John Hindraker complains:
"To me, the most telling incident of the campaign season was a poll that found that among young Americans, socialism enjoys a higher favorability rating than free enterprise. How can this possibly be, given the catastrophic failure of socialism, and the corresponding success of free enterprise, throughout history? The answer is that conservatives have entirely lost control over the culture."
Paul Krugman explains:
"After decades in which right-wingers have attacked long-established institutions — Social Security, progressive taxation, unemployment insurance — as “socialism”, a lot of young people now believe them, and think that this “socialism” thing really isn’t so bad."
In some ways, this is the "boy who cried wolf" tale writ economic. In other ways, it's charmingly ironic, especially if it does in fact noodge the US in future decades closer to European-style socialism.
(Not that true socialism, in terms of a thoroughly government-managed economy, doesn't have serious flaws as well, but by painting that with the same label as "progressive taxation" and "federal emergency response," economic conservatives of the Fox News style have rendered the differences much more difficult to sum up, or to believe.)
(h/t +Shannon Turlington)
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Socialism!
If everything good is “socialism”, don’t be surprised if socialism gets a good name.
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Name a socialist or communist country….
Wrong! (Probably 🙂 ) Most will say Soviet Union or China, or somesuch. Not actually anything to do with Marx. To rewrite Tony Benn, blaiming Marx for Stalin is like blaming Jesus for Limbaugh.
Here however is an article about what happens when a command economy works
http://www.damninteresting.com/nineteen-seventy-three/
The problem is that if it hadn’t worked it would have collapsed sooner, and possibly less messily. Oh Americans, aren’t you a bunch of scallywags.
Of course, if you are looking for a Government managed economy, look at China. Definately not Marxist – extremes of wealth. However the economy is centrally planned. Now there are cultural and size reasons that contribute to its success, but where it is winning it is doing so because the central government is acting in completely the opposite manner to ‘free market’ principles. It basically throws money at a problem. A western company has an invention? A government owned company uses government money to buy the company.
It has just struck me as I type, what China is doing is applying the knowledge of the free-market, but treating the world like a high street, and countries like competing companies. It uses its size to outcompete in a free market, but maintains a strict company policy – note how every shop in a large chain is identical? All the policies come from the centre, individual managers have little local control- it is a planned economy. Problems with a small competitor? Buy them out.
[please note -typed at 4:12 in the morning, so any lack of writing skill is tiredness]
As long as they can keep leveraging money to cover up for all the inefficiencies (and graft), they have it made.
Not that “capitalism”/”‘free’ markets” don’t have inefficiencies (and graft).
The other problem is that Socialism works.
On just about every list of countries doing X on Y item, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark are usually in the top 10 if not the top 5 of any list of good things (education, healthcare, life expectancy, etc) and the Us is somewhere below the top 20 if not at the very bottom of the list.
Since Americans generally do not travel to Europe or anywhere else for that matter, they do not get to find out things like Public Transportation can work very well, cheaply and quickly, or that socialized medicene works great, or that public education can work if given the money to do so, and it is cheaper than privatized education.
Nope, Socialism works, and the GOP banks on the fact that to many americans watch FOX news and are too uncurious to find out the truth.