5 ms·

Who Would Choose Socialism?

21 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

tokai 3y ago
(1978)
- sam_lowry_ 3y ago
  It would be helpful if someone compared this to the contemporary kibbutz movement. Are there still the same number of people? Rising? Declining? Morphing? What changed after Kibbutz crisis [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
(1978) Note, old Reason was pretty wild in content and contributors: "Did Reason Really Publish a "Holocaust Denial 'Special Issue'" in 1976?" https://reason.com/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish-a-holocaust-de/ https://reason.com/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish-a-ho... > Another of that issue's contributors, Gary North, would later be excoriated in this 1998 Reason article for arguing in favor of violent theocracy and the stoning of gays and others.
- aww_dang 3y ago
  Disclaimer and background: Reason isn't my favorite libertarian outlet. The pejorative commonly used is "beltway libertarian". There's a divide between the Rothbardians and the Koch, Reason and Cato types. Even today, you can find a somewhat recent crusade against Hoppe by a Koch funded academic Phil Magness. Of course Reason uncritically gave airtime to this crusade. That said, whenever there is a vaguely free-market publication submitted here, the guilt-by-association comments seem to come out of the woodwork. Interesting that the same is not true for CNN, BBC or the New York Times articles. They all have a long history of printing horrible deceptions. We could squabble over these past misdeeds or discuss the article at hand on the merits.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >That said, whenever there is a vaguely free-market publication submitted here, the guilt-by-association comments seem to come out of the woodwork. Try bringing up communism and see what happens. It'll be all guilt by association with various dictators concerned more with with personal power than communism (i.e. exactly like capitalist dictators). The libertarian movement was largely dragged from obscurity in the 80s by the Kochs during their fights with the EPA. That's where all that nonsense about hairdresser licensing got its headwinds. It was entirely an investor driven ideology, with its roots in letting rich businessmen enrich themselves by freeing themselves from the constraints of "overbearing" environmental regulations.
    - revelio 3y ago
      What's the link? When people bring up communism, other people describe what happened in communist systems. How is that guilt by association? What aww_dang means by that is that someone will write something libertarian or conservative, and the HN comments will fill up with replies of the form "did you know that on the same website is a different article by a different author that says something libertarian?!" which is a pointless sort of post. It is a form of signalling to other leftists saying "attack!", and against the ethos of the site as it's not intellectually curious.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    I pretty regularly see people bring up the NYT's record and don't really see a problem with context being provided. Maybe CNN and the BBC are more often submitted here due to the actual news they are covering rather than as part of an agenda that they are continually and explicitly expounding and so need that context less?
    - aww_dang 3y ago
      And when it is relevant to the topic at hand, people should bring up those past misdeeds. For example, if those aforementioned sources were selling a new war, it would be relevant to recall the Iraqi WMD debacle. Comments about disgraced CNN producer John Griffin or litigation against Don Lemon would not be relevant. As you say, it is all about context. Maybe you can elaborate on how "stoning gays" is relevant in this context?
_vbnz 3y ago
Seems weird to pit socialism against free markets. There's nothing about disallowing private ownership of the Earth's common resources, natural monopolies, etc. that stops having free markets everywhere else. If anything, allowing that is what corrupts free markets - as even with privatisation, you never have a real free market on the railways, highways, or electricity grid because we can only build a limited number of them and can't support multiple disjoint networks. But those corporations can then use that captive market for an unfair advantage entering other markets / verticals. I think the best solution would be free markets and liberalisation, except in natural monopolies, and a lot of taxation against accumulated and inherited wealth (not income) to provide a level playing field and economic mobility.
- avereveard 3y ago
  I'm ok with high taxes for sale and redistribution, but I don't think they have such large impact on economic mobility, at least at the top. After all real tax pressure on companies has been steadily going down, but the rate of change in the fortune 100 had been steadily increasing
  - pydry 3y ago
    Economic mobility != fortune 500 companies being swapped out with one another. Even more so as people increasingly opt out of individual stocks and just end up buying VTSAX or similar. It almost seems like a metric designed to mislead about economic mobility in fact. Where did you read about it?
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Fortune 500 companies are comprised of people who can receive varying pay packages based on their company's performance, the closer to the top they are the more direct this relationship is. Seems like a decent proxy measurement to me.
  - nivenkos 3y ago
    I mean economic mobility like making it easy for people to switch jobs, move city, work for startups, etc. So separating healthcare coverage from your employment is one important step, as is providing modern, in-depth STEM + Medicine education so people are able to work in highly skilled jobs where we really need them. That's a big part of driving disruption and progress.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Capitalism just has too many advantages, and closer mirrors human nature with our desire to take risks and build our own ideas. Socialism takes too much control away from people, stifles creativity, and IMO doesn't mach human nature. A hybrid system is ideal, or something even new that takes what works from both. For starters, a wealth and income threshold is needed. No individual human needs hundreds of millions of dollars let alone cash, and none of them directly earned or deserve that much. Everything past the threshold can be redistributed.
