Socialism

Republic - How much power is in a vote?Ariesx tells us that the 'supreme power' of the government rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote, but how much power is actually in that vote? There are about 300 million citizens in the U.S. with only around half of those who actually vote(1). That means that your vote is literally just one in 300 million. That's nothing. How much power is in a vote?The United States Congress has a recent a 16% approval rating with a 76% rating of disapproval. People don't like what the government is doing, but what can the people actually do about it? We have our vote. That's it. What can we do when the majority of us want something but can't get it?The answer: nothing. Congress may have teh disapproval of 3/4ths of Americans, but that's literally all we can do: stare at the government with disapproval.The government does things against the people's will. That is not power in the people.Aries says that politicians are educated and better suited to rule the country because they are supposed to know the best way to run the country. The United States' founding fathers were also educated. They ran the country with the idea that slavery was just and that property rights outweighed human rights. Many believed that African American slaves weren't even human. They believed a lot of things and ran the country on these beliefs. This literally shows that education has nothing to do with knowing how to run a country. Our educated policymakers went and got us into a lot of wars in the past one hundred years, one of them being the Vietnam War which is one of the more unpopular wars in U.S. history. What did the government do? The majority of the population disapproved of the Vietnam war for 6 years(3) before the U.S. government finally decided to stop drafting people and to actually pull back from the war. The citizens of the United States have almost no say at all, and the Vietnam War was one of those moments where this became glaringly obvious.Money is a huge policymaking factor.Education has almost completely nothing to do with anything beside the job that education prepares you for. Politicians are prepared on education in law school. They don't learn how to run the country. They don't learn what's right and what's wrong and how to help the people and the nation. No. They learn about the law. They learn how to help the system stay the way it is. They learn to debate, to campaign and to appeal to wealthy interests. No politician who doesn't have money can win an election. Each election required more money. Each presidential and party campaign set new records for spending. The 2012 election had the Democrats and Republicans each spending about a billion dollars (4).Lobbyists account for billions more during elections and between terms (5). That money literally is paid to get our policymaking government to favor the interests providing the fund. The poor or the average incomed don't have anything near that level of influence. Most of the people are unhappy with how the government is run. We can either take to the streets and protest or wait to vote another bloc of Democrats and Republicans into office to do the same things their predecessors do."the majority of people agreed with slavery."I looked this up. I don't see anything supporting this claim. The South was outraged. How many Southerners were there and how many of them actually wanted slavery to stay? I think you just made this up. Besides, a lot of citizens were abolitionists, but Abraham Lincoln actually wasn't an abolitionist and didn't think African Americans deserved equal rights (6). You're literally giving Abraham Lincoln a lot of credit for a movement that a large majority of people in the North actually supported.Anyway, I'm not talking about socialist then. I'm talking about socialist now and the system it is now and why we should have socialism now. You are supposed to be showing that socialism now would be bad.We are assuming that sufficient people are politically active, aware and informed as was agreed upon on round 1, so your education point doesn't make sense anyway.With the system the way it is now with most people who have little to no say and a puny useless vote and with the rich and the powerful lobbying and deciding what to do, socialism would provide for a much better system. If we were socialist, we would've left Iraq the third year we entered the war because disapproval of the war reached majority like SNAP. What could the people do? Nothing.Aries tries to praise the system for clearly working when she has shown no data to prove that most people didn't want to join world war 2. I think most people in the United States actually believed Hitler's actions to be terrible even before the United States formally joined the war after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. We were producing weapons for the Allies as a nation long before we joined the war, so most of us agreed with the Allied cause. Also, it was Pearl Harbor that got Roosevelt to make concessions to convince Congress to declare war on Japan with most of the U.S. citizens agreeing that we should enter the war. If we had been socialist, we'd have declared war anyway.In fact, if we had been socialist, we could have the people come together to elect some form of Republic(1)http://upload.wikimedia.org...;(2)http://www.gallup.com...;(3)http://media.gallup.com...;(4)http://elections.nytimes.com...;(5)https://www.opensecrets.org...;(6)http://www.history.com...;