstly I would say that what Sprite describes isnt socialism, it is the capitalist view of socialims. Big difference, have you read Terry Goodkind's Faith of the fallen? You describtion sounds alot like his extremely bad allegori of a communist state.

Secondly, Marx never came up with any theories. He just said what he thought would happen, what inevitable would happen. It was a describtion of the future based on the terrible situation that most people in the industrialised nations were in, but the conditions improved and Marx' vision of the future didnt come to pass. That doesnt mean that socialism is dead, most european states have systems that with american measures are extremely socialistic and even the states doesnt have a purebred capitalism. Even the US have some aspects of socialism in it.

joaquin, not sure how you can say Marx never came up with any theory. Everything about Marx was theory. He had a normative theory of exploitation and the Labor Added theory of value just to name two.

By the way, I did find one example of a communist state which thrived:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/1709/

[ October 03, 2002, 23:40: Message edited by: Laches ]

Read my post again Laches, sure he introduced alot of thoughts but for Marx those werent political theories that he 'came up' with. For him socialism was the natural evolution of the world in its current state. He say 'gosh it would be nice if someone did this' he said 'this is what will happen'. Perhaps only a slight difference but still a difference.

A spade has to be called a spade rather than a multi-purpose earth-moving garden utensil.

Joacqin, how do you think "real" socialism differs from what you term "the capitalist's view of socialism"? If you can disagree with any of my points about the relative morality of capitalism please do so explicitly and logically instead of dismissing them en masse. I'd also be intrigued to see you explain why you think those who believe capitalism is preferable just don't understand socialism.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own things.

Just a pointless remark in a sea of intelligent conversation.

For me, Communism is the ideal of the perfect society - you do what you can for the society, and your needs are catered for in return (and in 'needs' I would include needs for leisure etc.). But I also realise that, as human society stands at the moment, this is an unattainable goal - there is too much of a need for individuals to outdo each other. I think, but am not sure, that as history progresses society tends to move further to the left wing - at least in the West we have no slavery or serfdom as we did previously; we have unemployment benefit, state pensions, health services and other systems where society provides for those in need. Incidentally, does the universe of Star Trek not show a pretty good approximation to a communist society?

Everyone to contibute according to their ability, everyone paid/provided for according to their needs. The idea in a nutshell.

Now if someone could answer me the question: Where is the incentive for anyone to actually further this sort of society without reward?

Capitalism may not seem fair, but the only way to generate economic growth is by rewarding hard work, achievement, skills, business accumen etc

In short, without the stimulus of personal reward people stop achieving, because they stop trying. No-one would take the necessary risks if there was no reward. That is why communism cannot work.

Also read "Animal Farm" for an observation on applied State Socialism. We are indeed all equal, it's just that some are more equal than others.....

Q. If Communism is such a wonderful theory, why has it never worked in the past?

A. Because people are generally by nature selfish. They also expect to see the fruits of their labour, and not have to hand it over to a central authority. Why should YOU get what I have earned, eh?

Q.But what about China? They seem to be going well enough

A. Chairman Mao and his successors' interpretation of Communism is radically distorted from Marx's original beliefs, in that there is limited free-market trading in China.

P.S. Watch the Monty Python "Bicycle Repair Man" sketch for some humour on Western attitudes to Communism 40 years ago.

Yet another question starting off my post.

Why do people think that capitalism and communism are opposites? They are not. Capitalism is an economic system and communism is a governmental system. It would be far more accurate for this discussion to be about capitalism and socialism. Communism is basically socialism that is forced upon the people and the government controls the allocation of everything. Anyone that loves freedom will not like communism.

About the USA-China debate: Both are mixed economies. The USA is not a pure capitalism, nor is China pure socialism.

Since your economic principles have already been adequately torn apart, I won't waste my time doing it myself, suffice it to say that socialism does not work due to human nature. Period. This is best illustrated with an example, and I'll use one of the ones that a Professor of Business once told me, shortened for time constraints.

Imagine that you were stranded on a deserted island with a group of people. A small group sets out on their own to try to survive. You happen to find the only source of fresh water on the island. You now have a source of water, but no food or shelter. Another person manages to find a patch of fruit trees. He now controls the food supply, but has no water or shelter. The third guy happens to be a carpenter and he cuts up some wood and builds a shelter. He now has a place to stay, but no sustenance. Now, you, with water start getting hungry. So, you trade with the guy with the fruit trees and you now eat. You trade your water to the guy with the shelters for a place to stay. You will not give your water to the people who cannot give you anything in exchange, so they'll die off. That is pure capitalism, and in practice, it does not work.

