92% of Americans prefer Sweden's "socialistic" economic system

a reply to: Puppylove

Yes, but now you are saying that capitalism is a system of government or implying as much. But it isn't. All capitalism is is a free exchange of goods and services and that exists anywhere despite the system of government.

Capitalism was not created because someone created the constitutional republican government of the US.

a reply to: peck420

Natural order doesn't exist, all nature is, is a bunch of organisms trying to succeed and survive in a hostile environment. That's it. After that success is determined by which organisms evolve or develop the best traits or methods to succeeding in said environment.

The methods organisms evolve or develop to do this are numerous and ever evolving with many successes and failures.

Success can be measured in two ways, the success of a species as a whole to survival and the quality of life of said species.

We've shown ourselves incredibly successful in the first category, now lets concentrate on success in the second shall we?

a reply to: ketsuko

Alright capitalism isn't the failure our government systems including the balance between capitalism and socialism within them has been a failure the world over, including our own. We need to continue looking for ways to better our quality of life for all while also encouraging our species to continue seeking to innovate and improve themselves as individuals.

Is this statement acceptable to you?

a reply to: ketsuko

There is a blur between corps and government. This lobbying and incestuous relationship are a catalyst to untold power, treasure and control.

Most high-level FDA employees have a background in either medicine or law, but one of the largest private-sector sources is the Monsanto Company. Over the past decades, at least seven high-ranking employees in the FDA have an employment history with the Monsanto Company. Connections have led many to speculate whether any conflicts of interest exist within this revolving door between the big food companies and the department charged with regulating them.

It seems like a chicken or egg argument now.

ivn.us...

a reply to: seasonal

That much I can agree with, and in the end, it comes back to who was unscrupulous first. it doesn't really matter who because the actual process started a long time ago, so we may never get that sorted out.

But you can pass all the laws you want against it and so long as the unscrupulous are there, those laws mean squat -- see Hillary Clinton.

The best defenses for both our system of governance and our capitalist free market system are to allow maximal personal freedom and to build a society that prizes highly moral individuals in all facets of their lives.

Here are the reasons why: With maximal person freedom the damage done to others by unscrupulous individuals is lessened and contained. Also, it lowers the amount of power that can be contained in any one individual, so when you do get an unscrupulous person in a position of power, their reach is much less. Any suffering is bad, but at least there is both the freedom to move away from that bad abuser and the abuse is constrained by the lesser amount of power.

As corrupt as Hillary is, if all she ever rose to be was the equivalent of mayor of Podunk, AR, would anyone care beyond the city limits of her little town?

Secondly, if society prized morality in its individuals it would be much more difficult for blatantly unscrupulous individuals to grab and maintain power. There would or should be far more people of good moral fiber roaming around who would be intolerant of the kinds of things we see today in our high officials. They would either have to hide their behavior very, very well or be tossed out on their ear as soon as even the sniff of perfidy was revealed, and this would or should hold true in most strata of society.

In short, we would be mostly policing our own bad behavior without the strong arm of the law. Yes, that means we would have shame as a "thing" again.

originally posted by: JAY1980
I'll just leave this here...
Sweden leads the way in dumping socialism

Have any of you actually talked to people from Sweden?
Well I have and most are not very happy with their social programs, and have been moving back to a capitalist model over the last few years.
Collective socialism doesn't work!

As a Swede the social programs was not an issue until we started to become world champions on immigration of low skilled people who cannot compete in Sweden technological society since the unemployment was low. It worked quite well when we only imported people who wanted to succeed.

And then the politicians started to want to crush the system with open borders for any person in the world to live on the social system we had built up. A system will not work when the people/politicians in charge are hellbent to destroy it and miss manages it.

Selling out state owned companies that in the end increased the cost for customers. The only exception is telephony where the state owned monopoly was more expensive than what came after.

The correct statement is collective socialism does not work when Bilderberg take over and corrupt the politicians.

a reply to: ketsuko

I've got no problem with shame as long as it can be kept to things actually worthy of shaming. You know stuff that actually causes people (that are not themselves) harm on a personal level* without their non-coerced consent.

I know odd language but I think it pretty much covers exactly where shaming should both start and end while covering the odd strange exceptions.

a reply to: ketsuko

This is true, I think it will take a group like the un touchables to stop this train.

Have you ever been in a situation where there is something wrong, you mention it and you are the a-hole? Then we have the you can't beat em join em. This is the environment we find ourselves in.

I had to look up perfidy, new word, well for me.

a reply to: Puppylove

But my point in the end is that the system is a bit less important than the people in it. Even socialism or communism could theoretically work if every single person in the system was perfectly 100% committed to it and no one ever cheated the system even a tiny bit.

However, because we all know this is not so and that there are many people who will be only too happy to take advantage of the system if they can, this is why forced collective systems with central planning end up being so malevolent. Too many people will take advantage of the captive, forced nature of those systems to skim off the top of them and those who would otherwise be honest, hardworking people end up being crushed because they cannot do what any other person who is being taken advantage of would do -- remove themselves from the system.

