Socialism is BS. Don't be fooled.

There is nothing wrong with equality as the EFFECT of good policy and tied in with other good effects, but using it as the sole CAUSE of your policy decisions is ridiculously stupid.

If everyone is starving, everyone is equal. Does that mean you have a super wonderful perfect economic system? Of course fucking not.

The communists were tyrants before they even decided to be communist. They knew that if they chose a fallacious ideal like communism they could place "equality" above freedom of speech and human rights once they got into power.

"The people in harge were bad, that's why communism didn't work." is a fucking stupid argument. Of course bad people exist and will get into the government. How old are you? 5? The reason why communism is flawed is because it has little to no safeguards against tyranny. There is no much use complaining about how Stalin lives in opulent splendour whilst your children starve if you are living in a "dictatorship of the proletariat". The founding fathers of the US made Freedom of Speach their 1 priority from day 1, that is why we are a democracy, because not being executed for speaking your mind is a little more fundamental than whatever good would come from handing all your property over to the government.

Remember. With capitalism, EVERYONE WINS! It doesn't matter if some win more than others.

>>39
It’s funny because it actually sucks there. Just because you get a bunch of free shit doesn’t make a country good, you think those Scandinavian countries have the highest suicide rates in the world for nothing? It’s a fucking mental shithole.

Ive traveled all over the world and the only place I would rather live besides the USA is Hong Kong, Japan, Switzerland or Germany

>>41
Well, im from sweden and i like it here. And the suicide rates are higher in japan, switzerland and hong kong  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
And iran has less suicides than the US, must be because that is such mental paradise, or maybe their religous indoctrination is more succesful...

>>42 Hear hear landsman. I mean, we may be the only country in the world whose GDP is composed *majorly* of taxes (that means we pay more than half our income in taxes) but I still can't imagine how my life would have been if I was born in equal circumstances except in the US.

Still, it is evident we can't go on like this forever...

This will be my last response before the national holiday is over.

Many continue to perpetuate fallacies which are easily disproved. Here are my suggestions to aid the flow of the discussion.

1: It would be helpful to the flow of this discussion if you were to use the internet to check your facts.
2: If you have difficulty rememberring people's arguments, get a piece of paper and jot down all of the key points that have been made just as you would during a lecture at college.
3: Please analyse problems thoroughly before responding. I do not wish to patronise people by explaining things to them that they already know, so I write under the assumption that you have at least an ordinary level of knowledge and I do not need to waste time explaining things which you already know through common sense.
4: Take all of the points made into account whilst composing statements. This means if you wish to disprove a point you will have to take other points into account whilst attempting a disproval, otherwise your opponent will simply remind you of the point you have missed out and your efforts will have been wasted.

Civil rights, minimum wage and such laws have nothing to do with socialism. They are distinct individual concepts and you do not need to include other concepts socialists support, such as the eradication of the human right to own private property, in order to implement them.

Using Scandinavian countries as examples of socialism is a ridiculous argument since Norway is a Constitutional Monarchy and both Sweden and Finland are Parliamentary Democracies. I have already submitted that the most socialist a country will get is to have a popular socialist-leaning political party which favors abnormally high regulation and welfare. Most likely Scandinavian countries will not see an evolution towards socialism as it is an inefficient method of running the majority of the economy, the people know this and the socialists know the people know this and cannot prove to the people that socialism is an infallible system as it is not true. So in order to maintain their power they will not initiate those ideas which are observably inefficient and unpopular and if they do they will lose popularity.

It is common sense that Rome wasn't built in a day, yet marxist ideologies tend to claim that they are capable of something similiar and use this fallacy to claim other systems of government are inferior. Many are essentially claiming that because socialism can achieve the impossible it is superior to systems of government that are affected by the real world. This is of course absurd and is based on the fallacy that socialism can achieve what can only take decades to accomplish if it can accomplish it at all.

If you look at democracies around the globe you can see a correlation between the amount of egalitarianism in the country and the age of the democracy. Philosophically and from empirical evidence, from what has been seen libertarianism is the only way to eliminate tyranny. If you attempt to implement socialism before implementing libertarianism it can only be assumed, philosophically and from empirical evidence, that you will end up with tyranny as without libertarianism there are no safeguards against tyranny. With this in mind it is easy to see that socialist revolutions never work, not because tyrants were in charge, but because tyrants prefer their supporters to follow marxist ideologies instead of libertarianism. Pushing socialism as a means to eliminate tyranny is illogical.

