> Politics and economics presuppose an answer to what is the good. Socialism, in all its variants, holds that sacrificing individuals for the benefit of "societ

> Politics and economics presuppose an answer to what is the good. Socialism, in all its variants, holds that sacrificing individuals for the benefit of "society" is the good. Since "society" is just a collection of individuals it has to mean in practice the sacrificing of some individuals for the benefit of others. Again, re-read what I said. Capitalism is also based on judgements that prioritize the benefit of some versus others. "Individual" vs "society" is an incoherent framing of rights because people exist as both individuals and members of a society. "Individual rights" are rights conferred to the collective, and are also rights that necessarily circumscribe what other people are allowed to do. Pretending like this isn't the case is just letting your ideology cloud your perception of what rights are "natural" or whatever. > This is its present and historical track record and an unavoidable consequence of that premise which can't be dismissed as an accident of history, errors, personalities or bad men but by design. Your knowledge of history is absolutely garbage and you've just ignored every reference to history I've brought up WRT capitalism and fascism, so why should anyone care what you think about this? > On the other hand, Capitalism rests on the opposite view that the individual is paramount and the purpose of the government (i.e. legal and political system) is to protect the individual from others violating his rights. The individual's right essentially amounts to the freedom to take action and the right to property. The govt's role is to protect the rights and property of its citizens from predation of others, including the govt itself. Even the framing of "positive" vs "negative" rights admits that all rights confer duties on people and circumscribe their agency, and any philosopher worth listening to will admit that _all_ rights have both positive and negative duties. "Individual" vs "collective" rights are absolutely meaningless. This is the slight of hand in the liberal tradition that ultimately reduces to rights that are perceived to be axiomatic and "natural" in some way and therefore "individual" because it fits your weak ass ideology's account of what it represents. > 51% of the people voting to expropriate the property of the other 49% does not make it moral, i.e., democratic socialism is an oxymoron. If the individual is paramount and his rights are protected by law, police and social norms, i.e. he is free, then capitalism is the economic system of production that develops. You even admit here that the police and law have to enforce your "individual rights", which is an implicit acknowledgement that they circumscribe the agency of others. But I'll take the acknowledgement (finally) that capitalism requires a statist carceral system. That's a start. > Finally, every single one of your replies on this thread are long, overly-complicated, convoluted rationalizations for socialism that are not meant to illuminate the discussion but obfuscate it. Learn to read pal, this is pretty minuscule in comparison to the political pamphlets and treatises that defined the ideas we're discussing. And stop using this cop out to ignore what I've said. > Perhaps you don't even know it but you use the exact same arguments that were used last century to spread socialism across the globe and the death of millions. These arguments won't work in this century and last century, for various reasons, people fell for socialism and accepted it voluntarily. That won't happen this time around so you are wasting your time with intellectual arguments, socialism will have to be imposed by force. Do you have the stomach for that battle? lol if the only socialist movements you're willing to acknowledge are ML(M) ones that almost uniformly happened in feudalist states under immense social upheaval, you're going to have this incredibly dumb and skewed perception of what socialism means. Expropriation doesn't require violence, and there's historical examples of socialists who have expropriated without violence beyond self-defense. Furthermore it's ironic that you internalize the same bullshit "dialectical materialism" ideas about the deterministic nature of history that some of the socialists you use as a boogieman also liked quite a bit. Hell even capitalist revolutions had expropriation and violence. What do you think happened in the American Revolution? Whose property rights were protected and which individual rights were preserved against "the collective"? You're just going to ignore this like every other reference to history I've brought up, so I dunno why I bother. If you're going to actually respond to my points, I'm happy to continue the conversation, but otherwise stop wasting my time.