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The only reason anyone in the US supports these people is because they have never lived in the socialist big government utopia these politicians champion. In f

The only reason anyone in the US supports these people is because they have never lived in the socialist big government utopia these politicians champion. In fact, not even the politicians themselves have lived in the society they propose! How is that for a brilliant starting point. Ask anyone who has experienced these ideas in the flesh and you’ll find someone absolutely perplexed that US voters don’t laugh these people out of office. As the saying goes: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. All US voters really know about these ideas are the promises and a distorted theory and history that conveniently leaves out the horror, the reality, of these ideas. They have been implemented time and time again in various forms across continents and time. And they have laid to waste everything they touch. You’d think people would have learned better by now. Sadly, that required an educational system rooted in fair historical exposure rather than one that pushes a single ideology at every level. This ignorance of history leads to repeating mistakes. Here is the other fact that absolutely floors me: Nobody can name a single nation —not one— which, after adopting these policies, has elevated itself to a level even remotely resembling the success and accomplishments that can be attributed to free market capitalism. Sure, capitalism isn’t perfect, nothing ever will be, yet it has elevated more people out of poverty, cured more disease and improved the lives of more people than anything else in recorded history. The allure of these twisted ideas comes at the intersection of a badly educated public and the promise of solving all problems by taking from those who have more. Easy proposition. Reality is that it never solves anything and often creates more problems. The $15/hr minimum wage “solution” is one of the best modern examples of this effects. The other element naive supporters miss is that the politicians proposing these ideas never live the reality they want you to live. They never live it before or after they are elected. See if you can name even a single politician who has, anywhere in the world and across modern history. That should tell you something.