Before you repeat the argument "socialism didn't work because of bad guys", let me do some thinking for you by performing the simple task of following the 4 suggestions I have made... If socialism is a super wonderful happy magical fantasy perfect worker's paradise, then it needs to wait until a post-tyrannic proto-democracy evolves into a true democracy in order to have a chance of being implemented properly. You must admit that socialism is not a means of eliminating tyranny and setting a nation on course for democracy.

I shouldn't have to repeat this point, but I will have the common courtesy to. I never said capitalism was perfect, I am a firm believer in Adam Smith's proposition that capitalism only works when the law is enforced by a democratic government. Anyone who claims otherwise is putting words in my mouth.

halliburton?

In capitalism you only win if you're from a middle-class white Prostestant family. Because then you have OPPORTUNITIES!

>>46
I majorred in chemical engineering and this black nerd I used to study with completed a masters degree with merit and now contracts and consultancy across the globe for major industries, I last heard he is now working in China. If it wasn't for racism he would have been emperor of the universe by now, damn racists. If only we could find out who they are. I think it would be easier just to blanket tax all whites since all our problems are due to racism and only whites can be racist.

>>46
Yeah, god knows jews never make it anywhere.

>>46
Yeah, god knows jews never make it anywhere.

>>47
"All our problems are due to racism and only whites can be racist."
Sometimes it seems liberals believe that.

>>46 then explain all the Ching Chongs and Japanese and Jews and Arabs that have become successful in capitalist countries and in capitalism in general. not to mention the occasional Gook and Nigger.

liberals are stupid and whine a lot

While conservatives are so smart and take every setback like the men they are (women who are conservative are in denial about their gender and will not be raptured). Thats why conservatives never have anything bad to say about taxes.

>>53
whut?

>>54
Liberals whine. Conservatives do not. Get it?

>>55
You like pineapples?

Socialism is just populist ideas mixed up with bullshit. You don't need socialism, you don't need to drag the bullshit along with you. Just support the ideas you agree with. Stupid hippies.

Pure socialism does not exist.
Pure capitalism does not exist.

>>58
If we sort pure socialism into good ideas + bad ideas, does this mean that a version of impure socialism would consist solely of good ideas? What if these ideas were defined on their own and the labe lof socialism dropped. Would that be a problem?

If that isn't a problem, then people should stop being socialists and just support good ideas.

>>39
We are, seriously...

>>58 Should they, even? I mean, Socialism is completely offensive in its introduction (it requires a swath of theft) but there are always degrees, much to the chagrin and foil of those who have seen the light of "a non-relative ideal".

>>61
wut

humans arent stale, but some ideals are.
thats why most societies fail in the long run.. no flexibility at all

Marx called the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" the "rights of the egoistic bourgeois". He was basically saying that human rights are wrong because they don't ensure 100% equality. This is a huge logical fallacy because even though human rights don't ensure equal power distribution, they do protect a citizen's right to the freedom of speech and therefore they are not wrong AT ALL.

Marxism and all it's ideological branches were tyrannical since their first conception. Their followers blindly follow them refusing to accept even the most obvious and rational criticism and show as much ignorance and extremism as any religious cult.

Like Halliburton said, equality should be an effect of good policy, not the foundation for some fully flung ideology that rejects the very ideas that are actually needed for any form of equality to exist.

wasn't halliburton the guys who "distributed" themselves some money without giving anyhthing for it in the iraq war?

>>65
wut

Completely agree with Halliburton, on most counts; however, I would like to ask the question:

Why would a pure Libertarianism (anarchic to a degree, perhaps Government involvement only in International politics) not work?

Would we blame it on 'society' not being 'good?'
Would it not work because someone would steal something?
Surely then we could say that no Government in all of history hasn't 'worked' because people have always stolen.

I am not saying that the Government is evil (at least not all of them) but perhaps we should judge a government by the liberty of it's people?  By the freedoms enjoyed by it's populace, and by the happiness of the demos?

>>67

"Pure" libertarianism, or a free market economy in which the government only has the most minuet of influence means the government has absolutely no power what-so-ever, including the power to enforce its own laws.  Without a state controlled police or military force, it can be as easily defied as the UN.  Thus, a "libertarian" government is an oxymoron, and will begin to build its own enforcement agency if it wishes to survive.  At this point, minarchy is on the outs.  Further, if there was no agency of enforcement, then there would be nothing to protect production owning industry from producers who would simply seize the means of production -- that is, occupy factories and service industry, and create cooperatively owned business, or dare I say it, completely do away with consumer capitalism and socialize production.  The only way to prevent this would be to hire militias to protect the companies.  But once they've done this, they've become institutions of law enforcement and economic control.  State Capitalism becomes state socialism, all but in name.

