The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-27-2020, 02:49 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(01-27-2020, 02:08 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-27-2020, 01:09 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: ... Who/which party/which side has to become more socialist these days Bob?

I'm obviously not Bob, but I would like to know: when you ask this question, what do you mean by "socialist"?

You don't know what socialist means? I suggest that you look it up, learn what it means and see how well it fits your views and the positions that you take and so forth. Marx and Lennon may have been cool or viewed as a heroic figure by many back in the day. Where are they now? Hint...What happened back then is just beginning to happen now and you already know the outcome.

Marx and Lennon -- the poster? That poster referred to Groucho Marx and John Lennon. Marx and Lenin? They were very nasty people.

There is no firm definition of the word socialism. In America it has long been the political equivalent of a cuss-word as is fascism. Big government? We haven't had a President committed to small government since at least Gerald Ford.

One ideology that used the word socialism was national socialism, which of course is a nightmare for workers who found themselves defenseless against the demands of industrialists, executives, or big land-owners -- let alone for Jews and political dissidents.  One variant of national socialism, Strasserism, believed in a socialist reorganization of society but held the opinion that Jews were the worst exploiters of all. We can largely ignore that as a meaningful definition of socialism, an anathema to all other socialists. Likewise one has the Ba'athists of Iraq and Syria that originally had a socialist agenda but eventually became crony capitalists of the worst sort. 

Marxism-Leninism has had its variants, but all depend largely upon government ownership and operation of productive resources on the grounds that such will accelerate economic growth (and progress to communism, an era in which scarcity is no more and government is irrelevant). It rejected markets for deciding what was desirable and what wasn't and lost all rational means of determining desirable ends of a 'socialist' economy. I will get to the consequences of government ownership and operation of the economy and one reason for rejecting such.

One fault with Marxism-Leninism was dictatorship... not so much in a powerful State apparatus but instead in a monopoly Party that destroyed democracy. So what does one have if one keeps Marxist-Leninist economics (government ownership and operation of the means of production? Democratic socialism. This in theory is what the reformed Communist wing of the (east) German Sozialistische Einheits-Partei (SED) after the collapse of Commie rule. The SED refashioned itself as the Partei Demokratisches Sozialismus (PDS), which was little trusted.

Most credible is the social-market society in effect in the German Federal Republic (and some other countries) which established a high-tax, high-service economy that allowed capitalist markets to operate. To many (I included) it is the best of all possible worlds, one which allows consumer choice, fosters individual development to the fullest, and reduces poverty to the minimum. How attractive is it? Such countries as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia went quickly to it -- in part by selling off the "socialist" economy.

We do not have this; we instead have what may be the purest plutocracy in the First World, one that puts profit above all else irrespective of the social cost. It is optimal for people of supreme talent or who have inherited wealth or special connections, but anyone else struggles for whatever he gets.

Nobody in the Democratic Party wants to take over private industry through nationalizations as the Commies did. Heck, even the Communist Party of the United States has abandoned that idea -- at least such is their claim.