Cinnabar (10-15-2019), PoliTalker (10-15-2019)
I myself invest zero time thinking about Rand Paul.
I do periodically think about rightwing libertarianism, which I compare to communism. Because they are both systems that ardent geeks invented in theory and which supposedly sound good on paper --- but they never work and have never been proven to work in real life.
What has been proven to work, and is the most successful socio-economic system in all of human history, are the liberal democracies/social welfare states of the western tradition in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Cinnabar (10-15-2019), PoliTalker (10-15-2019)
Rand Paul went to the socialist hellscape that is Canada for the surgery he needed after his neighbor kicked his ass.
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
Cinnabar (10-15-2019)
The View.....
Wonkette
NY
You know what brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in places like China and India? Capitalism and free markets. Now I'm not suggesting we need to go the communist backed state capitalism style of China but the results of opening up their markets speak for themselves.
There's a certain segment of the U.S. population fascinated with several small largely all white European countries. What gets left out is those countries had their largest economic gains with their markets were the freest. Over time some became more about redistribution and it was during those times that their growth slowed or reversed.
So you don't go from a poor country to a redistributive one because the latter does not create the necessary growth.
Last edited by cawacko; 10-15-2019 at 08:21 AM.
I don't take lectures from unqualified self appointed pedantic poseurs.
Hello dukkha,
Yeah. It's just so unfair to the most advantaged in society to be forced to help the disadvantaged.
Ah, but the people you are arguing against are not advocating for complete socialism. By taking this bend, you are putting words in their mouths, arguing against something which is not real, An exaggeration.
But if you ask them, they are happy with their system and would not want to switch to an American-style extreme wealth inequality system.
Hey, if you have no good argument against what they stand for it always helps to repaint them, demonize them, as something more scary.
If Paul got his way, wealth inequality would become more extreme and lower standards of living would become lower still.
The problem with Paul's dream is that limited government allows more scoundrels to get away with more oppression.
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
John Galt was a metrosexual
There is a the problem when people start discussing ideologies and that is there doesn't exist a pure capitalist nor socialist economy in the world. Every nation has a mixed economy, the US has been partially socialistic since the 19th Century.
When Paul presents everything in a capitalist vs. socialist dichotomy, making sure to include the catch words, Stalin, Hitler (who wasn't a socialist), and Mao, plus drop the term socialism as often as possible, he isn't discussing nor describing reality, but selling books. As someone above put it, he wants to come across as the intellectual politician, but in truth, he is just another politician, and isn't the libertarian his father was for decades
Rand Paul and his supporters style themselves as self-styled rightwing libertarians in the tradition of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.
That obligates them to point to actual real world examples of major nation-states that successfully employ their vision of extremist, rightwing libertarianism.
Otherwise, they simply engage in mental masturbation at best.
Libertarians only provide slogans.
They provide no real world examples of where their ideology works at the scale of a nation state.
The debate between "socialism and capitalism" is pointless, fruitless, and worst of all disingenuous and dishonest.
Every modern nation state in the western liberal tradition employs a hybrid system of regulated and restrained capitalism combined with a generous social welfare state and government intervention in the macro-economy.
You are attempting to set up a false narrative and a phony shadow-boxing match between "socialism" and "capitalism"
and if you read the fountainhead the protagonist is a raping asshole.
Most people aren't geniuses, we should not design a world to cater solely to maximizing their freedom, even if
it costs us a few architectural treasures along the way..
Trumfucks don't even bother trying to understand what I wrote. It contains assumed knowledge you morons can't possibly fathom.
Not your fault, you want libertarian education, not evidence based.
it figures wingnuts would love Ayn Rand, a drunk RUSSIAN nutbag chain smoker ranting utter bullshit
And exactly where has anyone advocated for the eradication of capitalism? Which candidate? Ever? What I'm hearing is better regulations and a more fair common sense tax structure while maintaining social safely nets.
The way things stand under the current broken and corrupt form of capitalism, the middle class is being decimated. The USA is on the way to officially becoming an oligarchy/kleptocracy...if we are not already there.
The entire article is worth the read.The Middle Class is not “Normal”
There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class. Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.
At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.
So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in “normal” capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.
You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.
This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years. The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval - a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century - or by heavily taxing the rich.
History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class. If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you’ll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich - the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations - was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.
https://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/20...;normal”
Last edited by Cinnabar; 10-15-2019 at 10:40 AM.
BLUEXITA Modest Proposal For Separating Blue States From Red
Dear Red-State Trump Voter,
Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.
It is a tragedy that so much of the work that so many men and women toiled at for so long to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril.
This is why our separation in all but name is necessary.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1409...mp-red-america
Hello cawacko,
-Which is why the best system incorporates elements of socialism mixed with capitalism in the correct balance.
The problem with anti-socialists is that they always mischaracterize socialism as a replacement for capitalism. They can never acknowledge the benefits of mixing the two.
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
Hello dukkha,
I know that sounds bad but if everybody is paying the same thing then nobody is disadvantaged by that.
And the perk is that everyone benefits by it.
Free health care, free college, free day care ... all these things allow society to function. They allow people to flourish, work, raise families, contribute to society in their fullest.
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
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