By the way, this thread is an example of why I hate how minarchists in the US have taken "Libertarian" for their own.  In the rest of the world, Libertarianism is synonymous with "anarchist."  Confused the hell out of me for a minute there.

>>67
If you have no justice at all you will have no liberty at all. When done properly liberty and justice are practically the same thing.

>>68
""Pure" libertarianism, or a free market economy in which the government only has the most minuet of influence means the government has absolutely no power what-so-ever, including the power to enforce its own laws."
Technically a libertarian government fulfils the wishes of the people and is merely a functionaly bureaucracy that represents the people. So whether it has laws or not depends on the will of the people. The rest of your post is correct however.

>>68
I'm a "Pure" libertarian. Except without the "government" part. Why have a government at all if it doesn't do anything? I'm an agorist.

A government which cannot enforce laws is a good thing. Laws are the written will of legislatures, not necessarily rules designed to protect people (or that are any good at it when they are, frequently requiring people to be hurt in order to be enforced, thus eliminating the whole idea of laws existing to protect people).

In absence of "Law enforcement" there would still be protection agencies. You called it a "militia" but it doesn't have to be a milita. It could be a uniformed armed cop-looking person patrolling in a squad-car, a plainclothes guy that gets paid to stand around near the door with a concealed gun, a nut with an AR15 and a ghillie suit, it doesn't matter much. Ultimately if there were no protection agencies, we just become our own protection agencies. One way or another, people will be protected from crooks. This differs from "institutions of law enforcement and economic control" because they don't exist to enforce laws, just to protect their boss. They are not there for economic control either. If by this you mean sustaining capitalism, that belief requires the belief that capitalism must be enforced on people. I don't believe that's the case. Capitalism, as I use the word, is whatever economic activity occurs without being enforced on people. This is vastly different from the common use of the word in which the US is capitalist, I don't use it in that sense. Socialism and communism can be capitalistic if practiced completely voluntarily and without force. Communes and socialistic worker collectives are all fine and dandy under capitalism, as long as nobody is compelled to join a commune or collective, and are free to remain as individual actors to decide their own social organization. Not my personal taste, so don't shove it down my throat at gunpoint, but it's not like capitalism must be enforced upon people.

I find it unlikely that "consumer capitalism" will be done away with and production socialized. Violent overthrow of consumer capitalism would make the overthrowers the militia you mentioned, wouldn't it? If that is any reason to disparage capitalism, it would disparage similarly a violent socialist revolution, unless you are arbitrary and believe you know what's best for everybody, in which case it's okay because it's for a "just cause". Hopefully you're not of that belief. A voluntary overthrow of the market resembling what we know today in the US is possible, though vastly unlikely. It would have occured by now if people wanted it, in my opinion.

you know, back in the 17th century, a guy wrote a book about not having any laws, maybe you should read that before you go nut-jobbing apeshit with "omg omg we'll just protect ourselves!"

>>72
Hobbes?

Calvin?

>>74
No.

>>72
Maybe you should read it, he's practically justifying tyranny, learn to reading comprehension.

Socialism isn't bull shit. Capitalism is.

Capitalism (as people who call themselves "Capitalists" use it, and not to mean owner of means of production) is just leaving people fucking alone with their money.

Leaving people alone is bullshit? Someone's an asshole.

>>76
The world is more complicated than "ZOMG RULING CLASS IS TEH EBIL" and most true democracies form after decades of slow evolution. Hobbes outlined the first 10% of this process, from anarchy to dictatorship to monarchy to constitutional monarchy and finally to parliamentary monarchy. They were all tyrannies (anarchy can be classified as a patchwork of small tyrannies), but each one was getting closer to the libertarian democracy that is responsible for the freedom and standard of living we enjoy today.

If you read it you would realise that he was actually declaring that rulers should be revered figureheads and that national armies should be indoctrinated into early ideas surrounding national self determination and justice so that they cannot enter the vicious downward spiral of paranoia which leads to totalitarianist forms of government. He persuaded many monarchs to prefer rulers to act like populist presidents (enlightenned despots), rather than vicious kleptocratic totalitarianists. This was a vital step in the creation of parliaments, who's populists would later extend liberties to lower ranks creating the proto-democracies of the late 18th century.

How is anarchy a patchwork of small tyrannies?