The Morality of Socialism

Well, I'd like to point out that the topic of the debate is "The morality of Socialism"(not "the morality of the application of socialism" and you, yourself, defined socialism as "a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. "So by definition, we are debating the theory, since you included that in the definition, not the application of socialism. You changed it to the application of socialism mid-debate. If you want to debate the application of socialism, there are literally dozens of ways to apply socialism which not all of them have been attempted. You can't conclude socialism is immoral in practice when not all of the forms of socialism have been attempted. I'd like to point out, that just because force is used in some way, doesn't make it immoral. For example, in a capitalist society force is used in order to maintain a capitalist at the top of a company. The state forces people to allow capitalists to own and control their own business. Socialism is only immoral in practice if you think property is a right. However, what even makes property a right and why do we have such a concept? The native Americans had no concept of property, so why is it necessary for us to have that concept? To have the concept of private property means it puts some people above others. Those who own more property have more access to wealth, and thus purchasing power. How is it moral for people to take property as their own and cause thousands of people to live in poverty? Since there is a finite amount of resources, when someone gains more resources under their control, naturally, someone has to lose resources, often to the point where they can barely survive. Thus, when this happens, it is a violation of the right to life. The right to property conflicts with the right to life in this sense, since someone has a right to a vast amount of property, that means they limit the lives of others. Force has to be used to protect rights, and when it's used to protect rights, it's not a violation of the non-agression principle. We have to get rid of property in order to protect the right to life. And yes, causing people to live in poverty does take away their right to life, because they cannot afford to have necessary healthcare for diseases or health problems they have, and they then thus die. They may also die from malnutrition. "A good example of this would, ironically, be the event you referenced, Revolutionary Catalonia. Force was indeed used to maintain this system, as is stated in the very reference you posted. The fall of Catalonia, which occurred a mere two years later, was brought about largely by internal disputes and a resistance to force. Again, this is in your very source. "I don't see where it mentions force was used in the article. Please quote it or name the section it is under in the wikipedia source. As far as I can see, there wasn't force used in Revolutionary Catalonia. You can't just be vaque in your claims, otherwise they are weak claims."In your debate, you used democracy repeatedly as a synonym with morality. This is blatantly wrong, as democracy is most certainly not a guarantee to a moral system."There is NO system that has a guarantee for a moral system. All we have is a system that is MOST LIKELY to lead to a moral system, and a democratic government generally does. Sometimes it doesn't, but then again, who decides morals? Isn't morality subjective to begin with since there is no objective way to measure morality? Therefore, it's up to society to decide what is moral, so if society decides to vote on something, it's because that is what is considered to be moral in that society. Therefore, a democracy only ever does what is considered moral by majority of people in that society. As for your example, you do realize that we had immoral things in our government, when we didn't have a democracy, right? We had slavery in our history. In fact, if we had a democracy, slavery probably would have ended sooner since majority of people were against slavery. The only people who wanted slavery were white southerners, who were a minority. The northerners and African-Americans opposed slavery and would have abolished it much sooner than the republic did. In addition, while public opinion is not always what we may consider moral, MAJORITY do consider it moral. What makes our morals more superior to someone else's morals? And why should the morals of the minority be promoted over the morals of the majority?So, while I said earlier that democracy doesn't have a guarantee for morality, I'm actually now arguing it does. Morality is subjective, so we should go off of what the majority considers to be moral. It is wrong to promote the morality that a minority agree is moral, so we should always strive to promote the morality that a majority agree with. A democracy would do that. And no, libertarian socialism isn't an oxy-moron. It only depends on what you consider to be rights. The non-aggression principle is not violated when force is used to promote rights. Rights are not something everyone agrees on, for example, some consider it a right for women to be able to choose to have an abortion, but others say this is not a right. Rights all depend on public opinion. If the majority agree that property is not a right, then it's not a right. And if you say that it's wrong to say rights are dependent on what society agrees to be, then who decides what are rights and why? As it is right now, it's essentially the supreme court of the United States that decides what is a right, as they were the ones who declared abortion a right for women to have a choice in. They're also the ones who decided gay marriage was a right. Is it really better to have a majority of 9 people out of 300 million+ decide what the rights are instead of a majority of the 300 million+ people? So, I contend that my opponent needs to argue why property is a right before we can determine the morality of the application of socialism. It seems their objections are because of the use of force to prevent private property from forming. Well, if private property is not a right, then it's not a violation of the non-agression principle, and if the right to property does in fact violate the right to life when used in extremity, as I pointed out, then there can be legitimate reason to limit private property with force.