John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

Actually, with capitalism, the problem is ripping the resources from those with such obscene wealth that they can never spend all of it, or even a fraction of it, in their lives, but will squeeze every last drop of money they can get out of everyone without technically doing anything illegal, and will never, ever let it go of their own volition.

Well, yes. That's part of why it's hard for food to get the tables of poorer people.

An economy is much like a circulatory system. You gotta keep making money and you gotta keep making that money flow throughout the entire system. You can't let it just pool up at any one part of the system.

Capitalism is very good at making money and making goods for people to buy. It's not so great at ensuring that the money gets around everywhere as opposed to being hoarded by the powerful. Which is why you need to regulate capitalism — to keep greed in check.

Socialism otoh can be compared to an anemic person's circulatory system. Lower incentive to be productive and governments that favor political goals and ideology over actually making and selling product means less to go around for everyone.

Another issue is that you cannot solve the problems of one with the other. The solution to one extreme is rarely ever the opposite extreme. You don't solve the problems of, say, a strict state-controlled economy by suddenly applying lolbertarianism.

Edited by M84 on Apr 9th 2019 at 12:18:32 AM

Well, you can, but in degrees. The Soviet Union shows us what happens when we throw up our hands and say "Okay, we're getting rid of all the rich people, everything is going to be equal now." It causes many, many problems, and does not result in the people being equal. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with the basic socialist idea of "Let's take money from the rich and give it to the poor." That's taxes and welfare.

Except we've had almost a hundred years of propaganda insisting that any attempt to take money from the rich and give to the poor is basically the same as murdering the rich in their beds and leading straight to a second Soviet Union. The American right uses "socialist" in the same way that everyone else uses "Nazi."

Hence why I specified extremes. Just like how one can't solve the problems caused by rich oligarchs with a sudden Communist Revolution (at least not without introducing a bunch of new problems), one can't solve the problems caused by an oppressive inefficient state controlled economy by going full unregulated open free market lolbertarian. Just take a look at how well that worked out for Albania.

Edited by M84 on Apr 9th 2019 at 2:02:47 AM

Except that the Soviet union never got rid of the rich people. That is a myth. Those people high up in the party still had more than others. Which illustrates the problem. The system can be corrupted way too easily.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

And yes, I'm aware the author was a socialist. But Welles wasn't blind to the problems of Stalinism.

Edited by M84 on Apr 9th 2019 at 2:11:56 AM

But they said it. The Soviet Union stopped being communist roughly five minutes before they declared themselves communist. It was, in most ways, just the exact same as what came before but with a different coat of paint.

Which is what annoys me even more about all the anti-socialism in the US. During the Cold War, "communism and socialism" simply meant "evil and against democracy," with no one bothering to remember the fact that the Soviets were actually rather terrible examples of socialism. But the capitalists still used it as an excuse to kill anything remotely resembling socialism as "un-American."

Of course, that can lead to No True Scotsman arguments. "Oh they weren't real socialists so they don't count."

While there is truth to the idea of the rich hoarding money, it's actually based on a rather extreme misconception of the ultra rich. When they bring up someone's net worth that involves the value of all assets, it's not all the money they keep in a giant vault a la Scrooge McDuck. This includes their business, which includes the value of all their employees. That means their value is not fluid money kept in banks, but 95 percent of their worth is purely the value of their company at that moment. They can sell those assets for cash money but the trade-off is losing control of that property, Bill Gates has sold off billions worth of shares to give to his charity which means he owns less and less of Microsoft by the year. There is certainly the rich keeping their money in Swiss accounts or Cayman islands, but that is at best single digit percentage of their total value.

For one, they claimed to be communists, not socialists. There is a difference.

Two, are there positive examples of either communism or socialism?

TBF, they called themselves socialist. And Communism is a form of socialist government. To be more specific, it's an ideology that is ostensibly meant to lead to the creation of a socialist society.

The mistake is assuming that all forms of socialism are Communism.

As for positive examples...that largely depends on how you define "positive". Or how you define "socialism" and "Communism" for that matter.

I guess maybe the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia under Josip Tito counted? Of course, that was in part due to him allowing decentralizing the command economy, so maybe not that Communist. And things went to shit not long after he was gone.