- Convolutional 3y ago
  > Capitalism just has too many advantages, and closer mirrors human nature It mirrors human nature? From the time of the early cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago to the rise of the class system 10,000 years ago, social classes did not even exist. Even 1000 years ago there were no capitalist societies. Odd how an economic system which "mirrors human nature" is so recent. In France I watched the yellow vests protest economic conditions and then the more recent strikes. Lula just took over in Brazil, and most (not all) of Latin America is run by governments of a like mind. Also 2022 did not see an expansion of trade, but Russia being cut off from it, and steps to cut China off from it (chip ban). The capitalist economic system may have a short life span.
- snvzz 3y ago
  Public universal health, transport, education, basic housing (bed and desk, with shared showers and toilets) so that nobody is homeless, I can get behind. I'd even add a small, fanless computer running open source software and with internet access. Increasing taxes on a ladder, I can understand. High taxes (50%) past a certain point, I can understand. Even universal income. >For starters, a wealth and income threshold is needed. No individual human needs hundreds of millions of dollars let alone cash, and none of them directly earned or deserve that much. Everything past the threshold can be redistributed. Absolutely not. Any country that does this would have me (and most people who actually value hard work) leaving. The idea should be to provide the basics (as above) to everybody, and not more. So that they can live a basic life, acquire skills, and potentially get an actual job and the benefits that come with it.
cgrealy 3y ago
Depends on how socialist you want your socialism to be. Most countries aren’t purely socialist in the same way the US isn’t purely capitalist. Who would want to live in a purely socialist society? Probably very few people. Who would want to live in a social democratic society? Most of the developed world.
- refurb 3y ago
  What does social democratic society even mean? Canada has almost 100% public health insurance coverage, while Switzerland insurance is entirely private. The US is a mix. The US public school system is based on where you live, while Sweden has a school voucher system where parents can choose where their kids go including private schools. So what exactly is a social democratic society?
  - soco 3y ago
    Swiss insurance is definitely NOT private the way US understands it so let's not throw them in the mix as an argument for private insurance. It's run by private companies true, but the rules to run them are very strict, established by the state and revised periodically both by the state and by popular referendums. So, there's absolutely no free insurance market and I'm happy having it this way.
    - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
      This actually is a good point. Capitalism and Socialism are broad labels that make little sense outside of scholastic arguments. As a side note, I live in a wealthy European parliamentary monarchy with stellar press freedom ratings and an abysmal quality of press that makes me want to ignore all local news outright. Is there an -ism for that? Decadentism?
      - soco 3y ago
        No idea... The decreasing press/media quality gets often correlated to a decreasing education quality, can you see around you such a thing?
HelloNurse 3y ago
I suppose this article wasn't meant as a parody, or is it?
derelicta 3y ago
Workplace democracy BAD say capitalists. Totally unbiased.
tjpnz 3y ago
Given the malignant form of capitalism many countries follow now could we blame them? Why do we bail out fragile financial institutions and reward the billionaires who run them? Why does a poor person with a good idea get ignored, while a wealthy grifter with a terrible idea gets treated like the second coming of christ?
andrewclunn 3y ago
Is Reason low key admitting that socialism can work, but only if there is ethnic homogeneity and ideological / religious unity? Somewhere between the "Socialism never works!" and the "Real Communism has never been tried!" flame war, the "What about national socialism?" question invariably emerges. Then everyone flees because the right wing doesn't want to be associated with Nazis, and the left wing doesn't want to admit what functioning socialism actually entails. Is my post bashing Reason and the selective memory of the right, conflating all socialists (and modern Israel) with the Nazis, or advocacy / apologism for national socialism? Well that all depends on your own bias as you read it.
azubinski 3y ago
"The kibbutzim are now a very comfortable alternative"... "Robert Nozick ... teaches philosophy at Harvard. He recently spent a year in Jerusalem". Why is this so funny?
- gibikahi 3y ago
  [dead]
WeylandYutani 3y ago
Anyone who doesn't earn enough money to live in a gated community with private police. But hell even rich people want socialism. Poor people carry diseases that they can spread so clean drinking water was installed in the slums.
gibikahi 3y ago
What a stupid article. > Even this does not enable us to disentangle (imagined) self-interest from our topic: the desire to participate in socialist interpersonal relations of equality and community. Why would we want to "disentangle" material benefit? Material benefit is the whole entire point. > these communities have been widely admired for performing the important functions of... Jewish self defense... Going mask-off here. Socialism is when imperialism. The writer obviously started with the agenda to justify Zionism and capitalism, and the article is a thin argument in favour of his preconceptions.
freediverx 3y ago
Reason: the propaganda rag for libertarians.

