How Socialists Built America

[off2bed]

Actually we bash China for using slave labor, not for being Communists or so calling themselves. It's very simple and there's no contradiction.



In my case, "progressive," by which I mean something far to the right of "socialist" and far to the left of "liberal." I can't speak for anyone else on that point, but there is a Vermont Progressive Party which has roughly the same social-democratic policies as the Working Families Party, or Canada's self-described "social democratic" New Democratic Party. You will never confuse any of those with a socialist party, unless you are an idiot.

You're fooling yourself. If you don't think those are all pretty much the same, then you're a useful idiot.

You're comparing milk chocolate to dark chocolate to 60% cacao to 80% cacao. It's still chocolate. Or in your case, it's dog shit. "Progressive" is like saying "white chocolate" which has no chocolate in it at all. There is no progress in progressivism.

 

[garbage can]

you pay the least for the schools, you get shitty schools.. you shouldnt then have the right to bitch about schools if you didnt want to invest in them

Don't know where you've been, the gov't has spent trillions on education since LBJ created his failed great society.

 

[Luk]

Don't know where you've been, the gov't has spent trillions on education since LBJ created his failed great society.

We know, you're proof of that sad fact.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Tell me how much per pupil is spent by NYC or Washington DC schools, compare it to the amount spent per pupil in the best performing private schools, and tell me which is the shitty result.

A great deal of reasons. Being able to expel a kid for being and for that matter being able to set a bare minimum average before you can get in probably helps too.

Tell me, why is an NFL team better than a High School team?

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Don't know where you've been, the gov't has spent trillions on education since LBJ created his failed great society.

We know, you're proof of that sad fact.

 

[KingOrfeo]

There is no progress in progressivism.

The connection between the senses of the word is not meaningless. Going from, e.g., our present health-care system to UHC would be progress. And it happens to be the kind of thing Progressives want.

The word in its original political sense might or might not have been chosen to express support for income-progressive income taxation -- a connection that is also appropriate, but largely irrelevant, as the Progressivism of that era is a thing of the past. No modern usage bears any relation to it.

 

[pornstarwannabe]

Tell me, why is an NFL team better than a High School team?

Easy. NFL players are more talented.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Every person who has adopted the "middle way" (von Mises) never sees themselves as a Socialist, just someone who sees the benefits that can come from government while at once ignoring the laws of unintended consequences. The problem being that a mixed (Socialism and Capitalism) economy over the course of time turns Socialist for numerous reasons, but mostly because groups begin competing for favors and business begins buying indulgences from the Secular State. It is easy for someone to want to appear educated, erudite, and enlightened to look back and point to the positive interferences (von Humboldt) that they think benefited the nation and the people. One of my favorites is the Interstate that got people off and away from the rails only to produce a mode of transportation that then became the scourge of the earth due to "CO2" emissions. But because government is what it is, once you give it the green light to do good, there is never a terminal condition which says, this is where doing good stops. Witness, we now, in the US enjoy the largest, most helpful government ever, employing more people than the private sector, and yet, for some strange reason, we also enjoy dire economic times in which the light on the horizon is a carrot we just cannot seem to catch up to. But sooner, or later, if we just pick the best "thinkers" to lead us, then we will enjoy an Egalitarian Utopia.

Quite the reverse, many such nowadays call themselves "socialists." Almost every self-identified "socialist" party now active in Europe is really a social-democratic or, as you would put it, "middle way" party. (The Democrats, BTW, are not a middle-way party in that sense, let alone a socialist party.) Practically all of them have given up on what has been called "the theology of the final goal," the idea that socialism is something that is to come after capitalism.



But, this process you describe of a social-democratic state turning socialist is not happening in Europe today -- where one would look for it first, all the specified factors being in place -- and it does not appear likely to happen there . . . and, in fact, it has never happened anywhere.

You sound rather like Marx, when he describes the causes and events of the Revolution -- in the present tense, as if, instead of posing a hypothetical future scenario, he were merely fleshing out the details of a process that has happened many times already in the real world and is well-known to all in its general outlines.



No doubt. Still, based on what was known in the 1950s -- and based on what is known today -- it was money well-spent. A country that has a national freeway system is better off than one that has not. Look around you. A country that has a well-developed rail network -- better still, a high-speed rail network -- is better-off still; but, you will note, in the world today, in all countries that have either, the railways are to some degree publicly owned. The problem here is that American government has done the wrong (in the sense of suboptimal) things about transportation, not that it has done things. A sad transportation system we would have on this continent, if it had been left entirely to the private sector to develop it. All the great American railways of the past got their start on government subsidies and land-grants.



It is more useful here to compare America to other countries in the present than to America in the past.



Really?



