[ClumsyPilot]

> hostile language redefinition

par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse.

Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy

Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime.

When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal.

When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.

[ttgurney]

> When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft

Don't forget "piracy"--associating copying information with looting a ship and killing everyone on board. I'd love to see an end to this ridiculous modern usage of this word.

[swayvil]

How would you characterize a powerful force that sucks you into an illusion and bends your will to its agenda?

Feel free to wax florid and metaphorical.

[ClumsyPilot]

The Walt Disney Company

[guerrilla]

> Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy

This too is ironically it's own redefinition because originally (and still to many socialists today) socialism means workers' ownership of the means of the production, which undemocratic centrally planning states never were and never could be.

[jokethrowaway]

The reason people associate socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy is because that's the only popular socialism.

Anarcho-socialism rejects statism (totally agreeable) but doesn't offer a credible alternative. That's why common people don't even think about anarchy when you talk about socialism.

In a centrally planned socialist economy, the people in power can steal resources from the workers (like all the governments of the world do nowadays) and exercise power.

In anarcho socialism the power would be decentralised and distributed among democratic groups of workers. Why would the workers even bother to take all these decisions? They're not gaining power (or very little, due to the rightful decentralised nature of power in anarchy) nor currency.

The assumption is that workers are perfect human beings and don't need incentives do to the right thing, which is a pipe dream.

[pixl97]

Unless you have a powerful organization that prevents others from taking power, a powerful organization will always form that takes power.

[ClumsyPilot]

> socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy

Taxes have nothing to do with socialism and have existed in Feudalism, in ancient Egypt and in every 'capitalist' state. Just because you collected money, does not mean you need to centrally plan how to spend it - carbon dividend would tax things that produce CO2, and distribute it equally to all citizen. Someone who produces no CO2 would get paid, and someone who produces the average amount would see no change.

I have no problem with central planning being associated, it was a key feature of socialist states. But Central planning means government sets prices on Salami, like USSR did, and I never came across anyone in the West proposing that.

At most someone advocates for some infrastructure, and they get called a socialist. But then, why does no capitalism society privatise the police, the army, the navy, the judges that sit in court, the federal reserve, the public library and the patent office?

If the accuser does advocates for privatising them, the rest of society will call him a nutcase and move on with their lives.

So he must instead make up excuses, of various levels of absurdity, for why free market can't be trusted with managing elementary building blocks of society here, but it's socialist to suggest government should step in over there.

The only solution is to Stop accusing everyone of being a socialist in disguise and learn from history and other countries: we have tried societies without government-managed police and courtsm, the results were terrible. We have tried private prisons, and government-managed consumer goods, also terrible.