Socialism For Absolute Beginners

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Might socialism empower the government to counter individual and corporate greed.
Then what if people with bad intentions infiltrated the government for their own greed. And the now have the power too.
And what if socialism was being promoted by people with bad intentions to empower a government they have already infiltrated? And they realized that using schools to promote socialism made good business sense at least for themselves.

Yep, that's totally what's happening.

This is a terrible list.

Rand is an awful writer whose work exists solely to promote her bizarre views. It's not particularly informative and is very poorly regarded in literary, philosophical, and economic circles. Generally speaking people who read Rand either get bored, realise that she's an idiot, or become less informed as a result of reading her.

Animal Farm is about the specifics of the Russian Revolution. It isn't useful for learning about socialism in general. And 1984 is about authoritarianism rather than socialism necessarily.

Similarly Brave New World is not really about socialism, it's about power.

The Communist Manifesto at least is genuinely about socialism, but it's also 150 years old and as you say not an easy read.

There is of course the issue that most books about socialism are targeted towards idiots, whether they're the Naomi Klein and Paul Mason writing for leftists, or Matt Ridley and Ludwig von Mises writing for rightists. But there are good options out there. In ascending order of difficulty...

- As is often the case, A Very Short Introduction is probably the best starting point. Michael Newman writes the book on socialism.

- Cudd and Holmstrom's Capitalism, For and Against is a genuinely balanced book that maybe skews a little to the left for my liking, but it's hard to argue both sides don't get a fair shake.

- Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist is a great introduction to economics for lay people.

- The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto is a really good primer on why capitalism has been such a success in East Asia and the West, and why it hasn't always caught on elsewhere.

Looters and parasites typically do hate Ayn Rand, and academia has become a cesspool filled with them.

Brave New World is a satire of HG Wells and is entertaining. It’s not directly about socialism, but, hey, if the shoe fits, right?

Since you like authoritarianism so much, why not just move to Cuba already? It’s a socialist paradise over there. Enjoying a glass of rum with a cigar on the beach over there is on my bucket list should I live to be 85 or so.

What a bizarre attack coming from a conservative Christian. I'm a liberal, the ideology that's opposed to authoritarianism of all forms.

I don't think there's such thing as a socialist paradise. You can drink rum and smoke cigars on a beach almost anywhere in the world.

Did anyone watch the full video or stop partway and start promoting Ayn Rand?

1. I hate Ayn Rand. Just a bunch of conservative libertarian economic BS that promotes Socialism for the rich.

2. Socialism does not go hand in hand with authoritarianism.

3. Stop calling communist countries socialist. They are not. I might as well call North Korea an actual Democratic Peoples Republic.

4. Socialism is not taking other peoples money and giving it to the poor.

5. Socialism is not something the government does, it's something we all do.

The member in question is located deep in the Old South's "Bible Belt", where anything that does not strictly conform to each individual's own weaponized Bibliocentric belief system is labelled "Communism" and described in the vilest of terms.

(Side note: I recently had a very interesting conversation with a Cajun man in New Orleans regarding solar power, which he labelled a "Commie Plot".  He further claimed that solar cells stole sunlight and spread the corona and AIDS viruses via 5G radiation.)

And another thing: Jesus was not a supporter of Capitalism. Do not listen to anything PragerU says.

The real Jesus . . .

. . . is not who most Americans think He is.

Lies! Vicious lies!

Indeed. I never did see any per se reason why the private sector should be any more innovative or efficient than any conceivable alternative. Yet we always get told that a State-run venture is by its very nature useless, and that privatising is the only way to get anything running. The UK used to have publicly-owned water, electricity, gas, coal, and railway industries. They're all private now, but they don't seem to work any better than they ever did.

I don't think the government should be running businesses.

In theory, the free market means that bad businesses go out of business and good businesses do not. I think that's broadly sound but a little simplistic. Once the state steps in, the conection between a business and those it serves is broken, which can lead to bad businesses being propped up, and potentially costing the public a lot of money.

In our current situation, I don't think it makes much difference whether water is public or private. The water companies all have geographic monopolies, there's no real competition between them.

Rail similarly is probably not going to make a difference one way or the other. British Rail was losing a lot of money for a long time, but circumstances have changed. There is some competition but it is pretty limited.