Reasons having far, far less to do with public-sector hubris than with private-sector venality.



Not likely . . . But, if you want to find your way out of a mess, you're usually better off going to the best "thinkers" than to the best "doers." Most times -- as now -- it's the "doers" who got us into this mess.

A Social-Democrat State is a Socialism. They cannot turn into, they are, it's just a debate over the degree, as it is here. It is common for Statists to deny what they are and to adopt the labels that make them sound better as they did with the word "Liberal" until it became such a dirty word that they went to progressive and now, pragmatic centrism.

The problem is the way in which the statists like to drag out their Thesaurus and say, no we're not Socialists, we're not communists, we're not...

Unless you are willing to admit that these "mixed" economies are "Socialist" then we cannot have an "honest" conversation about the "failures" of classic Liberalism (which is only ever tried once the Social State has collapsed as it did during the last Century in the great German and Austrian experiments in the Socialist/Social Democrat/New Liberal/Progressive "Middle Way" of Interventionalism).

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You're fooling yourself. If you don't think those are all pretty much the same, then you're a useful idiot.

You're comparing milk chocolate to dark chocolate to 60% cacao to 80% cacao. It's still chocolate. Or in your case, it's dog shit. "Progressive" is like saying "white chocolate" which has no chocolate in it at all. There is no progress in progressivism.

Not as eloquent, but on the mark.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Thus, media reports correctly pegged Lieberman as "the last JFK Democrat in the Senate." The question, however, is why this is so. What happened to make the ideals of the New Frontier persona non grata in today's Democratic Party?

Joe Lieberman, when he entered the Senate in 1988, was not the only JFK Democrat there. But their numbers were fast declining. Their standard bearer, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D. Wash.) -- first elected to Congress in 1941 -- had died in 1983. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D. N.Y.) and Bob Kerrey (D. Neb.) retired in 2001. Ernest Hollings (D.S.C.) left in 2005.

That left Lieberman. In his 2006 campaign for the Senate, Lieberman was not even able to secure his party's re-nomination. Instead, only two years after being his party's Vice Presidential nominee, Lieberman had had to run (and win) as an Independent.

The stories of Sargent Shriver and Henry Jackson contain a kernel of the answer. But it's the recently published letters of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan which offer a fuller explanation.

Shriver, scion of a wealthy Maryland political family and, like Lieberman, educated at Yale, married into the Kennedy clan. JFK made Shriver the first head of the Peace Corps. Under LBJ, he led the War on Poverty. In 1972, Shriver was George McGovern's running mate on the Democratic ticket for president.

Thereafter, Shriver, like Lieberman 20 years later, fell out of favor with Party activists.

In 1972 and 1976, "Scoop" Jackson sought the Democratic presidential nomination, running on a strong defense platform. He lost both times, first to George McGovern, then to Jimmy Carter. Many of Jackson's academic brain trust -- like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and others -- went on to serve in the administration of Ronald Reagan.

Pat Moynihan, quite literally, ran against this trend, winning election to the Senate in 1976, defeating Bella Abzug for the nomination and then William F. Buckley's brother, James, the incumbent. Moynihan's purgatory began the day he took the oath of office as a United States Senator.

Moynihan, like Shriver, was a New Frontiersman. From Irish working class roots in Manhattan, he attended the London School of Economics, after City College and Navy service in World War II. Although choosing a career in academia as a social scientist, Moynihan returned again and again to politics. His first gig was as New York Governor Averell Harriman's private secretary.

Moynihan served in the subcabinets of JFK, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He was also, successively, Nixon's Ambassador to India and Gerald Ford's UN Ambassador. In the latter position, Moynihan famously stood up to both the Soviet Union and the General Assembly's 1976 anti-Zionism resolution.

Pretty good credentials. Yet, with Jimmy Carter's arrival in the White House in 1977, the newly-elected Senator Moynihan found himself locked out. Like many other New York intellectuals who had once been FDR or JFK Democrats, Moynihan now was denounced as a neo-conservative.

What had happened? Moynihan's own answer appears in Steven Weisman's Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters, published last year.

First, Moynihan tells Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne in 1991, was the issue of race and the welfare state. "[T]he Liberal Project began to fail when it began to lie." This, in his judgment, started in 1966, with the left's rejection of the work of social scientists like James Coleman and Moynihan himself on the African American family. They were, Moynihan wrote, branded as "right wing deviationists. Whereupon the rot set in and has continued since."

...

With Joe Lieberman's retirement from the Senate, the anti-American left's purge of the Democratic Party -- the world's oldest political organization, which led the U.S. through two world wars, the Great Depression, Vietnam, and Korea -- is now complete.

