Hey kids: Don't be a sucker for socialism

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Yep, no government has ever achieved "true communism" like the kind that Marx talked about either. All the communist countries you mentioned, and all others that have sprouted out in the modern world, are simply dictatorships hiding behind the veil of Marx's ideas, corrupted to a terrible extent. Actual communism would be a system where there would be no state government, no social classes, and workers would control everything. As you can see, this would be at the least a very hard system to create, at the most it would be simply impossible.

As for social democracies, I feel those actually have a lot of promise in the future, in fact, the not so distant future. Already, countries in Europe such as Germany and those in Scandinavia have already adopted many democratic socialist as well as market socialist economical policies, such as those aimed to preserve economic equality and stability. And those nations have so far turned out great as far as I know. So overall this seems to be a promising time for these more moderate forms of socialism to flourish.

I think the problem with Venezuela is socialism doesn't really work in an economy that isn't self-sufficient. If you rely on imports from a capitalist world you are screwed.

Makes perfect sense. When communism came to Russia, that country was largely still an agrarian peasant society, with little industry. Neither nation was anywhere close to birthing Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, as that could only happen, according to Marx, in a self sustaining industrial society.

I think socialism fails, because of greed.

Greed at all levels.

Every person out there will be angling to get some of whatever the Socialist is promising.

Some examples I have read about
-Doctors will rip off the Medicare program by doing unneeded procedures.
-Business owners will rip off the food stamp program by letting poor people trade them for cash by giving them some of the face-value.
-People will not look for work to maximize unemployment benefits.
-People live together, but don't get married, so the woman can still get welfare.
-Students move out of their rich parents home, so they look poor on paper, so they can qualify for education grants.
-Politicians will direct money to special interests.
-Government employees with intentionally "pump up" their government pensions by working much overtime their final years, or moving to a high cost of living area.
-Welfare and disability fraud are huge (where people fake to be needy).

Everyone is looking out for themselves, and trying to maximize personal gain.

So, in the end, probably what happens is that *nearly everyone* gets on board with the freebies in some form, and the whole country starts grinding into collapse because of the building inefficiencies and lack productivity, as everyone is expecting to get their freebies.

End-stage socialism is always the same: poverty, murder, starvation, and death. But you know, maybe next time it will work!

Venezuela's socialist hell

Venezuela cannot wake up from its socialist nightmare.

The Venezuelan opposition just staged a massive protest against the government, which the government repressed with military force, leading to at least three deaths, The New York Times reports. Detained opposition activists say the authorities tortured them, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, across the country, people are starving.

Venezuela, a beautiful, oil-rich country, once one of the wealthiest nations in the Southern Hemisphere, is only sinking further into economic devastation and chaotic, corrupt authoritarianism. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro increasingly looks like a "Bolivarian" version of Vladimir Putin, holding power through corrupt patronage, fear, and the smothering of alternative voices and power centers. The protests were triggered by further moves by the executive to consolidate power. Maduro has banned a main opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, from holding political office.

Meanwhile, the economy keeps rotting. Venezuela has topped Bloomberg's Economic Misery Index, a benchmark whose title is self-explanatory, for three years running. The economy shrank by 18 percent last year, with unemployment at 25 percent, and inflation slated to be 750 percent this year and 2,000 percent the next, according to the International Monetary Fund (Venezuelan government statistics are, of course, made up, so third-party figures are more reliable).

But it's other statistics that show the real extent of the misery, and make one's stomach truly churn. Over the past year, 74 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of nearly 20 pounds each, reports The Economist. The military controls the country's food supply, and the result is widespread malnourishment and, of course, corruption. Venezuela's hospitals have more in common with those in Aleppo than with those of an oil-rich, emerging economy. As the Guardian reported last year, children are suffering from malnourishment for the first time in the country's modern history; there are outbreaks of scabies, a disease easily prevented with basic hygienic practices; hospitals are running out of even basic drugs. Caracas is the murder capital of the world. Corruption has infected the country wholesale even as it has created a new class of kleptocratic oligarchs linked to the security services.

http://theweek.com/articles/693411/vene ... alist-hell

CENTURY OF BLOOD: 100 Years of Communism’s Bloody Legacy

One hundred years ago this month, a train pulled by locomotive No. 293 arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Though it was late at night, a large crowd waited waving red flags and flowers. Within a sealed railcar was a passenger who would soon become dictator of the world’s first Marxist state: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.

Returning from a decade in exile, he was jubilantly greeted by socialist comrades, old and new, who a month earlier had deposed Nicholas II. “The Russian Revolution achieved by you,” Lenin declared at the station, “has opened a new epoch.” A new epoch, to be sure, but certainly not a better one for the more than 100 million people who, over the course of the next century, would be tortured, persecuted, and murdered in the name of communism.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -socialism

Today is May 1st, and should be remembered as Victims of Communism Day:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/vol ... -day-2017/

Our bourgeoisie are stingy. It's true.

But, not for material gain.

They want to maintain the illusion of status.

They will make decisions, to hurt others, even it will not improve their own lot.

I'd rather think of May 1st as my birthday - - which it is. Happy birthday to meeeeee!! !! !

1. "You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.”

2.”What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.”

3.”The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”

4. “When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.”

5. “You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it..."

-- Adrian Rogers, 1931

Liberals always concern themselves with taking a larger slice of the pie, but they never conceive of creating a larger pie.

And it can be argued that conservatives believe that while the rich grow the pie, they should not have to share any of it.
I have no problem with capitalism, as long as it's regulated to protect consumers and workers, and in which everyone shares in prosperity. If that means the government and organized labor has to compel business to share their wealth, then so be it - business had no right to be so stingy with their money in the first place. And people wouldn't have to be on government assistance if business was responsible to their fellow citizens, and would hire as many people as possible. I could care less if those people hired are holding up the wall all day, as long as they get a pay check.

Now,now,it started as a lovely festival called Beltane.

Happy birthday!I hope your wife gave you a good spanking and frosted your cake!!

All the quotes you cite are simply truisms which tell me nothing or do not have any evidence to prove their point. "Pure Ideology" as ole Zizek would say.

Secondly, you make the mistake of the false analogy fallacy. A pie is so dissimilar from a market economy that trying to compare the two is a fool's gambit and does not show any inherent truth like you seem to think. If you look at the facts, you will see that the top 0.1% of this nation have about as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Now, one would think, that perhaps, if wealth is distributed somewhat more evenly, that the poverty stricken of the U.S. would then invigorate the economy by actually having spare money to spend in the market? Which would then lead to further prosperity for everyone? Just spitballing here. Or of course, you could reach the same conclusion through morality, but I'll leave that for another day.

(good god, I really need to stop arguing with people, its kind of a guilty pleasure of mine by this point.)

Oh gosh not PragerU! All the logical components of my brain are slowly dying... the pure ideology... its killing me...

jk, not all of its bad and extremely biased, its just that a lot of it is. And before you start calling me biased, if a leftist channel made the same amount of irrational conclusions based on pure opinion as they do (not referring to the video in question here) than I would despise them just as much.