Insulting? How is this insulting?
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No Malorn, socialism is NOT communism. Communism is an extreme form of socialism.
But hey, then the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea has the same state system as a democracy, because it's in the name? And what about the Democratic Republic of Kongo? Malorn, really now.
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Still, you do not know much of anything about labour parties, do you? "Controlling everything" is absolute and utter bullshit. Labour parties are socialist parties based on unions who are predominantly interested in protecting and advancing the position of the workforce,
without moving to a communist state. Labour parties are in favour of free market, but simply see a bigger role for the government in caring for their populace and see a bigger role for the wealthy to take care of the less wealthy, without actually controlling the populace.
They consider the government responsible for providing basic needs such as security (police, national defense), accessible public health, encouraging employment and protecting the rights of the employee, providing for those who can't help themselves (including the elderly and pension plans), accessible education for all (so they can work themselves up). The only things they prefered no free market on were services like energy (nuclear facilities, making sure power supply is in domestic hands and does not become too expensive), transportation (national railways, airports and harbours) and hospitals (public interest). All the latter three groups have already been privatized by the liberals, btw. The idea was that service and quality would go up if there was competition.
That was not exactly true, problem with for instance privatizing railways, meant that immediately the less profitable tracks were up for dismantling. Which meant a lot worse service for the people depending on them. Everything got more expensive as well, since government funding was pretty much stopped and now just the clients had to pay the price for exploiting all these less profitable routes, rather than the national community as a whole. Since not everybody uses railroads, that's a lot more expensive for a relative few and it meant more people would take the car (opposite of the intention), which lead to more traffic jams and traffic jams lead to economic damage.
The same is true for bus routes. There used to be 5 different busroutes in my own city, but since the privatization, there's only 2 left and they are less efficient as they take longer and less interesting routes (nearest busroute used to go to nearest railway station, now it goes to another one, which takes 10 minutes longer to get there and it's an extra train stop, so I don't use it anymore at all). The stops are frequently also a longer walk or a single stop for entire residential areas. So service has effectively gone down quite a bit. And they're considering on scrapping another line.
International shipping and transportation routes too are IMO too important for national security to be completely ran privately, since then economic interest may take precedence over national interest.
So despite being a liberal, I kinda agree that in some special cases, some nationalised institutions or subsidies to provide service to citizens isn't always a bad thing, or that companies have to provide services that are less profitable along with a more profitable line. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, otherwise only the profitable lines would still exist. And just look at the state of the British Railways (privatized for decades and decades). What an utter mess.
Providing some government services for a more care free life within a free trade and free market system is called a "wellfare states" and that can not at all be compared to communism. Companies are after all in private hands, not public hands. Competition is fierce and the government does not tell the companies what and how many things to produce.
So a modern, socialist, political party (typically named labour) is a farcry from the type of socialism you refer to. What you are refering to is a different type of regime that people like Chavez prefer. Modern socialists in Europe don't want anything to do with communism because they value their freedom as well. In fact, next to liberals they are the main proponents of gaining more freedoms to live your life the way you want to, where you want to and with as little concern for your health etc as possible. I know, you have trouble considering that other people than you like freedoms (as you continuously proclaim nobody can understand freedoms like you do), but it's true.
Now, I'm not particularly fond of labour for often being a bunch of hypocrits who don't look after the national treasury too well, but they too have a point now and then. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with taking care of one's fellow citizens if you can. It would be ideal if people would do so on their own, but they won't. Hence taxes.
2012-04-16, 04:26 PM
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