There is that too. A lot of the 1%'s (or 0.1%'s) wealth isn't actual liquid cash. It's stuff like stock certificates.

The Richie Rich movie had this as part of a plot twist.

Edited by M84 on Apr 10th 2019 at 3:02:05 AM

I was asking for something which worked for longer than a generation / one head of state.

I guess Cuba counts? Granted, they have also undergone some capitalist reforms.

Edited by M84 on Apr 10th 2019 at 3:09:07 AM

all this talk about Capitalism makes me want John Oliver to make an episode on it, where he completely tears down the US version of Capitalism, taking a good look at it's history and how it has evolved over the years. this will naturally include all the abuses, legal loopholes and lobbying big business has done.

sounds like the perfect topic for an hour long special

EDIT: the Paris Commune is a pretty good example of a positive example of communism

Edited by MABfan11 on Apr 9th 2019 at 9:13:27 PM

He has covered various parts of the problem in the USA throughout this show.

Between this and watching Adam Ruins Everything (where a major running theme is that USA corporations manufacture problems to sell products and services), one might get the feeling that USA business culture is kind of fucked up.

The Paris Commune only lasted a few months or so in 1871, though. And it was mostly a bloody revolt in which nothing meaningful was accomplished.

Or are you talking about the Paris Commune during the French Revolution instead?

Edited by M84 on Apr 10th 2019 at 3:20:19 AM

Cuba? I really wouldn't call Cuba a thriving society, and now that Castro is gone, the first time they did was to introduce more capitalism.

I agree John Oliver taking apart the basic problems would be worthwhile show.

Edited by Swanpride on Apr 9th 2019 at 12:42:45 PM

That's why you need to specify what exactly do you mean by "positive". Like, Cuba isn't doing great now, but it's not a failed state or anything.

Well, for one, it can't be some sort of dictatorship, because I think if you have a political elite which amasses power and wealth, it isn't really fulfilling the idea of communism or socialism.

Two, it needs to be sustainable. Meaning it needs to have worked for a longer period of time.

And Three, it needs to have a population which is overall better off than the populations who live in other state forms.

I mean, it is not like communism or socialism are new revolutionary concepts which have never been tried before. People have tried, again, and again, and again. To say "yeah, but what they ended up with isn't really that" kind of shows that the concept isn't really workable due to humans in general being both too egoistic and too competitive.

hunter-gatherer societies were also communistic, though they kinda had to be, since being to greedy would likely kill the entire tribe off

They were also relatively small in terms of population size. Anarcho-communes kind of only work when the population is <100 or so. It's that pesky Dunbar's Number thing.

Edited by M84 on Apr 9th 2019 at 4:22:06 PM

The Nordic countries are sometimes considered examples of socialism. This further highlights the problem with the term having no agreed-upon definition: basically nobody would describe both the Soviet Union and the Nordic countries as socialist ("communism isn't socialism" vs. "social democracy/a welfare state isn't socialism"), but there is disagreement about which is and is not socialism.

The Nordic countries would refute that they are socialist, because they aren't. They have this mixture of capitalism and Socialism which I think works the best overall. At least of the systems tried out. It is a struggle to keep the balance, and it would be even better without a rampart finance market. There is still way too much money flowing from the ground to the top. But the difference between the ground and the top isn't quite as steep as elsewhere (plus, the top often simply uses the advantages of a global market, so it is hardly a problem which can be solved locally).

No self-admitted socialist country has maintained itself for more than a generation, and that is partially because it built a cult of personality around the leader who introduced socialism. I think the only reason the Soviet Union lasted as long as it did with communism is because of how massive it was, size and money can hide problems longer than something smaller. That was one of the logical flaws in Oliver's segment on Venezuela "It could have worked... if they had full foresight of how the world economy would change ten years from then."

I actually found Oliver's segment on kidney dialysis to be interesting in part because it was a look into a fully socialized program in the US that demonstrated the problem with subsidized programs. When they couldn't charge for their services they looked for shortcuts to make the money they were given stretch as far as it could, a very similar result with any given anti-capitalist argument.

I am not sure if I would call the system socialist. Especially if you consider that there would be most likely less people in the US needing this specific service in the first place, if they had better healthcare overall. It was just one of the various things which are supposed to work as a patch but are just woefully inadequate.