morningstar2651
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That doesn't make sense...could you show us examples?Says the so-called progressive. It's the "progressives" which are the regressives in terms of human rights.
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That doesn't make sense...could you show us examples?Says the so-called progressive. It's the "progressives" which are the regressives in terms of human rights.
Aha! A backer of the Occupy movement! Welcome aboard sir!
That doesn't make sense...could you show us examples?
At least Communism is a topic most people are familiar with, since Communism dominated most of the twentieth century's history. If you're going to bring up an obscure academic like Sumner, and blame him for everthing wrong that happened in his time, I would expect his arguments to be better addressed than that. Especially since the intustrialization of the late nineteenth century which Reich identifies with Sumner, ugly though it sometimes was, made possible the cushy lives we enjoy in this country today.
You can "reject" the laws of nature, if you like. Nature has a funny way of reasserting herself though. She doesn't care what the law says, or what public opinon holds, but sooner or later she always finds a way to be heard.
There has never been any communist government anywhere, anytime in the history of the world.I had mentioned my belief of economic systems in a video I made a couple weeks ago. As far as I understand it, the difference between capitalism, socialism, and communism is merely how much money is given to the government to redistribute back to the government's constituents, which is how communism gets its equal share. The fault of it being that leaders tend to get corrupt and... well... take more than they should under a communistic society... >>
But that was just my opinion. I got slammed for it a while back because it's apparently not what communism is. That it's classless. Classless but still needs someone to lead. Unless you're doing a true communal style where everyone is in charge of the money and everyone divides it up equally with everyone supervising (and even that could result in some oligarchy if say, some people don't show up), there's still someone leading or someone that has to take charge of it.
So that's why the cause of equal rights for ALL mankind has been and continues to be championed by us? That might be why the conservative/regressives have recently taken the cause of same sex marriage to task?Says the so-called progressive. It's the "progressives" which are the regressives in terms of human rights.
There has never been any communist government anywhere, anytime in the history of the world.
No, because there can never be anything resembling the "true Communism" that Marx liked to daydream about; human nature is simply not that altruistic. Everywhere it's been tried, Communism inevitably devolves into socially repressive, economically failed regimes that end up being beneficial for nobody except a small cadre of the ruling members of the party.
Communism is sort of like Prohibition---it looks good on paper, but in actual practice it just ain't gonna work.
PHenry42 said:Just like the industrialization carried out under Stalin made possible the (relatively) cushy lives in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Therefore?
PHenry said:The industrialization you mention was made possible by technological progress, and would have happened regardless of what system was in place. The world did not magically boom into prosperity simply because an unregulated capitalist system was put into place
PHenry said:Tell that to the Conservatives, who are way more anti-science than anyone else in this country.
The toll on human life was far less in the US and other Western countries, and for that matter, even in Russia under the czar. Also, it actually led to a higher standard of living because it was driven by demand for consumer goods, not industrialization for industrialization's sake.
Was it really a coincidence that it began in the time and place of Adam Smith and David Ricardo? Technological progress had been occuring for thousands of years, but the methods of production management implemented in 18th century Britain was unprecedented. Capitalism, if it means anything, means an industrialed economy. Even Marx understood that.
Was it the conservatives who had conniption fits when The Bell Curve was published?
I tend to agree with you on this.No, because there can never be anything resembling the "true Communism" that Marx liked to daydream about; human nature is simply not that altruistic. Everywhere it's been tried, Communism inevitably devolves into socially repressive, economically failed regimes that end up being beneficial for nobody except a small cadre of the ruling members of the party.
Communism is sort of like Prohibition---it looks good on paper, but in actual practice it just ain't gonna work.
That doesn't make sense...could you show us examples?
Because they couldn't define communism if their lives depended on it.
Humans have the right to life, liberty, and property. "Progressives" deny or seek to deny these rights in various ways:
Life: The unborn are denied this right.
Liberty: Speech codes (on universities as well as censorship laws, fairness doctrine, net neutrality), mandates concerning weapons storage and restricting carrying them (Chicago is particularly egregious).
Property: Overtaxation. Overregulation of what can be bought and sold. Eminent domain abuse.
That doesn't make sense...could you show us examples?
So it doesn't look terribly different than capitalistic corporatocracy then, in its natural outcomes I mean.
Unregulated human beings who accumulate power tend toward that corruption which power has a habit of naturally bringing. So whether communism or capitalism, human nature, laboring under sinful concupiscence, has a tendency to degenerate; and thus certain levels of regulation ought to exist in order to protect the weak from the powerful.
I tend to agree with you on this.
Now true democratic socialism on the other hand IS a goal to aim for.
How many hundreds of millions of people have to die in the name of various forms of "communism" before it becomes self evident that it's a bad idea?
They've had how many chances, but yet they still can't seem to get it right. Maybe it's because it doesn't work.
The major difference is that capitalism allows the individual to rise in his standard of living through his own initiative, whereas in Communist regimes, the individual is stuck with what's mandated to him by the state. So instead of moving from a three-room apartment to a nice house in a suberb because you went from working on the loading dock to a middle-management position (or better yet, you started your own business), you spend the rest of your life living with six other people in a two-room shack with bad plumbing and a leaky roof, gutting fish in a commununal factory for fifteen hours a day at the rate of five kopecks per hour. Workers of the world, despair.
I quite agree, but it's not forms of government that will keep this in check. The only way to keep mankind's fallen nature from devolving into predatory exploitation is a firm belief in the teachings of Christ---the "Golden Rule", if you will.
And when the powerful are either not Christian or otherwise do not follow Jesus' teachings and kenotic ethos and continue exploit, suppress, oppress, and/or otherwise terrorize the weak and the poor? Shouldn't that civil authority which has the ability to pass law and put into effect regulation and protection, do so? If not for legal reasons alone, at the very least on the basis of human decency and because it's--quite, simply--the right and just thing to do?
Shouldn't the good, right and just thing be of the utmost importance?
-CryptoLutheran
Imperfection is the condition of our human nature. Men are tempted by dictatorial power under ANY form of government. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The fallacy of progressivism, the fallacy of those who advocate for a regulatory administrative state, is in the belief that government will be a wonderful, non-threatening, servant of the citizenry and a force for good if only the right people are put in charge. Giving government the kind of power to shape society in the way you're talking about will never end well.
Saying that the government is fallible and therefore won't be able to do these things perfectly hardly seems like good enough reason to reject the implementation of safety nets and regulations to protect the weak, the poor and the downtrodden from unregulated powermongering and greed.
-CryptoLutheran