dlp211 7y ago
Now name the Democrats trying to replace capitalism...I'll wait.
- rayiner 7y ago
  57% of them: https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socialism-capitalism.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socia... All of the major candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal, which espouses a massive economic program where the "public receives" "ownership stakes." It also calls for a WWII-level economic mobilization premised on wide-scale central planning.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dlp211 7y ago
    From that article: "Socialism as a concept is open to many interpretations. Gallup was describing socialism in questions asked in the 1940s in terms of government ownership of businesses -- something that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and most other left-leaning Democratic candidates have not advocated. Instead, socialism today seems to embody sets of programs by which the government helps regulate and in some instances run and pay for social programs focused on basic population needs in health, education, housing and employment." So not destroying capitalism but rather trying to blunt some of the sharp edges of capitalism. Nobody is trying to replace Google, GM, or JP Morgan with a government run company.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      As a purely technical matter socialism--especially when juxtaposed with capitalism, as in the Pew Gallup poll--means government ownership of businesses and central planning of economic activity. The DSA, which Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are affiliated with, do advocate for public ownership of businesses: https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/#govt https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism... > Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. See also: https://reason.com/2019/03/14/bernie-sanders-wanted-public-ownership-o/ https://reason.com/2019/03/14/bernie-sanders-wanted-public-o... > "I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries," Sanders told the Burlington Free Press in October 1976, at age 35 Given that socialism has been utterly discredited in Europe over the last couple of decades, groups like DSA try to obscure their views by equating socialism with the capitalist welfare states of Europe. But: https://mises.org/power-market/swedish-ex-prime-minister-rebukes-bernie-socialism-only-destroys https://mises.org/power-market/swedish-ex-prime-minister-reb... > Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994, Carl Bildt, took to Twitter to warn Sanders that socialism is not the key to creating a great society as he and Ocasio-Cortez seem to think. This is not just a matter of terminology and semantics. Over the last 20 years, Europeans have aggressively embraced market policies. They're all aggressively cutting corporate taxes and capital gains taxes. They've privatized state-owned businesses and deregulated industries. Sweden has had school vouchers for decades, and the subway in Stockholm is privately operated. The tax system in Sweden is remarkably flat, and the tax burden is borne primarily by the middle class. (I.e. the middle class pays for its own robust welfare system.) Those are not the policies espoused by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. Whereas Sweden has school vouchers, they're proposing curbing charter schools. Neither are proposing to privatize operation of New York's or DC's failing subway systems, to match Stockholm's model. Whereas Sweden's taxes are already less progressive than the U.S.'s (Sweden's top tax rate starts at $70,000), Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are proposing to shift even more of the tax burden to the rich, while Sweden is cutting taxes for the rich. While even Republicans, much less Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, are unwilling to touch Social Security, Sweden has moved to a partially privatized defined-contribution system. Whereas Sweden has a carbon tax, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are trying to address climate change through central planning. (The Green New Deal, for example, would involve taxing tens of trillions of dollars out of the private economy, and reallocating it to centrally-planned, government-directed economic activity.) If you read through the Green New Deal, it doesn't resemble the market-oriented approaches of modern Scandinavia. It's all about government-directed economic activity, guaranteed jobs, etc. That's old-school socialism.
pcwalton 7y ago
Antitrust law isn't a socialist idea; it's a capitalist one. The idea behind it is the standard neoclassical principle that markets achieve maximum efficiency, and therefore consumer welfare is maximized, when they are competitive. No less a capitalist than Adam Smith articulated these ideas when he wrote "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
- robomartin 7y ago
  Friend, the extremists who have taken over the narrative and soul of the Democratic party are not talking about antitrust. They are talking about remaking the US in the image of a demented ideology NONE OF THEM have ever lived under or have any experience managing in any imaginable way. They are in love with an ideology that has laid waste to entire nations across nearly every continent on this planet. As a Classical Liberal/Libertarian myself I find these people to be absolutely repugnant. They are selling the masses on ideas that will cause incredible damage. I mean, Bernie himself is on video during a debate talking about creating, if I remember correctly, 40 million government jobs. We know EXACTLY how something like that would end, because it has been done in many nations at different scales. The short answer is: Not well at all. This discussion isn't a matter of opinion, this is a matter of historical fact across nations and time. Nobody who pushes these ideologies can name a single nation on any continent in the last hundred years that has experienced good outcomes from their adoption. And by this I mean, to include raising people out of poverty and generating economic growth at a minimum. These conversations are like the people who promote coffee enemas to cure cancer, or the flat-earth-ers. Lot's of passion and even followers, but not one of them can back up what they are saying with any semblance of a reality that approaches confirmation of their promises in any way that would not caused them to be laughed out of the room. The fact that a society like that of the US doesn't laugh these people right out of the political sphere is of great concern. It means, at a minimum, that our educational system is severely damaged. No educated society would elevate these ideas. Most developing nations in the world aspire to be like the United States of America, and here we have a bunch of politicians and their followers wanting the US to be like most failed nations of the world. This is a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, to say the least.
dmode 7y ago
I have no idea what you just said. I personally, have lived in Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany - quite socialist, and big government places, with public healthcare, education, childcare, strong safety nets, unions, worker protections, so on and so forth. And life was freaking great. In fact, in Netherlands, you only needed to work for 36 hours. Those were the happiest times of my life.
- nec4b 7y ago
  Except that none of those places are socialist, instead they are one of the most capitalist countries on earth.
