US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2004

On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.

Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.

People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.

Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.

Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.

Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.

If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).

If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.

Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).

In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.

On January 08 2020 19:45 iamthedave wrote:
Initial reports said no US casualties. I can't imagine Trump posting what he did if there was confirmed US casualties. He'd be banging the drums in that instance, no doubt.

On January 08 2020 01:33 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone have an idea of how we get from where we are to this Scandinavian social democracy (which as practiced is still unsustainable) in the decade we have to get there if we want to keep the probability of mass extinction under ~50%?

When I entertain electoralism the closest I can come is.

Sanders wins 2020. First 2 years are nothing but roadblocks, and like Obama, he's handed an economy in free fall. During that time disillusioned Sanders supporters and socialists unite to replace the entirety of congress and the Senate and in Sanders second term he can sign the radical legislation necessary to avert what the best available science tells us is near certain doom otherwise.

People that aren't supporting Sanders as that sort of last hope seem to completely avoid reconciling how voting for anyone but Sanders keeps us on a trajectory toward irreversible (on a non geological time scale) and catastrophic ecological collapse.

As far as I can tell the science says anyone accepting anything less radical than Sanders is supporting not only dooms the global south (as the Scandinavian model does) but makes global catastrophic climate collapse certain.

I can't imagine and don't think anyone can, a scenario where Biden wins the nomination and we make the radical changes in the time needed through any other explanation than magic and hope.

On January 08 2020 23:40 JimmiC wrote:
Trump is going to make a statement at 11am Est.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794404894/president-trump-to-deliver-statement-on-iran

On January 08 2020 23:02 ShambhalaWar wrote:...
If democrats really want to win, they would endorse Sanders... His fundraising, his backing by the youth, and the excitement that has always been behind him I believe would overwhelm trump's campaign ez, and bring real change to the US.
...

On January 08 2020 23:02 ShambhalaWar wrote:


Your description of a Sanders win sounds pretty ideal to me.

I'm even starting to lose faith in Warren, the way she seems to pander to the center. Faltering on medicare for all, and seeing Castro endorse her, while not at all a bad thing (I think they are both rather progressive), was extremely depressing to me... and felt mostly like a statement of how desperate the democratic power structure is to hold onto the way things are.

If democrats really want to win, they would endorse Sanders... His fundraising, his backing by the youth, and the excitement that has always been behind him I believe would overwhelm trump's campaign ez, and bring real change to the US.

I don't at all trust the democratic party to do anything but split the party between the center and his supporters. We tried the center in 2016 and we lost, despite that... they will fight to the last to desperately hold onto the status quo.

I think at this point everyone knows it... yet... They do EVERYTHING but acknowledge him, for anything... at the very least they could acknowledge him as someone running in the race.

On January 08 2020 23:59 farvacola wrote:

You’re defining “left-wing” too narrowly with reference to Sanders, he has crossover appeal that conflicts with the typical urban/rural divide, as was seen when he won Michigan in the ‘16 primary. I don’t know if that means he’d win easily, but assuming that his progressivism would necessitate some measure of significantly higher turnout doesn’t jive with the specifics of his candidacy.