21 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

tokai 3y ago

(1978)

sam_lowry_ 3y ago
It would be helpful if someone compared this to the contemporary kibbutz movement. Are there still the same number of people? Rising? Declining? Morphing? What changed after Kibbutz crisis [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

(1978) Note, old Reason was pretty wild in content and contributors: "Did Reason Really Publish a "Holocaust Denial 'Special Issue'" in 1976?" https://reason.com/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish-a-holocaust-de/ https://reason.com/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish-a-ho... > Another of that issue's contributors, Gary North, would later be excoriated in this 1998 Reason article for arguing in favor of violent theocracy and the stoning of gays and others.

aww_dang 3y ago
Disclaimer and background: Reason isn't my favorite libertarian outlet. The pejorative commonly used is "beltway libertarian". There's a divide between the Rothbardians and the Koch, Reason and Cato types. Even today, you can find a somewhat recent crusade against Hoppe by a Koch funded academic Phil Magness. Of course Reason uncritically gave airtime to this crusade. That said, whenever there is a vaguely free-market publication submitted here, the guilt-by-association comments seem to come out of the woodwork. Interesting that the same is not true for CNN, BBC or the New York Times articles. They all have a long history of printing horrible deceptions. We could squabble over these past misdeeds or discuss the article at hand on the merits.
- pydry 3y ago
  >That said, whenever there is a vaguely free-market publication submitted here, the guilt-by-association comments seem to come out of the woodwork. Try bringing up communism and see what happens. It'll be all guilt by association with various dictators concerned more with with personal power than communism (i.e. exactly like capitalist dictators). The libertarian movement was largely dragged from obscurity in the 80s by the Kochs during their fights with the EPA. That's where all that nonsense about hairdresser licensing got its headwinds. It was entirely an investor driven ideology, with its roots in letting rich businessmen enrich themselves by freeing themselves from the constraints of "overbearing" environmental regulations.
  - revelio 3y ago
    What's the link? When people bring up communism, other people describe what happened in communist systems. How is that guilt by association? What aww_dang means by that is that someone will write something libertarian or conservative, and the HN comments will fill up with replies of the form "did you know that on the same website is a different article by a different author that says something libertarian?!" which is a pointless sort of post. It is a form of signalling to other leftists saying "attack!", and against the ethos of the site as it's not intellectually curious.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  I pretty regularly see people bring up the NYT's record and don't really see a problem with context being provided. Maybe CNN and the BBC are more often submitted here due to the actual news they are covering rather than as part of an agenda that they are continually and explicitly expounding and so need that context less?
  - aww_dang 3y ago
    And when it is relevant to the topic at hand, people should bring up those past misdeeds. For example, if those aforementioned sources were selling a new war, it would be relevant to recall the Iraqi WMD debacle. Comments about disgraced CNN producer John Griffin or litigation against Don Lemon would not be relevant. As you say, it is all about context. Maybe you can elaborate on how "stoning gays" is relevant in this context?

_vbnz 3y ago

Seems weird to pit socialism against free markets. There's nothing about disallowing private ownership of the Earth's common resources, natural monopolies, etc. that stops having free markets everywhere else. If anything, allowing that is what corrupts free markets - as even with privatisation, you never have a real free market on the railways, highways, or electricity grid because we can only build a limited number of them and can't support multiple disjoint networks. But those corporations can then use that captive market for an unfair advantage entering other markets / verticals. I think the best solution would be free markets and liberalisation, except in natural monopolies, and a lot of taxation against accumulated and inherited wealth (not income) to provide a level playing field and economic mobility.

avereveard 3y ago
I'm ok with high taxes for sale and redistribution, but I don't think they have such large impact on economic mobility, at least at the top. After all real tax pressure on companies has been steadily going down, but the rate of change in the fortune 100 had been steadily increasing
- pydry 3y ago
  Economic mobility != fortune 500 companies being swapped out with one another. Even more so as people increasingly opt out of individual stocks and just end up buying VTSAX or similar. It almost seems like a metric designed to mislead about economic mobility in fact. Where did you read about it?
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Fortune 500 companies are comprised of people who can receive varying pay packages based on their company's performance, the closer to the top they are the more direct this relationship is. Seems like a decent proxy measurement to me.
- nivenkos 3y ago
  I mean economic mobility like making it easy for people to switch jobs, move city, work for startups, etc. So separating healthcare coverage from your employment is one important step, as is providing modern, in-depth STEM + Medicine education so people are able to work in highly skilled jobs where we really need them. That's a big part of driving disruption and progress.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

Capitalism just has too many advantages, and closer mirrors human nature with our desire to take risks and build our own ideas. Socialism takes too much control away from people, stifles creativity, and IMO doesn't mach human nature. A hybrid system is ideal, or something even new that takes what works from both. For starters, a wealth and income threshold is needed. No individual human needs hundreds of millions of dollars let alone cash, and none of them directly earned or deserve that much. Everything past the threshold can be redistributed.