- robomartin 7y ago
  Those are not socialist nations, not even close. This is a common response that has no basis in reality. For example: Have any of those nations taken over and nationalized large businesses? Have any of those nations grown government so large that a massive percentage of the population depends on it to survive? Those countries are as capitalist as you can get in practice. They just happen to have one or more well developed social programs that compare favorably to the US. This is commendable, BTW, and there is no reason for which the US should not actually do better than all of these nations put together on these fronts. The reason we do not is because our politicians, well, suck. When people point at just a handful of European nations and claim them to be examples of socialism doing well, the usually point at Nordic countries and even places like Germany and the Netherlands, as you did. This false assertion is always based on a single data point: Healthcare. Or, by extension, high taxes and healthcare and maybe education. Nothing else. Well folks, universal healthcare does not make a country socialist. Show me where Karl Marx explained this was the goal of socialism and you might have a point. It's even worse when you truly look a the economies in these countries and understand how it is they are able to do as they do. For example, having an oil-based economy that supports great social programs --which is like winning the lottery at a national level and using the money intelligently. The reason the US does not have an equivalent healthcare system is because politicians, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been focusing on the wrong variable in this complex multivariate equation: Insurance. The US does not have a health insurance problem, it has a health costs problem. Until that side of the equation is balanced the situation will not improve, whether you go to Medicare for all or do something else. This is a business, and you have to balance costs if you want to improve outcomes. What are the cost drivers? The first layer might be a heavy regulatory framework that makes everything more expensive. Regulation is important and necessary. Over-regulation, to the point where the cost of doing business is negatively affected, is bad for everyone. Just try to develop a medical device or drug in the US and see what happens. I have been wanting to develop a specialized hearing aid for what is known as "Single Side Deafness" for quite some time. It's impossible without a massive amount of money and likely not a large enough market to make it worth investor's funding such an effort. The impediment isn't in technology, it's in the onerous and extremely expensive (in time and money) regulatory framework. We end-up with investors and intelligent folks devoting their money and smarts to figuring out how to get more people to click on links than devoting their time and money to solving important problems. Why is it that Europe and others pay so much less for the same drugs and devices that are so expensive in the US. Because we develop them here and the US bares 100% of the cost of the US regulatory burden. In other words, we, in the US, pay for what it cost to do business here. The rest of the world pays for the basic COGS on these products plus some profit. The difference is massive. If the various European nations had to pay for the actual cost of developing anything sourced from US companies their medical systems would crack and crumble. The UK's NHS is and has been in trouble for some times precisely due to the cost side of the equation, something that is unsustainable [0]. In 2017 the NHS's budget represented over 30% of public spending. Something like that is not sustainable. The net result is that care goes to hell, people have to wait months for care and others who are able to end-up paying for private care (negating the entire concept of these systems being the solution to healthcare). That's just ONE of the cost drivers in the US. Next you have to look at tort reform. For those not familiar with the term, it means lawsuits, doctors, clinics, hospitals, medical device and drug manufacturers exposure to being sued. This is a problem in the US that permeates almost every aspect of life to varying degrees. For example, if you run a website today you can be sued any time if you don't implement ADA accessibility guidelines. I am NOT saying the ADA guidelines are a bad thing, what I am saying is that in the US we use a sledge-hammer in the form of lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits rather than a more rational and less socially costly process. In the medical field, the cost of lawsuits is massive. Which also means insurance costs are large. Doctors, depending on specialization, have to pay for very expensive protection (insurance) against predatory attorneys looking to make a buck from any mistake they might make when treating a patient. The cost for hospitals and medical device and drug manufacturers is equally massive. There are repercussions to this structure. A simple example is that doctors will order and perform a battery of sometimes unnecessary tests on patients simply because of the threat. Nobody wants to go to court and have to face severe career-ending penalties, so they order tons of tests to cover their behinds. Medicine ceases to be about the patient when doctors are worried about lawyers. Yet another cost driver is the high cost of university education in the US, and, in particular, medical education. When a doctor graduates with US $300K in debt they cannot earn below a certain threshold. Their lives will soon include added costs for a house, car and eventually a growing family with their own cost structures. They will also need insurance for their home, cars, healthcare and practice. Without charging enough for their services they become enslaved to the cost of their education. As it is, most will require decades to pay off these loans. The cost of our education is out of control precisely due to government intervention. When a government guarantees loans as they do universities charge massive amounts of money for their degrees. The result is a chain reaction of costs at every level that affect the competitiveness of our medical industry in more ways than one. It's easy to point at a few countries in Europe and, just because they have "socialized" medicine and high taxes conclude that's utopia and the US's problems are due to evil capitalism. A more intellectually honest dive into the realities behind these issues reveals a completely different scenario, a truth where most of the failings in the US are easily attributable to failures in policy and politics and government becoming far more involved than they should. And then there's the "life is great" assertion and yet we don't see hundreds of millions of people wanting to move into any of these nations. In fact, if they don't control immigration tightly they would crumble in short order. Interestingly enough, if the US made immigration free and open we would probably easily double our population in a very short period of time. Everyone wants to come here, including people from the countries you mentioned. I also presume from your comment you no longer live in any of those countries. If life was so great, why not? The most common answer to that question is, lack of opportunity. Everything comes at a cost. [0] "10 charts that show why the NHS is in trouble" https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110

