[WalterBright]

> I don't expect things to change much with corporate's death grip on the government.

Statements like this always imply that if the government ran the businesses (socialism) things like this wouldn't happen. But the evidence is it is worse. The USSR had major problems with their heavily polluting industries, which persist today.

[dmkolobov]

Comments like that suggest no such thing.

There is plenty of middle ground, including restrictions on corporate election donations, and generally limiting corporate lobbyists access to our legislators.

[WalterBright]

Again, you're saying government control won't have these problems.

Socialist governments produced tremendous environmental problems because even though the government consisted solely of altruistic, self-sacrificing, dedicated, incorruptible administrators, the people still needed food, clothing, and washing machines. And the government would try to provide them, rather than face mass starvation.

[dmkolobov]

No, I am not.

I am saying corporate interests are not aligned with those of the people at large, they are aligned exclusively with those of their shareholders. I do not want my country’s laws to reflect a small group’s desires to make money.

[WalterBright]

This completely overlooks the desires of the people that want the products the company provides at a reasonable price. This is not going away, regardless of how you structure things. People like to eat food and use washing machines.

The notion that profit is the root of the problem is implying that removing the profit will resolve it. History shows that this never works.

Socialism produces more environmental degradation, because it cannot produce things as efficiently as free market businesses can. So, to make up the gap, they pay little attention to the environment.

[dmkolobov]

I don’t know why you keep bringing up socialism. My point is that corporate lobbying and donations should be restricted, not that free market businesses shouldn’t exist.

There is a broad, non-linear spectrum between socialism and unrestricted corporate influence on government.

[mcguire]

Because Walter doesn't see any difference between Stalin's Soviet Union and election regulations.

[WalterBright]

> unrestricted corporate influence on government

Your notion that absent corporate lobbying, government control would work out in the best interests of everybody is utterly without foundation.

Your complaint about the profit motive being the root of evil also implies that without profit, things would be better. Without profit has been repeatedly tried. It never produces better results.

My father grew up a socialist. Then he joined the military, and spent years living on military bases. There is zero profit motive on a military base. But there was no end of ridiculous problems, enormous waste, glacial bureaucracy, etc. This thoroughly disabused him of his socialist notions.

For one small example, on a new base, furniture for the base housing had to be supplied. The base commander delegated the selection of furniture to his wife (men rarely care about these things). She picked all the furniture, confident in how great her taste was and what a big favor she was doing to the ignorant masses on base.

The servicemens' wives all hated that furniture. My dad would always have a huge laugh at how much they loathed it.

P.S. When my parents got married, my mom hated all of his furniture. He had to buy all new stuff to her specifications.

[dmkolobov]

And speaking from a Russian perspective, your assertion that anyone in the USSR viewed their officials as self-sacrificing and altruistic is quite frankly hilarious.

[WalterBright]

I have friends who grew up in the Soviet bloc. I once witnessed a hilarious conversation between one of them and another friend who was a committed socialist (I don't de-friend people because of their politics). My socialist friend would say "X under socialism would be better". The other would say "I lived under socialism, and here's how and why X was worse." Socialist would say "but that won't happen under socialism". The other would say "you have zero experience with this, I lived under it. You have no idea what you are talking about."

The back and forth like this would go on for a while.

[mcguire]

Clearly, there's nothing to be done.

Thoughts and prayers, ivory-billed woodpecker, thoughts and prayers.

[scythe]

It's ironic that in tarring all forms of "government" with the same brush, conservatives who lackadaisically compare the actions of multi-party democratic governments to those of single-party states minimize the importance of what was probably the most important structural difference between the Eastern Bloc and Western democracies. Eisenhower would be horrified.

[bumby]

I don't understand why this is portrayed as some sort of false dichotomy.

There can be government regulation without reverting to socialism. There can also be systems of checks and balances to both the ills of unfettered free-market economics and government power structures.

[beerandt]

Because the argument isn't for regulation, it's against lobbying and it's against having a government that's influenced by corporatism/ capitalism (because that's largely what lobbying is).

Which pretty clearly makes the alternative socialism / communism, depending on how you want to define them.

[bumby]

Ok, I was reading that the alternative to current lobbying was to regulate the practice. How are you interpreting the "against lobbying" side of the argument?

Lobbying is about the right to petition the government; I don't see the direct line to socialism/communism, which is generally more concerned with the means of production. I don't think there is "clearly" a connection but rather one used to shoehorn a divisive and emotional topic.

