Hey kids: Don't be a sucker for socialism

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Well, let's hope they're reunited by South Korea.

There never was nor will there ever be a purely capitalist economy. Very simply, the atmosphere and the seas cannot be fenced in, thus they cannot be privately owned and operated. As long as there is a Natural Commons there will be some kind of sovereign authority that regulates it. Likewise there will never be a pure anarchy. Some form of central authority is necessary to keep things bumping along....

Socialism means different things, to different people, in different contexts. For Russians during the revolution, it meant taking power from the Tsarist autocracy in a military context, consolidating power with Lenin and his cadre. Nowadays, socialism means democratising society and economics. Socialism ultimately is about power, about controlling power, and that means economic democracy, common control over the means of production.

Whether it will be successful depends on how you view the power of our democratic systems against the power outside of it. Here in the UK, I can imagine socialism being advanced because our democratic systems are winning against the elite's power. People are increasingly educated through the web and knowledge is spreading.

Agreed.

Marxism really is a religion -- it's the true opiate of the masses.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas- ... 1470678805

Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro Looks to a Marxist Spaniard for an Economic Miracle

Alfredo Serrano’s calls for even more state controls have largely shaped the president’s response to the country’s economic crisis

By ANATOLY KURMANAEV and MAYELA ARMAS
Aug. 8, 2016 1:53 p.m. ET

CARACAS, Venezuela—President Nicolás Maduro, hoping for an economic miracle to salvage his country, has placed his trust in an obscure Marxist professor from Spain who holds so much sway the president calls him “the Jesus Christ of economics.”

There is a thing called mutualism (Proudhonism) where you get paid your labors worth. It is also know as free market anticapitalism, as it promotes a free market without an employer trying to make a buck off of work he didn't do.

Socialism is to economics as creationism is to biology.

Venezuela’s currency is dying

[Venezuela] has the world's largest oil reserves, but has still managed to have the world's worst-performing economy. The International Monetary Fund estimates that its gross domestic product will end up shrinking 10 percent this year, and its inflation rate will reach 720 percent. Nor is this expected to get any better any time soon. Inflation is supposed to get up to 2,200 percent next year, and 3,000 percent the one after that.

This has been the result of a government that has spent more than it could borrow, and has borrowed more than it could probably pay back. The problem was that the Chavista regime bungled the state-owned oil company so badly that it didn't have enough money even when crude prices were high, and really doesn't now that they're low. So it's printed what it's needed instead, setting off what is currently the world's worst inflation. Which, according to black market rates, made Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, lose 99.1 percent of its value between the start of 2012 and the start of this October. In the last month, though, that's picked up to the point that the bolivar is now worth 99.4 percent less than it was five years ago.... Or, to put it in more practical terms, it now takes so many bolivars to buy even the most basic goods that storeowners are starting to save time by weighing money rather than counting it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... -is-dying/

Funny that you should use evolution as an analogy for socialism, as it's conservatives who by a wide margin reject evolution.

The problem with this analogy is that biology is an actual science, concerned with the real world and subject to falsification. None of that's true with economics.

I think a closer analogy would be:
Socialism is to economics as astrology is to Ptolemaic astronomy.

Hate to burst your bubble but socialism has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of poor people or poverty in general. Capitalism is directly responsible for concepts like poverty. Poverty is a capitalistic construct.

Tell that to North Korea, a number of the African nations, Russia decades ago and to parts of Asia today.

Oh you mean the countries capitalists left behind? The ones the Central Bank wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole? Socialism steps in where Capitalism fails. We are concerned with alleviating the ills experienced by those who cannot meet basic needs with Capitalism. Socialistic concepts have provided healthcare, food, shelter, education and infrastructure to billions of people the world over, including Britain.

In my understanding of capitalism, capital is supposed to be something physical, ie. capital punishment. It seems to be some fungible commodity, as in tablesalt, a bag of wheat, or shiny metal.

So, we are not really capitalists.

Trickle-down economics, assumes that it begins as credit, at a 5th Plank lending monopoly, and finds it's way, first, to state interests.

From my own experience, not all SJWs support all human rights. A lot of them don't support the first basic human right, life. Life is the first basic human right because without it, we wouldn't be here.

I've learnt that carnivorous land animals and sharks don't eat eachother, in the circuses and zoos, because they are so well fed.

Some rich people are very gentle and even doting.

Some poor people are very plucky and mean.

As best I can tell, leftism becomes a meritocracy, the minute they start to run out of other people's money.

People only turn to socialism because those at the top don't share the benefits of capitalism, even though it's the many at the bottom who do all the hard work.