dlp211 7y ago

Now name the Democrats trying to replace capitalism...I'll wait.

rayiner 7y ago
57% of them: https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socialism-capitalism.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socia... All of the major candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal, which espouses a massive economic program where the "public receives" "ownership stakes." It also calls for a WWII-level economic mobilization premised on wide-scale central planning.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dlp211 7y ago
  From that article: "Socialism as a concept is open to many interpretations. Gallup was describing socialism in questions asked in the 1940s in terms of government ownership of businesses -- something that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and most other left-leaning Democratic candidates have not advocated. Instead, socialism today seems to embody sets of programs by which the government helps regulate and in some instances run and pay for social programs focused on basic population needs in health, education, housing and employment." So not destroying capitalism but rather trying to blunt some of the sharp edges of capitalism. Nobody is trying to replace Google, GM, or JP Morgan with a government run company.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    As a purely technical matter socialism--especially when juxtaposed with capitalism, as in the Pew Gallup poll--means government ownership of businesses and central planning of economic activity. The DSA, which Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are affiliated with, do advocate for public ownership of businesses: https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/#govt https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism... > Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. See also: https://reason.com/2019/03/14/bernie-sanders-wanted-public-ownership-o/ https://reason.com/2019/03/14/bernie-sanders-wanted-public-o... > "I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries," Sanders told the Burlington Free Press in October 1976, at age 35 Given that socialism has been utterly discredited in Europe over the last couple of decades, groups like DSA try to obscure their views by equating socialism with the capitalist welfare states of Europe. But: https://mises.org/power-market/swedish-ex-prime-minister-rebukes-bernie-socialism-only-destroys https://mises.org/power-market/swedish-ex-prime-minister-reb... > Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994, Carl Bildt, took to Twitter to warn Sanders that socialism is not the key to creating a great society as he and Ocasio-Cortez seem to think. This is not just a matter of terminology and semantics. Over the last 20 years, Europeans have aggressively embraced market policies. They're all aggressively cutting corporate taxes and capital gains taxes. They've privatized state-owned businesses and deregulated industries. Sweden has had school vouchers for decades, and the subway in Stockholm is privately operated. The tax system in Sweden is remarkably flat, and the tax burden is borne primarily by the middle class. (I.e. the middle class pays for its own robust welfare system.) Those are not the policies espoused by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. Whereas Sweden has school vouchers, they're proposing curbing charter schools. Neither are proposing to privatize operation of New York's or DC's failing subway systems, to match Stockholm's model. Whereas Sweden's taxes are already less progressive than the U.S.'s (Sweden's top tax rate starts at $70,000), Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are proposing to shift even more of the tax burden to the rich, while Sweden is cutting taxes for the rich. While even Republicans, much less Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, are unwilling to touch Social Security, Sweden has moved to a partially privatized defined-contribution system. Whereas Sweden has a carbon tax, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are trying to address climate change through central planning. (The Green New Deal, for example, would involve taxing tens of trillions of dollars out of the private economy, and reallocating it to centrally-planned, government-directed economic activity.) If you read through the Green New Deal, it doesn't resemble the market-oriented approaches of modern Scandinavia. It's all about government-directed economic activity, guaranteed jobs, etc. That's old-school socialism.