[dTal]

Bro, the government forbidding companies from using a certain pesticide because it's driving the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct isn't "socialism", man. Or if it is, then the very premise of governance is socialist. You're so desperate to attack your personal bugbear that you're thrusting it into a totally unrelated conversation by quite extravagantly strawmanning someone.

[WalterBright]

My posts here often talk about "internalizing the externalities" by putting taxes on externalities like pollution. The tax rate would be higher the more dangerous they are.

Free markets do not imply being free to hurt others or destroy others' property. A proper function of government is to protect people and property.

For example, I would not ban gasoline. I would tax the carbon content of fuels to reflect their true cost to the environment.

[_lqaf]

The "Ranting about Socialism" session is down the hall. This one is about extinction.

[jussij]

The USSR was a communists country.

There is a world of difference between Social Democratic (i.e. socialism) countries like Finland, Sweden, Norway for example and the USSR.

The hint is right there in the title, democratic.

The USSR never had a functioning democracy.

[WalterBright]

Democracy never made socialism competitive with free markets. Democracy in Seattle led to the government purchase of port-a-potties at $250,000 each and $12,000,000 per mile bike lane striping. All involved were comfortably re-elected.

Norway pumps 20% of its GDP out of the ground.

[jussij]

Firstly I was only pointing out your assertion that the USSR was a good model of socialism is wrong.

As to being 'competitive in free markets', I would suggest that is more of a measure of capitalism than socialism.

Socialism is about equality and a better measure of equality would be something like 'standard of living'.

When you look at which countries lead the world on that measure it should come as no surprise Social Democratic nations dominate:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-...

[Stupulous]

Finland, Norway, and Sweden are all capitalist countries. They just have better welfare institutions than the US.

[rsj_hn]

There is a difference between "social" and "socialism". The social welfare state was invented by Bismarck in order to fight socialism.

Thus calling it "socialist" is a pretty gross error. Indeed the foreign minster of Denmark had to plead with uninformed Americans to please stop calling his nation "socialist" when it is a social democracy - this was back when Bernie was running as a democratic socialist and his schtick to try to normalize socialism was by saying Denmark had it which lead to this mess of misinformation.

The idea of social democracy is that you have social welfare programs. That is, you tax private industry and give the money to people for things like pensions (which is exactly what Bismarck did, and this basic model has not changed since it was developed in 19th C Germany).

Socialism is the idea that private ownership of the means of production be banned (thus you cannot own your own business). In communism, all private property is banned (thus you don't even own your clothes, or car, or apartment).

Obviously the utopia of banning all private property was impractical, but seizing factories was more practical. Thus even those nations that were controlled by communist parties officially declared that they had not reached communism, they were in the state of socialism, and were working towards, or "building" communism. This led to many jokes in the Eastern Bloc about when the building of communism would be completed and how could it be done with all the shortages, etc. That is why all the communist nations called themselves socialist. Now you know the difference between communism and socialism.

What about socialism versus democracy. Here the problem is the enormous amount of totalitarian government control needed to organize production based on political concerns rather than concerns of price -- e.g. market concerns. Even if you are just a painter, you need paint. How do you get the paint? You have to requisition it based on some political justification. Now the government needs to plan how much paint is produced each year. Then you need to plan how many paint buckets and paint brushes. It goes on and on. There were mathematicians working full time on these linear programming problems in the soviet union, just trying to figure out how to plan their economy. Imagine all the inputs you need, imagine writing them down, and requisitioning them, as part of a big five year plan.

This requires a vast array of secret police and government micromanagement and that is what makes socialism not free. Whereas the genius of Bismarck is that he understood that workers just wanted pensions, and did not care so much about political organization of the process of production. So it's a lot easier to tax private enterprise -- something that was done even in ancient Mesopotamia -- rather than trying to control the process of production. Thus social welfare states are more "free" than socialist states, and no socialist state can be free, it must be micromanaged by the Party. Nevertheless they all called themselves Democratic. E.g. the Democratic Republic of Germany.

Thus we have these two types of economies, the social welfare state and the "democratic" socialist state, but they are not gradations on the same scale, they are two rival approaches to the problem of providing a basic safety net for the people.

In one approach you do it by taxing and giving people money who then go out and buy what they need on the open market, and in the other by political administration of production and then political distribution of production to those groups you believe "deserve" the output the most.

It is not two ends of the same scale.