Hey kids: Don't be a sucker for socialism

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i suppose the capitalists would do this [eliminating inferior genes in the pool] by simply making it impossible for more than a fraction of the working class to survive, making them so poor that they will not reproduce or they will starve. or if that isn't fast enough for those moneybagged devils, then dividing the working class along racial lines and goading them on to kill each other [the gouldian method, what is happening now here in amuuurica].

What bothers me is that the current system doesn't really require active antipathy towards the working classes on behalf of the rich. It simply has to perpetuate.

These people are born into a bubble of like minded individuals and enjoy separate conditions in living, education, and other spaces of society. They can just keep on inheriting money, managing it, and go on about their lives in their spheres of activity while the poor increasingly become less visible due to this separation.

There are definitely members of the wealthy classes who do actively have antipathy towards everyone else and deliberately wage class warfare politically and economically, of course.

The world's worst environmental disasters are the direct result of socialism.

Socialism Is Bad for the Environment

...[T]he socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes. Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted at the time that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.” Air and water pollution abounded. By one estimate, in the late 1980s, particulate air pollution was 13 times higher per unit of GDP in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Levels of gaseous air pollution were twice as high as this. Wastewater pollution was three times higher.

And people’s health was suffering as a result. Respiratory illnesses from pollution were rampant. In East Germany, 60 percent of the population suffered from respiratory ailments. In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), nearly half of all children had intestinal disorders caused by contaminated water. Children in Poland were found to have five times more lead in their blood than children in Western Europe. Conditions were so bad that, as Heilbroner acknowledged, the Soviet Union became the first industrialized country in history to experience a prolonged peacetime decline in average life expectancy.

As the Iron Curtain lifted, socialism’s dirty environmental secret was exposed: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were the most polluted and degraded places on earth. “When historians finally conduct an autopsy of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism,” economist Murray Feshbach and journalist Alfred Friendly Jr. wrote in 1992, “they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide.”

Consider the destruction of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has been called “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.” Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, it shrank to less than half its original size because of Soviet economic policies. Fixated on making the USSR self-sufficient in cotton production, central planners mandated industrial agriculture throughout the arid region. Massive water diversions for irrigation reduced the sea’s inflows to a trickle, causing the biggest manmade loss of water in history. Fishing villages became dry and landlocked. Some, such as the former port city of Muynak, now lie more than 75 miles from the sea.

The desiccation of the Aral Sea also caused severe health problems throughout the region. As the waters receded, the sea’s salty floor was exposed, along with pesticides that had accumulated from agricultural operations. All this was then carried by strong winds to nearby communities. Respiratory problems, throat cancer, and other illnesses became more common as the pollutants were deposited in the lungs of millions. The human and environmental consequences are still being felt. Today, infant-mortality rates in the Aral Sea region remain significantly higher than the national average in Uzbekistan, and children there experience similarly high rates of anemia, diarrheal diseases, and other illnesses caused by exposure to toxic contaminants.

How can this be? “Environmental deterioration was not supposed to occur under socialism,” Cuban-American researchers Sergio Díaz-Briquets and Jorge Pérez-López wrote in a detailed study of Cuba’s environmental legacy. “According to conventional Marxist-Leninist dogma, environmental deterioration was precipitated by the logic of capitalism and its relentless pursuit of profits.” Socialism, on the other hand, would avoid capitalism’s excesses. “Guided by ‘scientific’ principles, socialism’s goal was a classless and bountiful society,” they explained, “populated by men and women living in harmony with each other and the environment.”

But this was clearly not the case in the Soviet empire. Nor was it in Cuba, whose environmental record after decades of socialist control was described by Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López as “far different from the utopian view.” The West, meanwhile, had not only the consumer goods that socialist societies lacked but also a cleaner environment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine ... vironment/

Private and state ownership have both been failures. The real solution to the ecological crisis is common ownership and management.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEcMLEwaltc

An untested system could also fail.

To the comment quoting ecological disaster, could you explain precisely how what I have proposed, in its narrow specificity, contributes to environmental destruction?