Where a free market realizes its advantage is in the degree of freedom it allows. No one is compelled to work for any other so one is compelled to be taken advantage of in that way. Of course, the converse is that those who are greedy can keep what they have and ignore the truly needy.

But this is where a moral society comes in - You hope you have far more moral people than immoral and more who are willing to share and help a neighbor in need than those who will not.

a reply to: seasonal

Heh, side effect of all the reading I've done in my life. I constantly have strange words crop up when I write things. They seem to work, so I use them and then realize what I've done and grab my desktop dictionary to make sure my instincts were right.

So, honestly, you weren't the only one who looked it up.

I should point out that if you want a better example on how social programs can work I would look at Finland, Norway and Denmark.

Denmark have roughly the same system but less refugees and unemployed. Danish laws are less protective of the rights to fire people in Denmark but it is easier to get a new job there since danish companies are not as picky as Swedish. Swedish companies are used to getting very skilled labor.

Norway have oil and since unemployment in Sweden have been high Swedes have gone to Norway to get job. Now Norway have some unemployment in Norway in low skilled jobs due to the influx of Swedish competing on the job market.

a reply to: ketsuko

The problem is most people simply want to live their lives. They aren't out to hurt anyone or make sweeping social change nor are they particularly prone to sweeping gestures both good or bad. This is where most of humanity falls.

What we have are a few people that break the norm and prey on the ordinary mans desire to just live a simple life with their friends and loved ones.

All of humanity is screwed over by an extreme minority of people consistently taking advantage of this fact.

I think what we need is to make our leadership positions come with perks, but also with extreme no tolerance rules, with certain rules being punished by harsher punishments than any other crime any normal person can do. Positions of power and leadership should be such that unless you are truly concerned with leading for the right reasons and believe in the oaths of office you'd be insane to take it irregardless of the perks of said position. I also think our leaders should be tried in a court of the people where the citizens are the jury not his peers.

I don't know, but I know we need something that makes trying to take power by a lying two faced psychopath as hostile to them as possible, to the point they stop trying to get the power to kill millions and go back to "just" killing their neighbors or whatever their death fetish happens to be this time, something a whole lot easier to contain.

Our leaders should be held to near impossible standards. I don't want to hear excuses for them, that's the beginning of the decline of our society. We should work to make sure our leaders are the best of us, not accept the worst simply because they're the ones most gung ho about being such.

We need to find a way to beat these bastards and keep them from gaining power, they won;t stop trying unless we make it impossible for them, and if we let them, they'll slowly destroy us every time.

a reply to: ketsuko

communism could theoretically work

As I define communism it have not been implemented yet.

Communism for me is a system where all work have become equal in currency/time so that everyone can get the same cost/benefit for their contribution as everyone else. In fact if the free market worked with free information flow, it would in the end create the same equilibrium in capitalism as communism would.

But since people corrupt every system to the power pyramid for own greed you end in feudalism (what capitalist call crony capitalism). In communist countries that would be the 1% are more equal than others.

As for socialism, more often than not good social programs seem to fail due to infection rather than their own failures.

Some outside source comes in to destroy it. Be it hostile capitalistic trade partners, or a sudden influx of people that have no respect for the system in place.

Many seem fine til infected by things not part of said system.

a reply to: Puppylove

Makes me think of Socrates philosopher-king.

a reply to: seasonal

This is on Slate more than the OP...

92% of Americans? How on Earth can they float that number with a straight face? While I believe you can wiggle numbers to say anything, I do not believe 92% of Americans could find Sweden on a map much less make an educated comparison of economic systems.

a reply to: LittleByLittle

True, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

originally posted by: Puppylove
a reply to: Edumakated

I see what your saying, and what it's a very sick sociopathic way of determining the worth of people and is why capitalism needs to be seriously rebuild from the ground up or scrapped and replaced entirely by something else.

Here's why, can you, and be honest here think of something a person can do to make them worth more than a million times what someone else who puts in a full weeks work as a person? Because there are individuals making that and then some.

If not than tell me in what reasonable sense it makes a for a person to receive that much more of the worlds resources than they have?

I'm not saying there aren't people that deserve more than others. Clearly they do. But the system we have takes it to ridiculously broken extremes.

The issue I have with capitalism is it takes people and turns them into nothing more than numbers and that simply is sick and forgets that there are actually people attached to those numbers.

It makes excuses for extreme gaps in how people are treated by using math, and it does so by completely discounting the human aspect.

It completely ignores the fact that society exists not for profit, and not for the individual. It exists for the people within it as a whole. There's nothing wrong with people within a society being rewarded for contributing more. In fact it's a good thing, positively reinforcing good behavior is a great thing. The problem comes when we do so at the expense of forgetting the purpose of society in the first place, mutual protection and care. A people united against a harsh world that cares not one iota about a single one of us. When we put individual success above caring for each other in importance we've stopped being civil and turned into solitary predators and became the enemy of society as we now put preying upon each other ahead of caring for each other, we've put protecting ourselves above protecting each other. When you get rewarded by society it should be because you've done more to help it than others, not because you've found ways to take more from others.