pcwalton 7y ago

Antitrust law isn't a socialist idea; it's a capitalist one. The idea behind it is the standard neoclassical principle that markets achieve maximum efficiency, and therefore consumer welfare is maximized, when they are competitive. No less a capitalist than Adam Smith articulated these ideas when he wrote "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

robomartin 7y ago
Friend, the extremists who have taken over the narrative and soul of the Democratic party are not talking about antitrust. They are talking about remaking the US in the image of a demented ideology NONE OF THEM have ever lived under or have any experience managing in any imaginable way. They are in love with an ideology that has laid waste to entire nations across nearly every continent on this planet. As a Classical Liberal/Libertarian myself I find these people to be absolutely repugnant. They are selling the masses on ideas that will cause incredible damage. I mean, Bernie himself is on video during a debate talking about creating, if I remember correctly, 40 million government jobs. We know EXACTLY how something like that would end, because it has been done in many nations at different scales. The short answer is: Not well at all. This discussion isn't a matter of opinion, this is a matter of historical fact across nations and time. Nobody who pushes these ideologies can name a single nation on any continent in the last hundred years that has experienced good outcomes from their adoption. And by this I mean, to include raising people out of poverty and generating economic growth at a minimum. These conversations are like the people who promote coffee enemas to cure cancer, or the flat-earth-ers. Lot's of passion and even followers, but not one of them can back up what they are saying with any semblance of a reality that approaches confirmation of their promises in any way that would not caused them to be laughed out of the room. The fact that a society like that of the US doesn't laugh these people right out of the political sphere is of great concern. It means, at a minimum, that our educational system is severely damaged. No educated society would elevate these ideas. Most developing nations in the world aspire to be like the United States of America, and here we have a bunch of politicians and their followers wanting the US to be like most failed nations of the world. This is a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, to say the least.

dmode 7y ago

I have no idea what you just said. I personally, have lived in Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany - quite socialist, and big government places, with public healthcare, education, childcare, strong safety nets, unions, worker protections, so on and so forth. And life was freaking great. In fact, in Netherlands, you only needed to work for 36 hours. Those were the happiest times of my life.