James G. Wiles
The American Thinker

 

[off2bed]

A great deal of reasons. Being able to expel a kid for being and for that matter being able to set a bare minimum average before you can get in probably helps too.

Tell me, why is an NFL team better than a High School team?

So you're agreeing that spending more money on education has no correlation with quality?

My kid's private school doesn't have a "bare minimum average" to get in. You pay the money, they take you. And they're a Blue Ribbon Award winning school for academics. I think the "dumping ground" theory of why government schools are full of trash is bogus. That's nothing but an apocryphal feel-good theory with no basis in fact.

In the year 2000, only 10.4% of US students were in private schools. If 10% of those were kicked out for being bad seeds (probably grossly overestimated, but makes easy math for you liberals to understand ), that adds a mere 7/10 of 1% to the government school rolls. You can't seriously tell me that this causes the quality of government education to be noticeably affected.

 

[KingOrfeo]

A Social-Democrat State is a Socialism. They cannot turn into, they are, it's just a debate over the degree, as it is here.

You are an idiot. But, even granting that hypothetically, my point still applies. If there is a sort of Commie Continuum, with the New Deal at one end and Stalinism at the other, the social democracies of Europe are visibly not creeping along that continuum in the direction Stalinism. Nor has any social democracy, ever. Communists come to power in . . . different ways than the one you described.

Judging by Europe's experience: What actually happens in real-life social democracies is that eventually the people, rightly or wrongly, come to regard the social democrats' ideas of and/or means to social justice as excessive and economically nonviable, so they vote out the social democrats and vote in conservatives; then, before too long, the people get sick of the conservatives' stingy and heartless ways, and vote them out and vote the social democrats back in, and the cycle repeats; but no point in the cycle is ever really a once-and-for-all "revolution," though it may seem so to the victors at the time. It's just like what happens in American politics, except that the goalposts and the 50-yard line are more sensibly placed.

 

[JenAltArmy]

one thing about countries that have strong socialist tenancies is that those government require people to work. if you want a money, food, this and that, then one has to contribute.

here in America what the socialist want is a freaking free ride. give me the money, so that I can stay at home watching Oprah & WWE with an Old Style six pack hanging off their belly

some how, especially under obama, American's have lost their way. the dream (of improving your life, making it big) is dead and life is unfair and everyone is against you (the "Rich" are out to keep you down).


summary, socialist in america are sick people and should be used to feed zombies

You are an idiot. But, even granting that hypothetically, my point still applies. If there is a sort of Commie Continuum, with the New Deal at one end and Stalinism at the other, the social democracies of Europe are visibly not creeping along that continuum in the direction Stalinism. Nor has any social democracy, ever. Communists come to power in . . . different ways than the one you described.

Judging by Europe's experience: What actually happens in real-life social democracies is that eventually the people, rightly or wrongly, come to regard the social democrats' ideas of and/or means to social justice as excessive and economically nonviable, so they vote out the social democrats and vote in conservatives; then, before too long, the people get sick of the conservatives' stingy and heartless ways, and vote them out and vote the social democrats back in, and the cycle repeats; but no point in the cycle is ever really a once-and-for-all "revolution," though it may seem so to the victors at the time. It's just like what happens in American politics, except that the goalposts and the 50-yard line are more sensibly placed.

 

[KingOrfeo]

one thing about countries that have strong socialist tenancies is that those government require people to work. if you want a money, food, this and that, then one has to contribute.

here in America what the socialist want is a freaking free ride. give me the money, so that I can stay at home watching Oprah & WWE with an Old Style six pack hanging off their belly

some how, especially under obama, American's have lost their way. the dream (of improving your life, making it big) is dead and life is unfair and everyone is against you (the "Rich" are out to keep you down).


summary, socialist in america are sick people and should be used to feed zombies

Jen, remember when you claimed to be "the voice of reason here" and I said you had demonstrated a marked incapacity for reason? This is the kind of thing I was talking about.

 

[JenAltArmy]

Jen, remember when you claimed to be "the voice of reason here" and I said you had demonstrated a marked incapacity for reason? This is the kind of thing I was talking about.

its stating the facts, in that other countries require people to contribute to the system, this is something obama, Edward Kennedy and other's have forgotten.

when did "work" become a bad word for democrats & American socialists?

 

[KingOrfeo]

With Joe Lieberman's retirement from the Senate, the anti-American left's purge of the Democratic Party . . . is now complete.

And there's another example, far more hilarious. It never fails to amaze me how far the RW worldview in America today is not merely detached from reality but the inversion of reality.

 

[KingOrfeo]

its stating the facts, in that other countries require people to contribute to the system, this is something obama, Edward Kennedy and other's have forgotten.

when did "work" become a bad word for democrats & American socialists?