Convolutional 3y ago
> Capitalism just has too many advantages, and closer mirrors human nature It mirrors human nature? From the time of the early cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago to the rise of the class system 10,000 years ago, social classes did not even exist. Even 1000 years ago there were no capitalist societies. Odd how an economic system which "mirrors human nature" is so recent. In France I watched the yellow vests protest economic conditions and then the more recent strikes. Lula just took over in Brazil, and most (not all) of Latin America is run by governments of a like mind. Also 2022 did not see an expansion of trade, but Russia being cut off from it, and steps to cut China off from it (chip ban). The capitalist economic system may have a short life span.
snvzz 3y ago
Public universal health, transport, education, basic housing (bed and desk, with shared showers and toilets) so that nobody is homeless, I can get behind. I'd even add a small, fanless computer running open source software and with internet access. Increasing taxes on a ladder, I can understand. High taxes (50%) past a certain point, I can understand. Even universal income. >For starters, a wealth and income threshold is needed. No individual human needs hundreds of millions of dollars let alone cash, and none of them directly earned or deserve that much. Everything past the threshold can be redistributed. Absolutely not. Any country that does this would have me (and most people who actually value hard work) leaving. The idea should be to provide the basics (as above) to everybody, and not more. So that they can live a basic life, acquire skills, and potentially get an actual job and the benefits that come with it.

cgrealy 3y ago

Depends on how socialist you want your socialism to be. Most countries aren’t purely socialist in the same way the US isn’t purely capitalist. Who would want to live in a purely socialist society? Probably very few people. Who would want to live in a social democratic society? Most of the developed world.

refurb 3y ago
What does social democratic society even mean? Canada has almost 100% public health insurance coverage, while Switzerland insurance is entirely private. The US is a mix. The US public school system is based on where you live, while Sweden has a school voucher system where parents can choose where their kids go including private schools. So what exactly is a social democratic society?
- soco 3y ago
  Swiss insurance is definitely NOT private the way US understands it so let's not throw them in the mix as an argument for private insurance. It's run by private companies true, but the rules to run them are very strict, established by the state and revised periodically both by the state and by popular referendums. So, there's absolutely no free insurance market and I'm happy having it this way.
  - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
    This actually is a good point. Capitalism and Socialism are broad labels that make little sense outside of scholastic arguments. As a side note, I live in a wealthy European parliamentary monarchy with stellar press freedom ratings and an abysmal quality of press that makes me want to ignore all local news outright. Is there an -ism for that? Decadentism?
    - soco 3y ago
      No idea... The decreasing press/media quality gets often correlated to a decreasing education quality, can you see around you such a thing?

HelloNurse 3y ago

I suppose this article wasn't meant as a parody, or is it?

derelicta 3y ago

Workplace democracy BAD say capitalists. Totally unbiased.

tjpnz 3y ago

Given the malignant form of capitalism many countries follow now could we blame them? Why do we bail out fragile financial institutions and reward the billionaires who run them? Why does a poor person with a good idea get ignored, while a wealthy grifter with a terrible idea gets treated like the second coming of christ?

andrewclunn 3y ago

Is Reason low key admitting that socialism can work, but only if there is ethnic homogeneity and ideological / religious unity? Somewhere between the "Socialism never works!" and the "Real Communism has never been tried!" flame war, the "What about national socialism?" question invariably emerges. Then everyone flees because the right wing doesn't want to be associated with Nazis, and the left wing doesn't want to admit what functioning socialism actually entails. Is my post bashing Reason and the selective memory of the right, conflating all socialists (and modern Israel) with the Nazis, or advocacy / apologism for national socialism? Well that all depends on your own bias as you read it.

azubinski 3y ago

"The kibbutzim are now a very comfortable alternative"... "Robert Nozick ... teaches philosophy at Harvard. He recently spent a year in Jerusalem". Why is this so funny?

gibikahi 3y ago
[dead]

WeylandYutani 3y ago

Anyone who doesn't earn enough money to live in a gated community with private police. But hell even rich people want socialism. Poor people carry diseases that they can spread so clean drinking water was installed in the slums.

gibikahi 3y ago

What a stupid article. > Even this does not enable us to disentangle (imagined) self-interest from our topic: the desire to participate in socialist interpersonal relations of equality and community. Why would we want to "disentangle" material benefit? Material benefit is the whole entire point. > these communities have been widely admired for performing the important functions of... Jewish self defense... Going mask-off here. Socialism is when imperialism. The writer obviously started with the agenda to justify Zionism and capitalism, and the article is a thin argument in favour of his preconceptions.

freediverx 3y ago

Reason: the propaganda rag for libertarians.