nec4b 7y ago
Except that none of those places are socialist, instead they are one of the most capitalist countries on earth.
robomartin 7y ago
Those are not socialist nations, not even close. This is a common response that has no basis in reality. For example: Have any of those nations taken over and nationalized large businesses? Have any of those nations grown government so large that a massive percentage of the population depends on it to survive? Those countries are as capitalist as you can get in practice. They just happen to have one or more well developed social programs that compare favorably to the US. This is commendable, BTW, and there is no reason for which the US should not actually do better than all of these nations put together on these fronts. The reason we do not is because our politicians, well, suck. When people point at just a handful of European nations and claim them to be examples of socialism doing well, the usually point at Nordic countries and even places like Germany and the Netherlands, as you did. This false assertion is always based on a single data point: Healthcare. Or, by extension, high taxes and healthcare and maybe education. Nothing else. Well folks, universal healthcare does not make a country socialist. Show me where Karl Marx explained this was the goal of socialism and you might have a point. It's even worse when you truly look a the economies in these countries and understand how it is they are able to do as they do. For example, having an oil-based economy that supports great social programs --which is like winning the lottery at a national level and using the money intelligently. The reason the US does not have an equivalent healthcare system is because politicians, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been focusing on the wrong variable in this complex multivariate equation: Insurance. The US does not have a health insurance problem, it has a health costs problem. Until that side of the equation is balanced the situation will not improve, whether you go to Medicare for all or do something else. This is a business, and you have to balance costs if you want to improve outcomes. What are the cost drivers? The first layer might be a heavy regulatory framework that makes everything more expensive. Regulation is important and necessary. Over-regulation, to the point where the cost of doing business is negatively affected, is bad for everyone. Just try to develop a medical device or drug in the US and see what happens. I have been wanting to develop a specialized hearing aid for what is known as "Single Side Deafness" for quite some time. It's impossible without a massive amount of money and likely not a large enough market to make it worth investor's funding such an effort. The impediment isn't in technology, it's in the onerous and extremely expensive (in time and money) regulatory framework. We end-up with investors and intelligent folks devoting their money and smarts to figuring out how to get more people to click on links than devoting their time and money to solving important problems. Why is it that Europe and others pay so much less for the same drugs and devices that are so expensive in the US. Because we develop them here and the US bares 100% of the cost of the US regulatory burden. In other words, we, in the US, pay for what it cost to do business here. The rest of the world pays for the basic COGS on these products plus some profit. The difference is massive. If the various European nations had to pay for the actual cost of developing anything sourced from US companies their medical systems would crack and crumble. The UK's NHS is and has been in trouble for some times precisely due to the cost side of the equation, something that is unsustainable [0]. In 2017 the NHS's budget represented over 30% of public spending. Something like that is not sustainable. The net result is that care goes to hell, people have to wait months for care and others who are able to end-up paying for private care (negating the entire concept of these systems being the solution to healthcare). That's just ONE of the cost drivers in the US. Next you have to look at tort reform. For those not familiar with the term, it means lawsuits, doctors, clinics, hospitals, medical device and drug manufacturers exposure to being sued. This is a problem in the US that permeates almost every aspect of life to varying degrees. For example, if you run a website today you can be sued any time if you don't implement ADA accessibility guidelines. I am NOT saying the ADA guidelines are a bad thing, what I am saying is that in the US we use a sledge-hammer in the form of lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits rather than a more rational and less socially costly process. In the medical field, the cost of lawsuits is massive. Which also means insurance costs are large. Doctors, depending on specialization, have to pay for very expensive protection (insurance) against predatory attorneys looking to make a buck from any mistake they might make when treating a patient. The cost for hospitals and medical device and drug manufacturers is equally massive. There are repercussions to this structure. A simple example is that doctors will order and perform a battery of sometimes unnecessary tests on patients simply because of the threat. Nobody wants to go to court and have to face severe career-ending penalties, so they order tons of tests to cover their behinds. Medicine ceases to be about the patient when doctors are worried about lawyers. Yet another cost driver is the high cost of university education in the US, and, in particular, medical education. When a doctor graduates with US $300K in debt they cannot earn below a certain threshold. Their lives will soon include added costs for a house, car and eventually a growing family with their own cost structures. They will also need insurance for their home, cars, healthcare and practice. Without charging enough for their services they become enslaved to the cost of their education. As it is, most will require decades to pay off these loans. The cost of our education is out of control precisely due to government intervention. When a government guarantees loans as they do universities charge massive amounts of money for their degrees. The result is a chain reaction of costs at every level that affect the competitiveness of our medical industry in more ways than one. It's easy to point at a few countries in Europe and, just because they have "socialized" medicine and high taxes conclude that's utopia and the US's problems are due to evil capitalism. A more intellectually honest dive into the realities behind these issues reveals a completely different scenario, a truth where most of the failings in the US are easily attributable to failures in policy and politics and government becoming far more involved than they should. And then there's the "life is great" assertion and yet we don't see hundreds of millions of people wanting to move into any of these nations. In fact, if they don't control immigration tightly they would crumble in short order. Interestingly enough, if the US made immigration free and open we would probably easily double our population in a very short period of time. Everyone wants to come here, including people from the countries you mentioned. I also presume from your comment you no longer live in any of those countries. If life was so great, why not? The most common answer to that question is, lack of opportunity. Everything comes at a cost. [0] "10 charts that show why the NHS is in trouble" https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110