Now for socialism. The same group of people divides up into three parts. One group is responsible for finding food. The second group is responsible for finding water, and the third will build a shelter. However, just for this example, let's say that one of the people has a broken leg, so cannot do any of the work. Now, the first night, you all meet up again and all equally share the water, food, and shelter. So far, it sounds like an incredible system, doesn't it? Now, for the second day. One of the people noticed that the injured guy does not have to do work. So he figures, "Why should I work hard when I don't get anything more than that guy?" So, he just lounges around on the beach that day. That night, all share evenly again. The third day, more people start slacking around. That is pure socialism, and it, likewise, does not work.

The truth of the matter is that there will be no advancement and no betterment for all if there is no incentive for people to be productive. In practice, a mixed economy with more effort on the capitalistic side of things tends to yield sufficient compassion for fellow man and adequate incentive for people to continue the advancement of technology.

Capatalism. You get what you work for. Those that are idle suffer. Those that work hard, life will pay off. Those that are idle and suffering are costing the hard workers money. Not good. How are the idle costing those that work money? Perhaps you are referring to our costs of supporting them (welfare, social security, etc.) Need I point out once again that in a pure capitalistic society, none of those elements would exist. Those that are idle will die. This is the primary reason why pure capitalism is nonexistant in our world today and why mixed economies are so prevalent.

A society cannot operate without having a leader. The idea of communism is to have everyone as equal. if that was so, we would either, have no leader or everyone be a leader. With so many different views and perspectives, society would break down without a leader or having too many leaders and society will degrade into Anarchy.I'm sorry to keep picking on you, Sniper, but your points illustrate mine perfectly. A communistic society does have a leader. The purpose is not to put everyone into a leadership position. The government and the leaders of it will decide how to allocate supplies. Communism is where a few people force socialism onto the masses.

Also, for those of you who are massively in favor of Communism, read "1984" by George Orwell. That is exactly what could happen if the whole world goes purely communist.

Sorry to take down your theories Rastor but your classification of socialism and communism isnt correct. Socialism is it all and it is a strictly economical system, it has really not much to do with goverment. Communism is the belief that the only way to achieve socialism is through use of force and not through democratic means. It advocates revolution instead of socialdemocracy that advocates democratic reforms. Thats the only difference. You are correct though on your describtion of the world, most european nations have had socialdemocratic goverments have implemented socialism as far as possible without getting where you are in your extremely simplified example. I do think your faith are a bit too lacking in humanity.
The US did contrary to Europe and implemented capitalism as far as possible but making sure they didnt let people starve on the streets (well not too visible atleast).
No country that claims communism has been nothing but dictatorships, the economical system have been a rigid and mocking copy of a socialist system. Soviet, Cuba and China only adapted few parts of socialism. We think of extreme goverment control and a authoritarian society when we think of them, the point of socialism was just the opposite. To remove goverment and authority, everything and nothing should be the goverment so to speak. With no other authority than a thought about the common good. Soviet and the rest enforced their half hearted believes on the people they had set out to free and therefore made them even less freer than before not to mention that they got intoxicated with power. So you are partly right when you say that human nature makes it impossible to work but I have alittle more hope in humanity than that.
Marx assumed that everyone but the very few extremely well off would want a socialistic system implemented but that has never come to be. it was a small click of people in Russia that took the power after the Czar, they didnt even have the support of the socialist party in Russia. In Cuba and China it was perhaps more people that supported it but it wasnt the whole people rose up, it was a small part of it.

Oh well it isnt an easy subject, but it isnt easy. What works best is as with most things, the middle road. Take the best parts of everything :)

Socialism is it all and it is a strictly economical system, it has really not much to do with goverment. Communism is the belief that the only way to achieve socialism is through use of force and not through democratic means.That's exactly what I said, I just failed to differentiate between the two at a few points as I had to talk about a government but did not want to state that socialism has to be associated with totalitarianism (as communism is). Guess I could have said either communism or socialdemocracy, but that would have been a lot more typing. Anyway, thank you for expanding it.

Oh well it isnt an easy subject, but it isnt easy. What works best is as with most things, the middle road. Take the best parts of everythingI suppose that's why almost every nation in the world now uses a mixture of capitalism and socialism in their economic systems.

