Admittedly, I approached this article with a mixture of fear and anger. Setting aside these feelings and, valiantly I may add, resisting the urge to break something, I read. It was not until approximately 1/2 complete, that the actual story was revealed:
“Exactly how Americans define “socialism” or what exactly they think of when they hear the word is not known”
It occurs to me, that this statement encapsulates much of what I believe to be a the failings and ills of society today.
Gone are the days, if they once existed, of opinions rooted in fact and study. Regardless of your thought of socialism, should not an individual have, at the very least, a general understanding of an issue prior to lending their thoughts a voice? I cannot help but feel, that this seemingly minor issue, lies curled at the base of the majority of the problems we face as Americans today. The consistent failure, day in and out, to truly define that which you stand for and against has become an anchor on this great nation.
Daily, people expound upon that which they half-understand, vote without research or fact, blindly trust that all will be “okay”, and, in the end, assign blame where they see fit. The responsibility for the mess we currently enjoy lies within us all. Whether because we have failed to properly educate ourselves in each decision, to prepare our children, or merely to speak out when the time is ripe, the fault is surely ours. With every silenced tongue and lazy opinion, democracy dies.
“Socialism refers to the various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on the amount of labor expended.”
This is what you get when government intervenes in education. Years and years of the left running our school systems has destroyed the thinking process of our young. They have even changed history to fit their policies. The first thing we need to do is take back our government and make it the Constitutional government our founding fathers gave us.
“From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.”
A simple phrase that has wrought atrocities worldwide in the name of doing “good”.
The government intervening in education is a problem for us in the now, but if it isn’t the government, it would be another advocacy group. Check your history. Harvard was founded to promote religion, and through the ages education has been used to promote a viewpoint.
The trouble with education now would not be the content if it weren’t for the guidelines to get money. Money drives agenda, agenda drives message, message drives agenda, agenda promotes money in a big circle game.
The real problem as I see it is a universal tendency for people to take the easy way out. Some people do things the hard way and research, and question their premises and refine their theories. Most follow the line of least resistance, especially on philosophy, they are more concerned with the practicalities. It’s not really ok to put people down for putting their basic needs first, it’s how we became wired to survive. The task for those who want to push a thinking approach is to make that thinking “real” to the “pupil.” (Say, haven’t we just developed an educational agenda to prod society in our own direction?)
For instance, when mentioning “socialism,” I notice a common response is “It’s good to have interstate freeways.” And it is good, if it is a good thing to be able to drive rapidly all over the US. I remember when we didn’t have them and travel was a lot more adventurous. Now it’s blah. On the other hand, it’s great to have supplies quickly available. This program, and others like the big water management projects that have allowed civilization in the west, are definitely government, social jobs. People from all over the country contributed. Is it fair? This is the crux. When is it most fair and most just and most beneficial all around to give a job to the government, i.e. “socialize” it?
This will be the 36% who will be working for the railroads that go to the gulags.
Socialism Viewed Positively by 36% of Americans
36% of Americans are MORONS… 👿
When I was young and not interested in or knowledgeable about politics, I didn’t vote. I ignored the haranging from the usual liberal voices urging me to just get out and vote. I figured, the only decent thing to do was to let the people who knew the issues and cared about them decide, so that fools like me didn’t screw things up.
I know we can’t have a competency test for voters, and we can’t stop anyone from voting on something they know less than nothing about. But real education and real journalism would refrain from urging every idiot to vote, at the very least.
Many people I’ve spoken to think that socialism is about helping people. They often have no clue who Karl Marx is. So they bandy about the word thinking more of “compassion” or “charity by government.” Yet, then, when you question them a bit further, or put out ideas for socialism, all of a sudden they become very libertarian-conservative, or Republican. They are not socialists at all.
I recall that someone I knew said she was a bleeding heart liberal — and when I corrected her to being a bleeding heart humanitarian, well, she saw that as a much better description of who she was.
This is, I believe, an actual case of people being misinformed, of the message not being clear. Socialism is an easy thing to hide nasty stuff in, under the guise of helping people. That’s why it seems to me it is imperative to make sure the American people know that current Democrat Party people are indeed old-style socialists, and that will put a big kabosh on their dreams of poppa marx making all the big decisions.
People are not as ignorant as it seems, which we should learn from Democratic claims to the contrary. Most people are too busy running their own lives to go learn about political philosophy, which is understandable. So I would think that 36% is more like 20% die hard real socialists in our midst, and some 15% just not sure of what to call their instinct to help people, which of course can be done very conservatively, libertarian-wise, or even Republican, too.