Never. (At least, not in this America; in the America that lives inside your head, things appear to have gone rather differently.) Yes, people in countries with social-democratic welfare states contribute to the system. Nobody -- certainly not Obama, Edwards or any Kennedy, let alone any real progressives or social democrats -- is suggesting we could have something similar here without that. Nobody is promising a work-free Land of Cockaigne or Oleanna or Rock Candy Mountain. Not even Marx ever promised that.

 

[JenAltArmy]

Never. At least, not in this America. In the America that lives inside your head, things appear to have gone rather differently. Yes, people in countries with social-democratic welfare states contribute to the system. Nobody -- certainly not Obama, Edwards or any Kennedy, let alone any real progressives or social democrats -- is suggesting we could have something similar here without that.

well maybe I turn it out, but I have never heard the left/socialist say contrite to the system by means of working

In fact, in the great state of CA they ruled (back in the 90's) that making people work for welfare was unconstitutional

 

[JenAltArmy]

Never. At least, not in this America. In the America that lives inside your head, things appear to have gone rather differently. Yes, people in countries with social-democratic welfare states contribute to the system. Nobody -- certainly not Obama, Edwards or any Kennedy, let alone any real progressives or social democrats -- is suggesting we could have something similar here without that. Nobody is promising a work-free Land of Cockaigne or Oleanna or Rock Candy Mountain. Not even Marx ever promised that.

did you hear that obama finally lost, gave up, or what ever, but the federal government just issues a permit to drill in the Gulf of Mexico!

I'm not sure why obama is anti American, or why obama hates American oil
(yes we need a new fuel source and more nuke power plants)

 

[KingOrfeo]

well maybe I turn it out, but I have never heard the left/socialist say contrite to the system by means of working

In fact, in the great state of CA they ruled (back in the 90's) that making people work for welfare was unconstitutional

Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying before, then. "Workfare" is not an essential element to a successful welfare state. Somebody has to contribute to the system somehow at some point, of course -- but, there is no reason why each beneficiary of it need contribute personally. That would not be welfare, that would work-for-hire.

Remember, also, that it is not essentially "socialist" for A to meet with B to decide that C, D and E (and A and B too) shall give something to poor F. That has been going on at least since the first poor-relief laws were invented, long before "socialism" was even a word.

 

[JenAltArmy]

Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying before, then. "Workfare" is not an essential element to a successful welfare state. Somebody has to contribute to the system somehow at some point, of course -- but, there is no reason why each beneficiary of it need contribute personally. That would not be welfare, that would work-for-hire.

Remember, also, that it is not essentially "socialist" for A to meet with B to decide that C, D and E (and A and B too) shall give something to poor F. That has been going on at least since the first poor-relief laws were invented, long before "socialism" was even a word.

I'm fore welfare as a safety net, but I think the real key is to help people learn skills. America can lean something from the UK in that kids are given choices (sadly based on test results) where they go to college, or trade schools.

why not take someone on welfare, and put that person through a trade school? this way, that person can be self supporting and improve their life?

sadly, our current form of welfare is just government slavery

 

[off2bed]

If there is a sort of Commie Continuum, with the New Deal at one end and Stalinism at the other...

Having a Commie continuum is like having a cancer continuum. You'd welcome certain amounts of cancer in your body. I wouldn't.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Having a Commie continuum is like having a cancer continuum. You'd welcome certain amounts of cancer in your body. I wouldn't.

[shrug] The world's social democracies ain't dyin'. Nor, compared to America, sick.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I'm fore welfare as a safety net, but I think the real key is to help people learn skills. America can lean something from the UK in that kids are given choices (sadly based on test results) where they go to college, or trade schools.

why not take someone on welfare, and put that person through a trade school? this way, that person can be self supporting and improve their life?

I said only that "workfare" is not essential to a welfare system. Moving a welfare recipient into the workforce certainly could be a good idea. (So long as the subject actually becomes fully self-supporting. Going from welfare poor to working poor is not a step up.)

(N.B.: Americans on some form of poverty relief are no significant element of the budget and no existential threat to the Republic.)

sadly, our current form of welfare is just government slavery

That is not a voice of reason speaking.

 

[JenAltArmy]

I said only that "workfare" is not essential to a welfare system. Moving a welfare recipient into the workforce certainly could be a good idea. (So long as the subject actually becomes fully self-supporting. Going from welfare poor to working poor is not a step up.)

(N.B.: Americans on some form of poverty relief are no significant element of the budget and no existential threat to the Republic.)



That is not a voice of reason speaking.

Workfare is needed, not welfare

government welfare is enslavement; this a true statement. How many people are able to get off that addiction?