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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Actually, if I'm remembering my history correctly, the greed of government-sponsored British corporations was part of what motivated the Revolution.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Socialism is about control of the means of production, which Sanders does not support. Capitalist societies can still have redistributive taxation and regulation; indeed many socialists would argue that the 'free' market is in fact dependent on the support of the state.
Well, that depends if you take capitalism to be purely about the accumulation of money, or if you think 'free market ideology' has some necessary component of individual freedom. Hell, even most libertarians don't like the Confederacy, although there are a fairly sizeable proportion of shitheads who do.
edited 11th Feb '16 8:50:47 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der ParteiThe idea of corporations back then was the East India Company, which was a true MegaCorp both in size and in fulfilling the meaning of the trope. Hence Boston Tea Party, which destroyed EIC product.
edited 11th Feb '16 8:53:28 AM by FFShinra
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We have nationalized industries in the United States, so we have socialism. Unless you're suggesting that Sanders wants to return public utilities to the private market.
@ Fighteer:
Back then, there was no other way to found a Corporation (including Local Governments) — all had to be incorporated by an Act of Parliament.
But nowhere near as many as Governments with explicitly Socialist credentials — indeed, wasn't Amtrak nationalised because the companies that formed it had gone out of business?note .
edited 11th Feb '16 8:57:21 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On![]()
Then the US itself wouldn't be a thing.
And not all the areas of the US see the same issues the same way (even when they broadly agree with each other, so this isn't just a liberal/conservative thing). Overcentralizing government authority will ensure the US gets problems.
That said, there is something to be said for overdecentralization as well. But it has to be worked out on a case by case basis, not throwing out the tenth amendment.
edited 11th Feb '16 9:00:45 AM by FFShinra
@Achaemenid: That essay is another exceptional example of Libertarian thought as it should be, not as it is commonly expressed by its so-called adherents.
@others: To be sure, we are not nearly as socialist as other nations, but the inescapable fact is that the United States does seize private money to fuel public industries.
The Tenth Amendment is one of those weird ones that implies a lot but says very little, leaving wide powers of interpretation up to the legislature and the courts. It is at the heart of our federalist system, reserving a great deal of power to the individual states for the express purpose of preventing the Federal government from seizing all power.
I have often decried the idea of leaving the states so much power in our political system, given the abuses that it permits; but it also permits positive outcomes, such as the experiments in minimum wages and universal healthcare that are going on right now and have been going on. To allow for such things, we must accept that negative outcomes will occur as well, such as in Michigan and Kansas. If we believe in democracy at all, we must believe that the voters of those states can "throw out the bums" and elect people who will represent their interests properly.
Edit: There's also the fact that, as noted
, without the Tenth, we'd have had an immediate secession of the slave-owning states rather than 100 years of grudging tolerance followed by a civil war.
edited 11th Feb '16 9:09:22 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"If it didn't exist then the first stupid stunt the states would have pulled would have been to bail from the Union. And they would have succeeded too since the power of the federal government at the time was too weak and the patriotism for the United States as a unit hadn't developed enough to fight off state loyalists.
Simply having some nationalized industries is not 'socialist' on its own. Otherwise Pinochet or Hitler would count as 'socialist'. Just because these are things a socialist government would also do doesn't mean the United States 'has socialism' or some other such nonsense. The United States is not in any sense a society where there is dictatorship of the proletariat or where the means of production are socially owned. Unless Boeing just became a workers' collective and the USA's income distribution curve reversed without anyone noticing? I assume the revolution to establish workers' control must have passed us all by too?
Socialism is a socio-economic system and a movement to create that system. Just because some things are 'socialized' does not make them or the society they exist in inherently socialist. Just because American public discourse around socialism is so propagandized most Americans are incapable of thinking about socialism in these terms doesn't change what it actually stands for.
edited 11th Feb '16 9:17:19 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der ParteiThe name was in the party, of course, and to Latino conservatives all mass movements designed to overthrow the system must have looked like the red bogeyman, despite massive differences between them.
Here in the US, a lot of the rightwingers like to trot out the idea that Hitler's ideals were leftist in nature.
National Socialist German Worker's Party. They were socialist, but as Fighteer mentioned a few posts back, socialism at its core is government involvement in the economy, which is a broad broad catagory that just about all reigning political systems use today.
The entire world is socialist.
EDIT-
'd on the nazis.
edited 11th Feb '16 9:16:37 AM by FFShinra
Is there any other type of sense for it?
Also not only did they not avoid it...hence the Civil War. They could not get their shit together well enough
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesNo it isn't. It's control over the means of production, a classless society, and dictatorship of the proletariat. Usually established via a revolution. Government involvement in the economy is not un-capitalist; in fact socialists generally argue that the government sustains the private economy.
Schild und Schwert der Partei@Parable: Not necessarily. I'd argue that it's more accurate that Lincoln returned the "property" back to the slaves who it was stolen from.
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IIRC, wouldn't that be communism, not socialism?
@FF Shinra: The name of the party is meaningless tho. Names are just names, just pick the one that gets the more votes. Maybe not in a country with only two parties, but in others...
@Off-topic, however tangentially related: I'm seeing a discussion in which someone is trying to argue Brazil is socialist because it has welfare policies. I don't even...
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Wrong. Communism is the state of affairs that follows the establishment of the socialist society, as the state is withered away and class consciousness disappears (or rather, everyone accepts the primacy of classless society). Socialism is the historical phase that will displace capitalism and precede communism. The aims of the two are synonymous.
[[quoteblock]We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called 'socialism'.[[/quoteblock]]
VI Lenin, To the Rural Poor.
edited 11th Feb '16 9:29:56 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der Partei

If anything, the leaders we hold up to our highest esteem were the ones who expanded federal influence the most. Heck, from a purely capitalistic point of view, Lincoln is the worst president in history since he confiscated what, adjusted for inflation, had to be billions of dollars worth of property when he emancipated the slaves.