Government can't help, it can only hurt

[pbrower2a]

(02-01-2018, 04:14 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(01-31-2018, 08:07 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I think the labels are old and outdated. One's dead and the other is clinging to life. I think capitalist and socialist are more accurate labels to use and to go by in today's America. Look at it/ think of it as being this way, I'm a capitalist who is on the capitalist side and you're a capitalist who is on the socialist side. Does it look, do you think that's pretty accurate? I'm not going to be offended if blues call me a capitalist because that's what I am and what I've always been since I was a little kid. The American reds are all American capitalists. The American blues are a mixture of American capitalists and European minded American socialists. Pretty accurate?

A vast improvement.  Still, when one sticks with one word labels, you will fall short.

I don't think the division of wealth should be as large, that division in health care (and some of the other UDHR 25 rights) should be as extreme, and that the elites have enough votes to be immune to the people.  I tend to see our military adventures abroad failing and/or having unintended consequences.  I put the people ahead of corporations right now, but it is possible to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.  We can't be too hard on corporations.  I think global warming should have been addressed when there was time, and that there will be a day of reckoning come the next awakening that will shake the past values and bring about some sort of post scarcity values.

All of the above leans me blue, but I am reluctant to speak for all blues.  A label is only a start.

A few comments on what both of you have said:

1. The word 'socialism' describes so many variants of political and economic ideology that it means nothing. In America, the word 'socialism' is a political cuss-word, and even people on the Left have used it to disparage some right-wing tendencies, as in the phrase 'socialism for the rich'. Socialism can mean government ownership and operation of  productive business (in the Marxist-Leninist sense and in its variations including Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, Titoism, Juche, and the insane nightmare of Pol Pot) or a welfare state; in practice these are incompatible. The recent 'socialist states' of central and Balkan Europe typically sold off government enterprises not natural monopolies to create the welfare systems characteristic of such a 'social market state' as the German Federal Republic, by 1990 a favored model for liberal democracies for economics..

Government ownership and operation of a productive business may be by a right-wing government; Shah Reza II Pahlavi nationalized the Iranian oil industry. Capitalists may prefer that natural monopolies, a bane of competitive industries because monopolies bleed everyone else if they get the chance.

2. A welfare state can aid capitalists in some of their own objectives, including the reduction of petty crime such as shoplifting. Welfare can turn shoplifters into paying customers; Wal*Mart is arguably the company that most profits from food aid. Welfare can put an end to malnutrition and medical neglect. A consequence of SNAP and Medicaid (or even Medicare) is that some capitalists, including retailers, professional practices, slumlords (most Section 8 housing) and medical suppliers can develop an interest in politicians on the Left side of the political spectrum. Those who make their money through a welfare state can have an economic interest in the liberal side of American politics even though they fit patterns (such as having high levels of formal education, owning a business, and being in upper tax brackets) that typically put one in the Republican bloc in the Eisenhower era. 

3. Capitalism is not evil in itself. Capitalism goes bad when owners and managers get away with imposing their vilest tendencies upon businesses. The most basic rule of ethics in most businesses is "Do not hurt your customers", which explains why street drugs are illegal, and Kellogg's Corporation took revenge upon executives of Peanut Corporation of America, a company that sold grossly substandard peanut butter to many food processors. The bad peanut butter could have hurt Kellogg's customers, and criminal courts agreed. Executives of Peanut Corporation of America and salespeople who sold the tainted peanut butter to Kellogg's  and its Keebler division have become jailbirds. Indeed any human activity, especially sexuality, becomes evil when it becomes exploitative and abusive or even harmful. Above all, a well-functioning welfare state needs a successful capitalism to generate the taxable income and consumer activity necessary for the welfare state.

4. Government, like business, is no better than its leadership. Although incompetently-run businesses (unless guaranteed profits no matter how poorly they perform) generally meet the economic equivalent of the Grim Reaper in bankruptcy, liquidation, and certain forms of mergers, such an evil as slavery could exist within a capitalist context for a very long time. Rapacious plutocrats and semi-feudal big landowners of Germany funded the rise of Hitler because he promised lucrative profits from rearmament and maintenance of the lowest industrial wages in Europe (union officials in Germany were heavily Jewish) -- and the elimination of small-business competition (which was largely Jewish). For the safety of democracy even at the expense of some opportunities for solving a few problems quickly it is best to keep the public and private sectors separate.