What if Walmart's current shareholder profit became state revenue (while still being managed by an independent internal hierarchy which is motivated to be profit driven for personal benefit of employees with variance of wage compensation depending on skill of labor) and the Waltons could not pass on any capital to their children? This is a practical example of the application of what I have supported here.


How does this harm the environment in particular?

All human activity harms the environment. This won't be changed by adopting any particular economic system.

Welcome to late-stage socialism, a.k.a. primitive isolation.

With Venezuela in collapse, towns slip into primitive isolation

PATANEMO, Venezuela (Reuters) - At the once-busy beach resort of Patanemo, tourism has evaporated over the last two years as Venezuela’s economic crisis has deepened and deteriorating cellphone service left visitors too afraid of robbery to brave the isolated roads.

Gone are the vendors who once walked the sands of the crescent-shaped beach hawking bathing suits and empanadas - a traditional savory pastry.

These days, its Caribbean shoreline flanked by forested hills receives a different type of visitor: people who walk 10 minutes from a nearby town carrying rice, plantains or bananas in hopes of exchanging them for the fishermen’s latest catch.

With bank notes made useless by hyperinflation, and no easy access to the debit card terminals widely used to conduct transactions in urban areas, residents of Patanemo rely mainly on barter.

It is just one of a growing number of rural towns slipping into isolation as Venezuela’s economy implodes amid a long-running political crisis.

From the peaks of the Andes to Venezuela’s sweltering southern savannahs, the collapse of basic services including power, telephone and internet has left many towns struggling to survive.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vene ... SKCN1T823D

If you think this phenomenon is exclusive to socialism, I suggest you examine what happened in Greece and other countries of a fundamentally capitalist nature that experience primitive isolation as a result of economic calamity. The cities depopulate. Skilled labor emigrates. Commerce and civil society shrivels.

if one is a fortunate capitalist, the picture at the left applies, but for us working stiffs, it is more often the pic on the right. we are not invited to dinner because we are on the menu.

Inaccurate. The Venezuelan don't have meet of any kind.

In late-stage socialism even the dead aren't safe.

Venezuela's dead are not spared as theft increases in cemeteries

MARACAIBO, Venezuela — Even the dead aren’t safe in Maracaibo, a sweltering, suffering city in Venezuela.

Thieves have broken into some of the vaults and coffins in El Cuadrado cemetery since late last year, stealing ornaments and sometimes items from corpses as the country sinks to new depths of deprivation.

“Starting eight months ago, they even took the gold teeth of the dead,” said José Antonio Ferrer, who is in charge of the cemetery, where a prominent doctor, a university director and other local luminaries are buried.

Much of Venezuela is in a state of decay and abandonment, brought on by shortages of things that people need the most: cash, food, water, medicine, power, gasoline.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/venez ... s-n1019051

This is some good satire

Late-stage socialism in action — murder is the end-game every time. Chavez, celebrated and adored by the American left, and his successor Maduro, have been two of the great monsters of this generation in the western hemisphere.


Venezuela's rulers accused by UN of death squads and policy of fear

The UN has accused Venezuela of a strategy of instilling fear in its population to retain power, removing opponents with a "shocking" number of alleged extrajudicial killings.

Victims are arrested and shot, with crime scenes manipulated to suggest they resisted police, a report says.

The UN urges Venezuela to end the "grave violations of economic, social, civil, political and cultural rights".

Venezuela's government has called the report distorted and biased.

Mr Maduro is locked in a political battle with opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

Mr Guaidó, head of the country's National Assembly, declared himself interim president in January and has the backing of more than 50 countries, including the US and most of Latin America. Mr Maduro retains the loyalty of most of the military and important allies such as China and Russia.

Some four million people have fled Venezuela since 2015, according to the UN, amid a severe economic crisis that has resulted in high unemployment and chronic shortages of food and medicine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48873500

The latest ABC/Washington Post survey asked a generic question about a matchup between Trump and a candidate regarded as a socialist, the president holds a slight edge of 49 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Those liberal school teachers are sure getting it done.

My daughter upon receiving her first paycheck as an ice cream scooper: "Who is FICA, and why are they taking all my money?" Instant education.