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This bonmot sounded cool and fun years ago, but not anymore. It is actually OK and desirable for governments to help, to organize and to lead toward positive ou
by watwut 4mo ago
This bonmot sounded cool and fun years ago, but not anymore. It is actually OK and desirable for governments to help, to organize and to lead toward positive outcome. Governments should do more then just pay military, prisons and police.
Deliberate destruction and expectation of nothing positive from the governments already caused enough damage.
- philipallstar 4mo agoIt never sounded cool and fun. It was government acknowledging its own limitations. Governments don't perform better if we all cheer them on. Right now a government (Russia's) is waging war on a country. Last century governments caused untold death in socialist countries (Venezuela, China, USSR) because they were trying to organise centrally.
- tempfile 4mo agoIn the spirit of fairness I have to note the untold deaths caused by non-socialist countries in Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, pretty much every country in South America...
- squigz 4mo agoOr even Western nations like America and Canada? How many people die every year from preventable causes? To exposure? To suicide?
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoI never understood this selfish desire to stop people from killing themselves. What's it to you if a person jumps from a building or shots itself in the head? Did you ever think that they might have had actually good reasons for doing what they did?
- squigz 4mo agoIt's not seflish though - who has to clean that up? What about the people nearby who have to witness it?
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoThe coroner will take the body. Just as if that person was shot by a robber. People nearby don't have to look if they don't want to.
- squigz 4mo agoYou think that a coroner cleans that up? I'm pretty sure that's not the way it works.
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoCrime scene cleaners? The Sanitation Department? Still cheaper than having 10-20 cops sitting around talking to the person.
- squigz 4mo agoWell at least we got to the heart of the issue - it's too costly to try to prevent people from killing themselves. Truly perfect example of how capitalism views life. Of course, that most people regret their attempt after being saved by those 10-20 cops is irrelevant, right? I wonder what the benefits to society of that person being alive come out to, vs the costs to save them. Anyway, you've completely missed my point (twice, in fact), so we're done here.
- philipallstar 4mo agoThat's not capitalism, it's personal responsibility. Why do you dump all the responsibility on other people to stop someone from killing themselves, and nothing on the person actually doing it?
- soco 4mo agoLast century non-socialist governments caused untold deaths in many Western countries, starting with Germany for a better known example, but the entire list is quite long. So could it be that it wasn't socialism the problem?
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoSocialism is always the problem. If you're talking about the Nazis in Germany, socialism is in their name, you now? If you're talking before Hitler, the Kaiser was socialist. So socialism anyway you slice it.
- inigyou 4mo agoNational is also in their name. Therefore, nations killed all those people. We need to ban nations.
- throw10920 4mo agoUh, the point was that a single ideology caused deaths due to socialism. Unless you think that there's a single ideology that caused all of the deaths in the countries you mentioned, then this isn't "in the spirit of fairness", it's just misrepresentation.
- tempfile 3mo agoAll the incidents I mentioned were acts of US imperialism.
- philipallstar 4mo agoAgree - the world has horrible things happening, although not on the scale of socialism. The thing that comes close is WW2, but that was an actual war, and not just starving millions of people due to central planning. However, Cambodia: > Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were supported for many years by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by Mao Zedong;[c] it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which the Khmer Rouge received came from China, including at least US $1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid in 1975 alone.[11][12][13] After it seized power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge wanted to turn the country into an agrarian socialist republic, founded on the policies of ultra-Maoism and influenced by the Cultural Revolution. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
- tempfile 3mo agoIn Cambodia I was referring to [1] [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal#Cambodian_deaths_caused_by_U.S._bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal#Cambodi...
- inigyou 4mo agoCapitalism has killed 100 million people, and that's just the verified deaths.
- lenerdenator 4mo agoAnd now we've overcorrected and have people dying from a lack of government care. It was indeed meant to sound "cool and fun". It was supposed to be a memorable slogan. That's why Reagan used it. Then people made it into a battle cry for letting the hyper-wealthy dismantle regulations that were often written in blood, or for explaining why we need to let people go into bankruptcy from medical bills. Having some centralized/public ownership of some enterprises doesn't necessarily mean that the government is going to purge people or starve tens of millions.
- watwut 4mo ago> It was government acknowledging its own limitations No it was not. It was deliberately trying to make government sound as useless as possible, so that its useful programs can be dismantled. You are ignoring all good things that came out of governments. That is also deliberate choice. If Ukraine government fell, they would be Russians now. Last century, we have see a lot of good coming out of governments - starting with new deal, human rights, historically unprecedented period of peace in Europe and prosperity. Science, education, healthcare all work better when governments work well.
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoYou're conflating issues: governments started wars, they lost, new governments did not want to repeat the war because the people that elected them opposed it. Human rights, at least in the US, were the won by a lot of suffering from the ordinary people, not by the benevolence of any senator/congressman/president. They passed the laws to appease the people, not because they wanted to. Science comes when governments do not impede research. Do you think SpaceX would have existed if the government decided to help? NASA has become a shell of its former self, launching rockets into space that cost more than who knows how many Falcon launches. Government at work. I could go on, but we, as a species, need a government to kind of keep peace amongst our selves and not go overboard too much. But more than that, governments are a hindrance to human evolution and development.
- fragmede 4mo agoThen again, the British East India Company committed plenty of atrocities as a corporation, so if we're going to oversimplify to government bad, it seems corporations bad too. Don't get me started on religious either!
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoAs a counter example, a government (Ukraine) is defending against the Russian invasion and is looking more and more like it might win that fight. Would they be better off without a government?
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoThe governement of Unraine is sending its people to die on the frontlines while the elites party in Kyiev and their president is an entitled choosing beggar. How are they helping the prople again?
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoProbably with the exception of a country or two, governments never run a successful business when competition is involved. Never ever. So no, it is not desirable for the government to intervene in any way in private business and "save them".
- inigyou 4mo agoThey don't have to. Private business has to do at least as well as the government business or it won't make any sales, so quality increases and price decreases even if the government business doesn't sell anything.
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoYou do know it is illegal in most places to sell under cost, right? So why would be legal for a government to sell something below cost but illegal for a company to do the same thing?
- inigyou 4mo agoBy definition the cost of a thing is what it sells for.