OK, so a business as corrupt as Enrob Corporation can destroy itself despite having had a good model of economic activity at one time; Braniff Airways could go under because it went into unprofitable operations to generate revenue growth without looking into the costs; Borders Bookstores failed because it made bad decisions in merchandising; Montgomery-Ward followed an obsolete model for its industry and tried to shake itself out of its doom only too late. But none of those ended in mass death or apocalyptic war. Really-bad governments can stay alive through mass murder and often die in wars and revolutions that they start, provoke, or drift into.

5. Profiteering without stewardship has its temptations for plutocrats, executives, and their favored politicians. Great wealth can insulate people from the consequences of their bad behavior just as poverty brings swift judgment for any personal mistake. At the worst, economic elites can follow the dictum that no human suffering can ever discredit their gain and indulgence. Think of Leopold II, King of Belgium, for his nightmarish "Congo Free State" founded in the Congo to exploit a rubber boom. On a lesser level, consider that such a novel as Uncle Tom's Cabin would have had no impact had there not been real-life equivalents of the horrid villain Simon Legree. I put much of the fault for the horrors of Nazi concentration camps upon the plutocrats who found the inmates a ready source of labor to be worked to physical limits for starvation rations under conditions unfit for livestock and whose lives were forfeit if they could no longer work. That was Auschwitz, the closest approximation to Hell that some species of genus Homo could ever create. Leadership of any kind is no better than its moral compass.

Now -- on global warming:

Rapid global warming a real danger. The world's most precious real estate -- the coastal lowlands that contain the cities where much of the non-agricultural activity of the world is, and even worse, most of the world's most productive farmland lies, can be inundated.  OK, so the giant centers of finance, education, and creative activity can move. Maybe such cities as New York, St. Petersburg (both the cities in Florida and Russia) , London, Cairo, Mumbai, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Singapore can build into the sky as the sea rises, much as did Venice when the land upon which the city sits sank.  But there is no obvious capital fix for the inundation of prime farmland.

Every person needs to get this straight: agriculture is the foundation of all human existence. When the agricultural system fails, then so does everything else in society. Yes, economic progress has allowed people to delve into activities other than peasant farming, but if one starves to death one can no longer be a concert pianist, attorney, surgeon, stockbroker, film star, or software engineer. Such people will be the least vulnerable, of course. This said, multitudes will be in grave peril should the great food-producing areas typically in low plains abutting the rising seas be inundated as ice caps melt.  Should that happen gradually, people will be able to adjust as soils suitable for agriculture start appearing in what are now boreal areas. But if it happens quickly, then the mass death at the hands of thoroughly evil people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tojo, and Genghis Khan will seem slight in numbers if not offense.

China, which is still largely a land of peasant farmers even if cities like Shanghai and Tianjin suggest otherwise, and it has hundreds of people living in its lowland plains. The majority of such people are farmers. Where do they go? Hilly country is not so well suited for farming as are low-lying plains. People will not be able to catch enough fish to replace the grain crops (most people have grains as their primary source of food) that will no longer be grown where they grew so copiously. We of course all know about Denmark and the Netherlands, both of which will practically disappear, but the Dutch and the Danes will probably have the funds with which to relocate. But unspeakable tragedy awaits the people of not-so-glamorous, and of course, very poor Bangladesh.

In view of the generational cycle, I can already predict the time of the next Crisis Era -- roughly the year 2100, about eighty years from now. Global warming will have caused inundations that will make people desperate for survival and with few means of securing survival for themselves and their posterity. The potential for economic collapse, war, and genocide will be so high that there will be no need for any Timur Lenk to make it happen. There will be no easy adjustment to huge cuts in food supplies from either inundations of lowland plains or possible desertification of what is now prime farmland. In spirit Man does not live by bread alone -- but he certainly needs bread. There is no techno-fix for famine.