The theory of communism (everyone gets a bit of averything) is much better than the theory of capitalism. But we still have yet to see a government implement communism in all its glory. Until the rest of the world has reached enlightenment on a par with Buddhist monks in Tibet, capitalism is the better system.

In my opinion, there is some confusion of terms. Socialism references, or can at least, both an economic system and a political system. After all, of what use is a political system which fails to account for economics and vice versa. Communism is most rightly described as a subcategory of socialism in my opinion.

The term ‘socialist’ firstly describes a broad range of ideas and proposals that are held together by a central overarching tenet: the central ownership and control of the means of production – either because central ownership is deemed more efficient and/or more moral. Secondly, socialists agree that capitalism (free-market conservativism or liberalism) is morally and hence politically flawed. Thirdly, some socialists of the Marxist persuasion argue that socialism is the final historical era that supplants capitalism before proper communism emerges (i.e., a ‘historicist’ conception). In the face of the utter failure of centrally planned economies, socialists have scurried to find alternatives.

Despite the empirical challenge of the collapse of the Soviet system – and more importantly the failure of centrally controlled economies throughout the West and the Third World, socialists have rallied to parade alternative conceptions of the communal ownership and control of resources. ‘Market socialism’, for instance, tolerates a predominantly market system but demands that certain ‘essential’ resources be controlled by the state. These may then act to direct the general economy along politically desirable roads: e.g., expanding technology companies, educational and health services, or the economic and physical infrastructure of the nation. Others argue that while markets should predominate, the state should control only the investment industry. However, the economists’ critique that state intervention produces not only an inefficient outcome but also an outcome that the planners themselves do not desire is extendable to all instances of intervention – and especially any interventions in investment, where the complexity of the price mechanism deals not just with consumers’ and producers’ present preferences but also their more subtle intertemporal preferences for present and future consumption.

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/p/polphil.htm#Socialism

I don't understand those that claim Communism is preferable in theory to Capatalism. In theory Communism fails because it rests upon a flawed Labor Added theory of value and any centrally planned economy of any respectable size is doomed to failure in my opinion for the reasons I listed in my initial post; a centrally planned economy is incapable of handling and relaying the massive amounts of information to make a respectable economy work. So, even in theory Communism is fatally flawed and how can a fatally flawed system be preferable to one that can work, unless you mean in a "golly gee wouldn't it be swell if we all got along" type of way.

[ October 09, 2002, 05:09: Message edited by: Laches ]

It's also misleading to suggest that force is a distinguishing characteristic of communism but not of socialism. Socialism cannot be implemented without the use of force and without laws that drastically reduce the liberties of citizens. Voluntary use of personal resources to the benefit of society is called CHARITY, not socialism.

Let's look at an example: a nation is 100% capitalist but decides to implement one socialised service. Let's say it decides to have only health care socialised. Now let's see what uses of force the state will need to use to implement that.

- Confiscation of private property. Most basically, taxation will be increased. All taxation involves implied force, of course- if you do not give the government the amount of money it demands, you go to prison. Additionally, hospitals, clinics, and medical equipment that was previously privately owned may be "reappropriated" by the government. Certainly the original owners will no longer be allowed to use their property and equipment freely.

- Medical practitioners will lose the right to work freely at their trades. They can only do the work the government contracts them to perform, at the time and place the government contracts them to perform it. There is an absolute monopoly on health care employment: if the government is a bad employer, the doctors, nurses etc have no options but to work on the black market, flee the country, or (sometimes) refuse to work at all.

- Citizens lose the right to purchase health care services from their choice of provider. Only the government can provide health-care services, and the citizens have no control over the quality of that service or even over its availability. It's the problem of monopoly, which is always a risk under capitalism but is intrinsic to socialism.

Ultimately, this is the most morally objectionable part of socialism. It doesn't matter how many other freedoms you have, you can't use your hard-earned money to buy perfectly moral and legal services that you need, so you are not a free person. The government decides, for example, how many radiograms it can afford to pay for in a month, and if you are not in the quota, tough luck. If you protest that you can afford to buy the whole damn radiogram machine, pay to put a new wing on the hospital, will invest millions of dollars into the healthcare system in exchange for a test or treatement that will save your life- nope. Can't be done. You can wait, or you can die, but you can't buy what you need. Because someone else might NOT be able to do it, and if he has to die because he can't afford treatment, so do you, in the interests of "fairness". Equality before liberty.