#2, JohnGalt:
“The greatest source of post-war [World War 2] democide was communism (see the communist death toll). During and after the war communists seized power, or came to power with the help of Soviet military might, as in Eastern Europe. In addition to the USSR, Mongolia, Eastern European regimes, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, communist regimes eventually also included China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and South Yemen, or 26 regimes in all. These communist governments and the communist guerrillas they supported in other countries account for about 66,000,000 of the 76,000,000 murdered since the war, or about 87 percent. Clearly, of all regimes, communist ones have been by far the greatest killer. During these years it has been mostly death by Marxism than more generally by government. ”
Emphasis mine, source: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/POSTWWII.HTM
Nuada
I have attributed the phrase rightly to the broader socialist movement, of which, communism is a subcategory, as is several other socialist versions. Fascism has been wrongly or rightly described as, depending on your view and understanding of socialism, a version of socialism as well. The atrocities committed in Cambodia and Ethiopia during the 70’s were due to forms of communist, and thus socialist movements.
Socialism, in general and specifically in practice, has been one of the worst abusers of human rights in the world, and much of it during the latter half of the last century, and the phrase “From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.” has been the underlying mantra of all.
Hi JohnGalt,
Lest I was unclear, I am agreeing with you. Karl Marx’s famous words, which you quoted, are indeed words intended to sound reasonable, while minimizing the individual human spirit to nothing greater than a “Worker”. Socialism has always led to the leadership of that ideology becoming an elite “more equal than you” class which abuses its position and harshly treats those who question the system.
Nuada
I was not arguing, but trying to make it even more clear to everyone that socialism, in a broader sense, included many instances of not only human rights abuses, but the abhorrent practice of democide, of which you provided the word. You were very clear in your assessment of communism, and I apologize if I was unclear to you in my response. It was not intended as an argument against what you posted. As for the phrase “From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.”, it is most famously attributed to Karl Marx, but was used prior to him in 1840 by Louis Blanc, a French socialist politician.
Socialism and Communism, different flavors of control. But communism is dead. So say our youth, convinced that once the Iron Curtain fell so did communism. Yet we find a plethora of organization espousing marxist philosophies. They might not have “communist” in their moniker but there is no mistaking their end goal. They write books on how to implement their desired agenda through the nudging of American policy step by step, by creating crisis that can be exploited to their benefit, by creating class dissention that can be exploited. Their timeline has no limit. They have websites and produce video’s espousing their radical views. Ah… But they don’t exist, communism is dead and anyone that thinks there are still communists must be a paranoid right wing Bircher.
More and more youth are parroting their mantra, capitalism is bad, profits are bad. Only the State can know what is best for us. The people are not equipped or smart enough to pursue their own best interest. We must be nudged through deceptions and lies to accept that we are too stupid to know what’s best and that only when we allow the elite to make our decisions for us will we truly know freedom.
Communism is in part the contol of the means of production.
General Motors is now 60% owned by the Federal goverment. Anyone that knows how the board of directors of a corporation is elected knows that you don’t have to own 100% of the stock to control the company which equates to controlling the means of prodution. Turn up the heat dial on the frog pot!
The government has deemed some financial companies too large to fail. If a company is so big that it cannot fail, this doctrine eliminates the need for profit in the business equation. The taxpayer will step in to bail the non-profitable company out, but with strings attached, the result, government bureaucratic control of the means of production. Turn up the heat dial on the frog pot!
Health insurance companies make about four percent profit. But profit is bad therefor the insurance companies must be bad therefor we must have a government option to make those nasty insurance companies compete. But wait, the government doesn’t have to make a profit. How can the insurance companies compete when the government gets to set the rules and doesn’t have to make a profit. They can’t therefor they cease to exist, but that’s okay, we have the government option, controlling the means of production. Turn up the heat dial on that frog pot!
Government regulation of corporations in addition to the good it can do also creates barriers to entry and stifling of competition.. Corporations react to regulation by compliance, avoidance or manipulation. When a corporation can “capture” the regulatory process by ensuring that the regulators are sympathetic or actively working on behalf of a particular corporation we have a situation where a corporation can erect a multitude of barriers that competing corporations must navigate. Over time these manipulated regulations can create an enviornment where a corporation gets so big that it is deemed too big to fail. Now the profit motive is gone, the government will bail them out if they run into trouble.