What we have today is predatory in nature, it's anything but civil or civilized, and it makes a mockery of the term society. If we were truly civil we'd make sure the people at the bottom are taken care of and comfortable first, and then reward from there, happy that the extra rewards we receive are because we contribute to society and it's purpose, not prey upon it like some sick parasite.

Addendum: If a person is actively contributing to society or have in a meaningful way for an extended period, they deserve at minimum that which society is supposed to offer by the very act of being a society. The protection and care of the society they contribute to. It should be an inalienable right. When people say a job does not deserve a living wage, they are saying that person has not earned to be included in our society as their contributions are unworthy of the very basics society is supposed to offer to its contributing members.

Your problem is that you believe yourself to be the judge of what someone is worth and not the free market. I agree that I believe some people are not worth what they make, but the market makes that determination.

Let's look at athletes. Take Floyd Mayweather. He made $300 million last year. By your logic from previous posts, the guy selling popcorn at the fight deserves to make more because it is obscene that Floyd makes like $50 million a fight and the popcorn guy is working just as hard as Floyd. The reality is that there is only one Floyd and without Floyd, the popcorn guy would have no job. People are there to see Floyd, not the popcorn guy. So the popcorn guy makes his $15/hr or whatever. He is happy, he earned some extra money and the arena is happy they could sell some popcorn. It isn't much more complicated than that... The fact Floyd is making $50 million is totally irrelevant to what the popcorn guy makes.

Wages and money are just a way to value an individual's labor. The fact that someone works hard has ZERO to do with how much they make. All that matters is supply and demand which is what determines wages.

Sticking with Floyd, if I am a fight promoter and I know I can sell out an arena plus TV spots and make say $200 million from a Floyd Mayweather fight, it makes sense that I might pay him $50 million. It is just simple math. Same with movie stars. Same with CEOs. Same with any job for that matter.

I've asked this question and yet to receive a response. How does Floyd Mayweather (or a CEO) who makes $50 million a year affect you personally? Matter of fact, keep it simple. If your neighbor makes 3x's what you make, how is it taking money out of your pocket?

a reply to: Edumakated

The free market is an aspect of a system we designed. It's not inherent perfect system or divinity, it exists as it does as a product of the system it's part of. A flawed system if I may add. There's nothing inherently magical about your free market that makes in the end all, be all perfect decider for what a person is worth. A free market is no different than trying to use nature as a model for perfect living, idiotic. It has no rules, not really a bunch of random organisms trying # til something works for that organism, # the ones that happened to try the wrong #. It's nothing but a cold heartless dog eat dog system. Anyone who holds it up as some kind of great example of anything kind of makes me nervous. All free market really is, everyone for yourselves GO, to the victor go the spoils!!!!

Also I don't worship the almighty dollar as you seem to, so your question is a silly one to me. My neighbor making three times as much as me in cash isn't an issue. Neither is someone making a lot more than me, so long as the least of us that contribute to society has a living wage I don't care how much anyone has beyond that point, it seriously no longer matters once the living wage is met.

If you contribute to society, society owes you a living for it. Beyond that, it's up to you to show you deserve more.

You don't believe in society being of the people, for the people. So you'll probably never get this and I might as well be speaking to a wall. You are a staunch individualist, you see things clear in terms of me and you. To you there is no us.

I'm not out destroy success, I'm simply out to end poverty. Both success and a lack of poverty can exist side by side.

Let me ask you a similar question. If everyone makes a living wage, but harder work, skill and education still lead to greater gains. What problem do you have with that?

Is there anything gained by people not making a living wage? When they don't they get desperate, many turn to crime, it leads to malnutrition which leads to disease, it leads to a lack of education and ignorance, it leads to civil unrest and taken too far eventual rebellion, I can go on and on for the things bad we gain from failing to pay a living wage as a base.

So nothing wrong with people making more, the problem is people not making enough.

a reply to: LittleByLittle

As most people define it will never be implemented because you will never find the right people to run it.

The devil is always in the details. In order to have what would be called perfect communism, no one could be in charge, but given human nature, someone would have to be in charge ... and as we can see from every example of every communist state in existence, this is where the problem begins.

Being in charge of a communist system gives one enormous power over everything and access to all the best of the system for oneself, even moreso than cronyism in a way. And people who are drawn to such things will find their way to the top in those systems; they always do. And because such things are compelled by force, those of us who might be in it with the best intent end up trapped and crushed in misery with no escape or recourse.

Often, the greatest evils happen when humans gain ultimate control over their fellows who have no recognized rights of their own but what the top officials allow them. This is why respect for rule of law for all, top to bottom, and the concept of morality which reinforces that concept is so important in a free society. It is a natural barrier to taking advantage and a natural barrier to prevent others from allowing themselves to be taken advantage of.