On a more personal note: People - specifically I am thinking at the moment of Hilary Clinton - keep pointing to Canada as an example of socialised health care done "right". Well, I live in that utopia, and I can tell you these people have not spent all day or all night waiting in a Canadian emergency-room lobby for the exhausted doctor to get a free moment. Why do you think Canadian old people move to the United States in droves? In part, because that's where they can buy the health care services they need, instead of being put on endless waiting lists that may be longer than their life expectancy. It's also where all the Canadian doctors and nurses are, having fled the sweatshops the Canadian government runs.

Dear Sprite, it is only a tiny percentage of the population that can afford to buy an entire wing of the hospital and donate a few million bucks to get that radiogram, the other 99,9% wouldnt even have the oppurtunity to get one if it wasnt supplied by the state. Do you know what health care cost? No one can afford it if it isnt supplied by the goverment or as in the US by insurances. You are also presuming that just because there is a monopoly on something it makes it flawed by design. It isnt, the things you pointed out is a great risk but something that people do notice and whine about and if their goverment want to keep their jobs they better do something about it. You seem to assume that a goverment is malevolent and wants to make as much problem for their citizens as possible, if you have that stance nothing will satisfy you have to atleast hope that the goverment is there for its citizens best and is benevolent.
As I said in my earlier post so isnt use of force nescessary in a perfect socialism, the idea is that everyone will see the 'light' and think that it is a jolly good idea. But it isnt surprising that the ones that already have it very well of doesnt want to share with the ones that dont. And as my law proffessor said to us last week; 'you cant work so you get a fortune, it is impossible, you have to either steal it or otherwise get it in some shady way'.

Sprite,

Health care is a poor example for several reasons:

1) Are you suggesting that health care should be excluded from those who cannot afford to pay for it directly? Now THAT would be immoral.
2) In most European countries with a centralised health service you CAN buy private services and thus skip the queue so to speak. I expect it can be done that way in Canada too?
3) It is an area where licencing is required for drugs, doctors etc, so some government intervention is required regardless of how it's paid for, but some things I do not trust business to take adequate care of...

Take another example, like defence. Do you think people would pay for it on a charitable basis for the defence of your country? I think not.

Would we build roads on a charitable basis, or should they be paid for through taxation?

Take money. Now how would we issue money if there is no central control to install the confidence that it was worth something? Consider that it really is just a piece of paper after all.

There are some things that needs central planning and funding, and thus we automatically have a mixed economy. It's the degree of mix I suppose that is debateable, since either form of pure economy would fail it's people.

No intervention means no government meaning Anarchy. Complete intervention and centralised provision kills itself off as has been debated in earlier posts.

1) Are you suggesting that health care should be excluded from those who cannot afford to pay for it directly? Now THAT would be immoral.
I find it interesting that now technological interference with the natural progression of someone's life is seen as a moral obligation.

Viking: re "In most European countries with a centralised health service you CAN buy private services and thus skip the queue so to speak. I expect it can be done that way in Canada too?"

No, in a purely socialised health care system, such as Canada's, you lose your medical license for taking part in that sort of thing. You can absolutely not skip the queue in any way, no matter how much money you are willing to invest in the system (some very rich people have tried). The mitigating factor you refer to is the good influence of capitalism! ;)

And I don't think you're correct that health care is not a good example. It is usually the defining factor between a nation considered "socialist" and a country considered "capitalist". It's the most significant social-infrastructure difference between the US and Canada, and yet the US is virtually never considered "Socialist" and Canada virtually always is.

Having said that, I lived off and on in France (where I was born) until I was 26, and that is an unrelentingly socialist country. However, France's centralised economy is riddled with corruption, whereas Canada's main problem is money wasted on well-intentioned bureaucracy. And in many ways the corruption made it *easier* to function freely in France. I got a lot of pharmaceutical and medical services at a cut rate on the black market in France (not that I'm saying it's moral or that I'd do it now), whereas in Canada you just have to wait in a queue for months or years for the surgery or treatment you need. If there is a black market for medicine here I've yet to encounter it.

No, of COURSE I'm not saying people should not be given health care if they need a service they can't afford. But giving someone what they need is charity, not socialism. Socialism is when the service or product can only be provided at the discretion (or whim?) of the society. It's inseparable from central planning monopolies.