Lehman Brothers, was forced into bankruptcy by government regulators while their biggest competitor Goldman Sachs was bailed out. Who were the regulators that deemed Lehman Brothers unworthy of a bailout. Why former Goldman Sach’s executives that were now manipulating the system because they had captured the regulatory process and of course we know that Goldman Sachs is now TOO BIG TO FAIL. Turn up the heat on the frog pot!
@Jim Hlavac: #7 – GREAT comment! I’m a liberal, but this probably the most persuasive comment I’ve read here, ever. Thank you.
In the current go around over health care, the health insurance companies are being demonize. They are particularly being attacked for excluding people with pre-existing conditions. What folks fail to realize is that insurance is about preparing for the UNKNOWN liability, not the known liability. Once the problem is known, there is no more uncertainty about it, other than perhaps just how bad it is going to be. But insurance companies are in the business of insuring against that which is unknown.
With the exception of those who are born with pre-existing conditions, we all have the option to purchase health insurance early in our lives without this problem. Many of us do not because we are young, healthy, and poor. But it is our choice. We could choose to buy health insurance instead of a TV, or whatever, but most will buy the TV. I am personally very well acquainted with the pre-existing conditions dilemma, and it has adversely affected my life several times. But I recognize that this is the way insurance works.
Many people want to look at the insurance companies as a health care payment mechanism, and they simply are not that. They are insurance, and there is no possible way that they can function as disbursers of funds of the general national health care. And that is what they are asked to do when it is demanded that they accept all pre-existing conditions.
Dr. D, you’re not correct, most of us got sucked into the existing employer-based system, which offers group coverage but is not portable. Lose (or leave) your job, and you lose your membership in the group, and the insurance. This system evolved in response to government wage restrictions in WW2. At this point, some solution is needed for people who are already in that system and have aged to the point where they’re no longer able to get coverage on their own. These people (myself included) did not chose to buy a TV instead of get health insurance, we took jobs where part of the pay was health insurance coverage that, unfortunately, is tied to the specific employer. There’s more, though – even if you decided to forego insurance because you can’t get covered, you’ll not be able to get the true market rate from health care providers, because their official rates are much higher than the rate charged to insurers (which is most people and therefore the true market rate). That aspect of the system has reallly become disfunctional. Ultimately insurance is about risk-pooling, as you say. Yet the sad fact is that the risk is certainly strongly correlated with age, so ultimately in your slice-and-dice world, most people will end up uninsurable just when they most need it. The employer-based system sort-of works because the pool isn’t self-selecting. But for private insurance, self-selection clearly can’t work for the reasons you state. It’s a classic market failure IMO.
I don’t believe socialism and capitalism should be thought of as an either/or proposition. The best attainable and sustainable societal arrangement probably requires a careful balance between the two. Either alone eventually turns toxic.
My guess is that the 36% favorable response might be a reflection of people who share that view, rather than of people who are totally clueless about the meaning of the term.
Doug, I know all about the employer-base insurance programs; been there myself. But in choosing to go that route (and it is a choice), you chose not to buy health insurance on the open market when you were 22 (I did not buy it on the open market when I was 22 either).
I agree that the fact that this situation does not give portability is definitely limiting, but that is not a fault of the insurance companies. That is a fault of the way the system has evolved, and the fact that you and I chose to buy into the current system (it was the easiest thing to do by far).
The latter part of your comment seems to be directed at the fact that the HMOs, etc. have bargained down their costs and the single individual does not get these advantages. That is this thing called “group buying power.” I have always roundly resented that, but in our evil age, it seems to be taken for granted. I have no answer to that, except to say that it is not a good idea to be caught outside of a group. I know that I personally have had to make some adverse career moves in order to obtain insurance coverage for my family, and it has cost me career-wise. That is life.
Employer based health care is portable.. it’s called COBRA
Two tiered medical service pricing should be outlawed. The cost to have an appendix removed is the cost to have an appendix removed regardless of whether you are in a group or paying cash.
Dr D is right the health care insurance system has devolved into a health care payment disbursement system not a true insurance system for catastrophic circumstances.
The government could guarantee a line of credit devoted to health care costs (we guarantee mortgage payments to bankers). The indiviudal would be responsible for making the payments on the card but for the vast majority of the uninsured they would be able to get care they’d just be on the hook to pay for the care over time. This would also allow individuals to purchase high deductible plans that are inexpensive while providing them the means to meet a high deductible if the need arose.