Electricity and gas do have competition, but the government's energy price cap has become the energy price floor as well, so honestly if government are setting prices then... meh. The cost of energy will fall at some point, but until that happens consumers won't benefit very much from competition.

Coal is a great example of the benefits of the private sector - it stopped being profitable so we stopped mining it. Actually, of course, the public sector was already closing mines well before Thatcher came along, but theoretically it could have bowed to political pressure to keep them open and subsidised.

I would suggest that British Airways, Thomas Cook, and Rolls-Royce are particularly successful privatisations. Thomas Cook is suffering a bit in the internet age but there was no reason for those things to be state-owned. The private sector has the threat of bankrupcy to encourage some innovation, while the public sector doesn't have as much incentive - if anything, it tends to be under greater pressure to keep costs under control.

How to encourage R&D if I'm not suggesting nationalising science? Well, there's the R&D tax credit, there are the research councils, and there are innovation grants. There are probably some more ways the government could intervene to encourage R&D, but I don't think the answer is state-owned businesses.

Yes I've seen the "competition" theory before - it seems to say that if a company doesn't make its customers happy, another one will step in and put them out of business. Survival of the fittest. But in practice it doesn't happen that way so often. The "ideal" of a free market of that kind is a joke. Without regulation, the big fish eat the little fish until we're left with nothing but monopolies that can do what they like. We can't even vote the captains of industry out of office when they let us down. Shareholders might, but shareholders mostly just want the best dividends on their shares, and you don't get that by being good to the staff or the customers.

I see no reason why the gov can't directly create incentives in the public sector that would be just as strong as sitting back and letting market forces do the same thing to private companies. If the guy running the service doesn't deliver, he loses his job.

Excellent draw my life video about Karl Marx.

. . . especially points that have little or no bearing on reality.

I don't think anyone would need it pointed out that this is not an excellent video. Despite being called "Marxism: A Failed and Murderous Ideology", it fails to advance any substantive criticisms of Marxism in more than passing, although it almost does when touching on Marx's antisemitism. Instead it focuses on Marx's personal life. It is produced by the Atlas Society, a group dedicated to an ideology almost as evil as Marxism, and seems to be targeted at teenagers who already agree with that ideology. The production quality is low, with the speaker doing a bad impersonation that doesn't really add anything. It's no good for people who are interested in learning, and neither is it going to convince anyone who believes in Marxism that they shouldn't.

If all you want to do is joke around with your friends without changing any minds then sure, videos like that are fine. If you want to convince people to stop being Marxist then get out the data - there's plenty of it.

Perhaps. But so what? It's useful to explore logical extremes to understand the ultimate end of a worldview. Anthem explored the logical extreme similar to 1984 of how regimes successfully used language as a way to reinforce an ideology. A philosophical concern many people have is not past outcomes, since we know them already, but how history and philosophy intersect to influence future outcomes. The reason we often do not see dystopias like Anthem, 1984, or even Atlas Shrugged are either because people tend to heed warnings or, most often, governments and individuals prop up failing systems. Political correctness as it currently exists is the result of slow cultural change balanced by resistance from older, more traditional-thinking people. Opinions are too evenly divided to allow elimination of language to identify people as individuals.

However, in both sports and in the business world it's commonplace to hear "there is no 'I' in 'team.'" Or any time there's a situation involving discipline, a manager might sit down beside an employee and gently ask, "So how are we doing in our department? Might we be seeing an opportunity for growth?" Of course, if YOU are the employee in this scenario, YOU know good and well "we" does not include the manager or supervisor who called you into HIS office. On the surface, it's just a way to pretend to share responsibility for a loss of efficiency and avoid confrontation. But it's also harmful in that it erases the employee's identity as a unique individual who brings his own distinctiveness to the workplace. It devalues the worker. It's condescending. Without checking this kind of behavior, the logical end is something like Anthem. The reason it continues is because, well, it's effective in manipulating workers, plus there aren't sufficient numbers of people quitting jobs over it to hurt companies that use these tactics. Sooner or later, executives will realize it doesn't have the desired effect and will chase some other managerial trend, same as how "we" stopped using the word "I."

It does have SOME bearing on reality, and it need only happen one time to be significant.