As I said in my earlier post so isnt use of force nescessary in a perfect socialism, the idea is that everyone will see the 'light' and think that it is a jolly good idea. But it isnt surprising that the ones that already have it very well of doesnt want to share with the ones that dont.Unfortunately, that's what many people consider to be the major flaw of both systems. Human nature is (gasp!) to be greedy and selfish. We enjoy having our property, we enjoy the acquisition of it, and we (sometimes) enjoy the practice of obtaining more of it. The only truly viable system would be something akin to what you see in some futuristic utopian visions where the driving force of humanity is no longer the acquisition of wealth, but I can't see that happening during any of our lifetimes.

3) It is an area where licencing is required for drugs, doctors etc, so some government intervention is required regardless of how it's paid for, but some things I do not trust business to take adequate care of...You obviously have little faith in the enterprenur. Since more qualified people are likely to obtain more business, they'll be making more money, which therefore makes them more likely to do a good job. Personally, I'm more of an advocate of little government regulation in business. Although some is obviously necessary (Healthcare for example), negating many of the government's economic programs would likely benefit us more than not.

Do you think people would pay for it on a charitable basis for the defence of your country? I think not.I beg to differ. Many of the people within a country have the intelligence to realize that if their nation were invaded, all the money that they had worked hard to earn would be for naught as they become slaves to some foreign power. On the other hand, however, if all countries depended on charity and nobody donated, it would effectively nullify most if not all wars.

i do NOT like to own more things than anyone else... i think that everyone should follow Fidel Castros example and make the world better... i am a socialist and an active supporter of SKP - a swedish communist party... Viva la Castro...

I do accualy prefere kpml(r) over Skp myself....

I would go with, Monarchy! It would be so cool to be the king! :D

Turandil and Ass,

You haven't responded to the economic critique of centrally planned economies (which you advocate.) Here is the thing, there is more to it than saying "if everyone is nice and hold hands it can work!" I assert that it can't. Communism fails internally, not just externally. In other words, we've watched centrally planned economies fail over and over and over. We don't need all of the empirical evidence to know they'll fail though, we can see communism fails just by analyzing it and seeing that it is based on flawed and unworkable theory.

You seem to be ignoring this. I would be interested if you could cite one modern, reputable economist who can explain why the labor added theory of value can be combined with a centrally planned economy to work on a respectable scale. How do you make the hundreds of trillions of calculations every single day that will be necessary and then disseminate that information?

Rather than take a system that is flawed in theory, and that has failed time and time again, why not take a system that has proven itself to work over the centuries and then work to make it more gentle?

Laches, I must commend you on your posts thus far. You seem well versed in political knowledge, and the Smurf link had me laughing quite hard. Anyway, I am pro-Capitalism all the way, but I must make one small distinction.

My preference? Capatalism. I want to earn more than someone that doesn't work as hard as me, full stop.

-Sniper Right. So the farmer who works 14-hour days for a mere pittance is less deserving than the pampered son of a CEO who earns 100K a month for sitting on his ass? Or should the earnings be the other way around? Communism vs. Capitalism is not about what people deserve. It's about the reality of what people have.

Slim, Corporate Executives have a much harder job than "sitting on their ass" as you so eloquently put it. Many of them actually invest their own money in their businesses so if they didn't, they'd be the ones out on the street scrounging through your trash.

They need salaries like that. In a major corporation, the CEO is oftentimes away from the main office multiple times per month and they may have to maintain a second house with payments due to how often they are away.

Second, it is an incredibly stressful job. Knowing that the livelihood of thousands of people and millions of customers is riding on your shoulders is quite pressuring on a human mind. Aside from that, they have boatloads of decisions to make every day, billions of dollars to manage, and innovation to ensure. I'd say that they are among the most talented and hardest working people in the Global Economy today.

While I'm certainly not attempting to downgrade the farmers, it would be impractical for them to actually recieve what they deserve. If they did, the price of food would be so astronomical that only the very wealthy people could afford it. You may argue that the government could subsidize them so that they would gain increased money. Guess who would pay for that? The taxpayers. Enjoy your new 60% income taxes.

Oh, this could get fun. I have to disagree with your characterizations of CEOs Rastor. From US business writer James Surowiecki:

....Now, as it happens, this was a futile quest. Although it may be hard to believe after a decade and a half of CEO worship, all the available evidence suggests that most chief executives have only a negligible impact on the performance of the companies they run. There are, of course, exceptions. But corporate performance depends far more on what industry a company is in, what proprietary advantages it has, and the general quality of its workforce, than it does on who's at the very top.....

