I will admit I did get a little condescending towards the end, and I apologize for that.
By: Richard Dicristino
Tags: Economics, Capitalism, Socialism

I will admit I did get a little condescending towards the end, and I apologize for that. I tend to get annoyed when people conflate ideologies or simple facts that someone could easily look up, like the fact that socialism is not just communism, nor is socialism just when “the government does stuff.” I would also like to cite, that although communism doesn’t look to the free market for solutions, due to its very nature, there are socialist ideologies that do make use of market systems in order to do things like gauge supply and demand in order to figure out what to produce and where it needs to go. I also like how people of your viewpoint tend to cite things with a general supposition using your own condescension. I never espoused any views, even if the hint may have been there somewhere, nor had I said that any country was anywhere near truly socialist in practice, but I do see some hypocrisy here since you’re the one that purported such a thing, not I. I was purely speaking from actual ideologies, not movements that were simply being used as a Trojan horse or taken over generally via authoritarian movements. Something that the Nazi party (an actual Fascist party) did. From your dialogue would I be right to assume you may be the type of person that also believes taxation is theft? Or someone who subscribes to something more akin to the Chicago school of economics and who’s afraid that adding taxes back onto the rich would scare them away? One could also argue that capitalism, especially unfettered capitalism and imperialism could be considered to have caused far more violence, inequity and damage throughout history than just about any socialist movement, even if you look at it in terms of resource management or purely monetarily. I did not conflate capitalism with fascism. You just used those as the two extremes in your example. I was pointing out the fallacy of your comparison since the scope of Socialism is far greater than a single ideology, whereas Fascism is a single ideology that sits pretty firmly under capitalism. If you wanted to go to another authoritarian extreme you would have been better served to distinguish Communism or if you just wanted an extremely polar example to contrast against Fascism you could have cited Anarcho-Communism if you wanted to hit the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Your analogy of the origins of the EU are also horrendously oversimplified and grossly misrepresentative. It was certainly put to the blame by people like Thatcher stating that taxes were the issue for investors, but you’re not considering the increased international competition with developing nations, globalization, the oil crisis, the steel crisis, the fall of the Bretton Woods system after the Nixon Shock and the decline of manufacturing jobs which resulted in some heavy stagflation. All of these issues came to a head around the same time and to put all of the blame on taxes that were around for decades wouldn’t exactly make much sense outside of the fact that the system couldn’t handle the strain of so many crises at once. Fast forward to today and they still can’t though. This is a systemic issue. In the 70’s, if you look at the picture as a whole, they were issues of competition that would not have necessarily mattered in cooperation. Also, you don’t need to look for utopia, I certainly don’t, but you can always look for better. I believe that you should try to make whatever you touch better in some way than when you received it, before it gets passed to the next person.

As far as “entitlement” goes, it’s not exactly entitlement as it is just good policy. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say it’s more efficient as well. For healthcare, the next highest paying 1st world country still only pays about 70% of the amount that we do on average. All the while our average health outcomes and life expectancy are below many of them and still on the decline. This is where health becomes a public good. When you’re healthy, you tend to be more productive, more engaged and more active. These things in turn help your community. In terms of higher education we spend more than double the average of those same countries and the next highest paying country is still a little less than 2/3rds of what we pay and this trend follows with the country holding the next highest average student loan debt is about half of the debt the average US student will walk out with. Education is already a recognized public good here, we just haven’t updated the policy to fit our current needs. It has been recognized again that having an educated population is a boon to communities. Doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers, social workers, technicians. They all have an extremely important role in our communities and we gain large benefits by having them, especially when unburdened, because then the need for them to leave in order to find stability via a better job in a larger city is greatly lessened. This could allow them to even further open and invest themselves within these communities and build them up. Plus there’s the fact that about 65% of all new jobs opening up within the next year or so will require some form of higher education. That’s almost 2/3rds of all job openings. This is 37%+ increase of the share that was held in the 70’s. Making high schools public was something pushed in the late 1800s to early 1900s. That was around a century ago to give a scope of how out of date that sentiment may be. In average housing cost we rank as second highest, just below Spain when I last checked, with a not-insignificant portion of our population putting out around 73% of their entire household income just maintaining the roof over their heads. We waste 40 million tons of food every year, because it isn’t cost efficient to distribute it to people in need. That’s 80 billion lbs of food. The amount of food needed in order to give every food insecure person in the US a full day’s worth of food for a year is around 18 billion lbs. We could feed every food insecure person in the country more than 4 times over. Instead we throw it away. In what way has this system truly been working out recently for the average person? We are paying more, stressing more and holding more debt while having worse outcomes. Is this okay due to it being the natural order of things argument that was espoused by someone like Burke with the aristocracy? Are we looking at an efficiencies argument, because the data above helps prove otherwise because what is that excess overhead cost if not an inefficiency? Also practices like planned obsolescence, stock buybacks, and lobbying expenditures that are cheaper (more cost efficient short-term) than upgrading their processes and practices would be other prime examples that would point to the contrary. In fact, it would seem that these are just ways to further amass and concentrate wealth in such a fashion that it could potentially be used in such a way that one could exert enough force or pressure to crush competition and/or turn people into what are essentially indentured servants. Then there’s the possibility of dynastic or aristocratic-like tendencies with inheritance. When one is crippled by debt and circumstance, they need stable income and healthcare as soon as possible. They don’t have time to hold out or play games trying to switch from one job to another in order to try to get ahead when they are teetering on the edge of financial ruin. Where is the freedom in that? Where is the real choice? There is a real reason why these are issues. Socialism isn’t a cheap cop out. Actual ideological socialism is really hard to implement. It would take large ideological and cultural shifts across the board, especially here in the US, it would need to be done incrementally and probably over a really long period of time. There are logistical nightmares with some of the ideological policies or beliefs that would need to be thought through and answered before they have any hope of going further, but you need to start somewhere and negotiations always need to start high otherwise you’ll get nothing. Fundamentally though, socialism is generally about ownership of the means of production, Labour rights and the common good. It assumes that the second two would follow the first. It just sounds easy on paper. There needs to be a will to do it and do it right. No half-assing and handing it over to someone else to start or take care of later. I realize that this is lengthy and pretty much has no shot of getting you to see from a more left-leaning perspective, but I don’t shape my viewpoints without having substantiated data.