No matter, though. Boards of directors were convinced that the CEO was the key to greatness (perhaps in part because so many directors were themselves CEOs), and they were willing to pay accordingly - after all, you don't treat a new messiah the way you would an ordinary mortal. So CEO pay packages skyrocketed, rising from 42 times the average worker's salary in 1980 to 531 times the average worker's salary in 2000. .....

And it wasn't just the very best CEOs who were rolling in filthy lucre, either...

Executive pay was, on its own terms, scandalous. But what made it the engine of the kind of shenanigans we've seen at Enron and WorldCom was, of course, the fact that most CEO pay packages relied heavily on stock options. Options were not new - read any business history dating back to the 1950s, and it is clear that option packages were an important part of any CEO's compensation. But the nature of the options grants in the 1990s was qualitatively different.....

In 1995, Congress passed a law limiting the tax-deductibility of corporate salaries of more than $1m. But it allowed an exemption for any pay that was incentive-related. So options were a way of paying executives without forgoing tax benefits....

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. Most of the great scandals of the gilded age in America during the 19th century involved American managers who set up corporations (generally railroads) and then siphoned off the money of outside investors - who more often than not were British.....

As economist David Yermack of New York University has shown, stock option grants tended to be issued just before good news was released (thereby locking in a lower price for the option). Issuing more options didn't increase executives' stake in companies. They just cashed in existing options. And the way options were awarded encouraged executives to adopt risky strategies. If stock prices skyrocketed, they got massive options grants as a reward; if stock prices plummeted, they got massive options grants as an incentive, or they had their options repriced. Either way, executives couldn't really lose......

Finally, the sheer size of the grants exacerbated the problem. In the past, one check on managers' greed was that they stood to gain more from staying with a company for a long time than they did by playing fast and loose and cashing out early. But when you give CEOs the chance to make $300m in a year by stretching the rules a little bit, it's not too surprising that some of them will take you up on it.....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,761548,00.html

Very good article, took me just a couple of minutes to find it. In short, I believe you give CEOs entirely too much credit.

Besides, SlimShogun said the pampered son of a CEO...

Thanks, BTA.

Rastor, you eloquently [ha!] and totally missed what I was trying to say...in no way was I minimizing the importance of the jobs of the CEOs.

P.S. Living in NYC, I'm paying 40% income tax as of now...PARTIALLY BECAUSE OF GOVERNMENT SUBSIDATION OF CROPS.

[ October 24, 2002, 22:20: Message edited by: SlimShogun ]

Perhaps, you said that the pampered son earns 100k a year? How? Through his allowance or what?

Oh, and FYI, being from PA, we have a lot of farms around. You do realize that many of the private farms spend thousands or even a few million per day on maintenance, so don't give me the crap that farmers are very poor, although I do know what you were trying to get at.

According to pure economic theory, farms will not be profitable to run, so the government is forced to establish a price floor and subsidize farms so that the farmers will actually have some incentive to produce, instead of going out of business. I'd say that the higher income taxes are a small price to pay to actually be able to buy food, but this is getting really :yot: .

If you are saying that people should all start out on equal footing, instead of enjoying the wealth of the family that they were born into, I partially agree but recognise both sides. On the one hand, yes, removing inheritance and such will make everyone have to prove themselves worthy of having large amounts of money. On the reverse coin, many people work extra hard just to know that they can provide a better life for their children than they themselves were able to enjoy. You decide which is better.

Nah, huge farms turn quite a nice profit. Crop subsidies are caused by American obsession with the idea of the small farmer. They will go out of business without subsidies and price fixing. And they are hugely sympathetic figures. So any politician voting to end the farm subsidies gets nailed by his opponents for trying to kill the American dream.

I'd be kind of bummed if it were no longer possible for a man to make a decent living farming a small amount of land, but I realize that that's just nostalgia and really no way to run a country.

NO.

The son sits on his ass while his father the CEO makes 100K a month. The son is pampered, even though he does no work. I have nothing against this particular system, I was just trying to make a point to Sniper that just because someone makes more money than someone it doesn't mean they work harder or deserve it, while someone who works harder doesn't necessarily get more money or is more deserving.