Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Fine. Provide some evidence. Did taxes not triple under Hoover? Did we see a dramatic decline in unemployment under FDR before the beginning of World War II? I'll answer that one for you. In 1938, the unemployment rate was almost 19%, three points and change higher than it was in 1931.
More to my point, let's talk about the Depression of 1920. In a host of ways, its opening phases were just as severe as the Great Depression. Yet, the country quickly rebounded and the Roaring 20s ensued. What was government policy during that period? Tax cuts and spending cuts. That's why the Depression of 1920 is a trivia question while the Great Depression was a decade-long ordeal.
This is all nonsense to confuse ignorant white people to vote for politicians who adopt public policy that benefits rich people.
Like everywhere else in the first world, we live in a social democracy. We use taxes to fund things that are for the public good. We’ve had public schools and public libraries forever. The rich people who pay most of the taxes have manipulated this so social democracy->socialist->evil commie.
Similarly, liberal means open to new ideas. I’m a liberal. I’m always learning. I’m always changing my worldview as I learn new things. Rich people have corrupted this so liberal to poorly educated unengaged people is now a bad thing. Why? Because they want to squish rational public policy discussions about things that would benefit the country but would require taxing rich people to fund them.
So when anyone spouts Fox News rhetoric about “liberal” and “socialist”, I first check to see if they’re rich people merely being greedy or ignorant people being manipulated by the greedy rich people.
Being Liberal these days means continually trying failed ideas because someone has assigned a new name to the same old ones in order to disguise them. See Venezuela for the latest failure.
That's because the lines keep moving. The so-called left-wingers of the early 20th Century would most likely identify with the far right today. I mean, everyone loves to talk about the many benefits of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger. And they would mostly be right. But Margaret Sanger also advocated eugenics, writing about weeding out the "unfit." Imagine the uproar if anyone used that kind of language today.
What's more, many of the most cherished goals of the labor movements in the early 20th century have been institutionalized in law and business practice. A forty-hour week. Safe working conditions. Protection from exploitation. The elimination of child labor. Health benefits. If you magically transported a labor activist from the early 20th Century to the average manufacturing plant today in this country, it would be like a visit to the Elysian Fields for him. "What are you complaining about?" would be his likely reaction.
And I could only imagine what these folks would say about the modern debates on subjects such as transgender rights or illegal immigration. The gains are becoming far more incremental.
What's more, the proponents of socialism have to own up to its manifest failures. Any number of ideals of socialism have proved disasters in practice, from state ownership of enterprises to the top-down governance of society. From Russia to Maoist China to Cambodia to more benign disasters such a Venezuela and Great Britain before Thatcher, the more fully the principles of Socialism have been exercised, the more sclerotic the economy becomes and the more rights have been curtailed to ensure compliance. All you have to do is watch the brutal descent of Venezuela from its place as Latin America's strongest economy before Chavez to the complete basket case it is today. And that happened over a span of twenty years.
Even the much ballyhooed example of Scandinavia isn't much an argument, given how that countries such as Sweden have famously cut back their statist programs and actually today enjoy considerably more economic freedom than that of the United States. If you look at the arc of those countries, their enormous welfare states were funded by the accumulated wealth gained in previous decades of laissez-faire capitalism. Over the past couple of decades, Scandinavian countries have retreated from those generous policies, enacting corporate tax cuts and loosening labor laws.
Point those problems out to a proponent of socialism and they always point to the unfair challenges socialism has faced. Yet, that argument is weak cheese, for it actually argues the opposite. It implies that socialism requires a set of rarefied conditions to succeed, kind of like growing orchids in a hothouse. In short, just when the lunatic fringe in this country is toying with socialism, the few countries where it actually kind of functioned are slowly abandoning it.
You said it so much better than I ever could have! repped.
Some of the issues today only seem harder because we think they're okay. To many people in 1750, it was plainly obvious that black people were not of equal moral importance or mental capability as white people. That wasn't a hard question for many. To a lot of people in 1880, that was suddenly a much harder question.
Take animals, for instance. Our modern American factory farming system is torture. There's no way around it. We put animals that are as smart as our dogs, capable of complex emotional connection and deep levels of happiness or suffering, through torture because we like the way they taste. To me, that is an obvious example of most Americans being as duped about the world around them as the 1750 white supremacist.
There are still convincing issues out there that you should be a liberal about. They just don't seem as plainly obvious as the old issues do with our luxury of retrospection.
I think people who run two million pigs (USA only) through factory farming processes each year exceed the levels of harm produced by the examples you mentioned. There are still comparable moral tragedies today. They just aren't recognized as such by the average Joe.
Of course. Liberalism isn't a prescribed set of beliefs that neatly apply to specific issues. It is a much deeper belief about the nature of experience, ethics and obligations. There were plenty of people in 1750 who might have been liberals in their day because they believed in representative government. But they also probably believed blacks were animals and women were property. That doesn't mean that someone in 2018 can be a real liberal simply by believing in representative government.
Liberalism often entails thinking in unconventional ways about the world around us. This is likely why liberalism and IQ are positively correlated. Thinking in novel ways requires intelligence.I do think there is an end to this moral monster treadmill somewhere. At some point, people won't necessarily look back at previous generations and wonder how they could do such terrible things and hold such obviously false beliefs. I think this is when we recognize consciousness as the prerequisite for moral consideration. Everything that is conscious has interests. There are ways its life can go well or go poorly, and as such, we should consider its interests when living our lives. Enslaving a black man is against his interests. Subjecting women to sexism is against their interests. Forcing animals through the factory farming process is against their interests. A kid in China doesn't have lesser interests than I do simply because he lives in China. Once that is the basis for our moral appraisals, I think we have a shot at staying in the ballpark morality-wise with future generations. At that point, it might be possible for everyone to be liberals.
Too many liberals think they are thinking in ways that are unconventional, yet they fail to realize when others have come up with those ideas previously, tried them and we found out they were wrong. Their ideas did not work, due to the laws of human nature or some other reason. They think they are so intellectual that they can try the same programs and do better it than it was done before, not realizing they can't. "Let me try and I will succeed because I am more intelligent than everyone else who has tried it before me" is what you are saying. Elitist, much?
Reading thru of few of these posts, it's apparent that many confuse issues/definitions:
Socialism/capitalism/communism, are economic systems. The liberal/conservative dichotomy is relative-- it pertains to the philosophies of "free (liberal) to change things" vs "saving (conservate)) the stats quo."
Don't conflate increasing nanny-state social programs with socialism necessarily. Economic systems that favor central planning tend to require that dissent be suppressed, so they tend towards a totalitarianistic political system. In order to appease the proletariat and remain in power, they then tend to rely heavily on providing paternalistic social services.
Libertarianism stands for individual freedom vs totalitarianism, govt control of all aspects of life.
Because the US supposedly stands for individual freedom & capitalism, conservatives should want to preserve that, while liberals would want to change that, ie- move towards socialism/communism and totalitarianism.
I always wondered why more of the genius talking heads on TV didn't make more of BO's promise "to fundamentally change America." What, after all are America's fundamentals?-- individual and economic freedom. How do you move away from that and claim to support America?
Re: intelligence and liberalism-- you gotta be pretty stupid to want to change the formula for success. New Coke, anyone?
I'll give my best answer on this topic and this is coming from a staunch Libertarian. I think that many American citizens are emphatic to the causes of inequality and poverty. Yes our hearts bleed immensely. However, it is more difficult in todays times to satisfy everybody only because funds are so limited. Right now, this country is not far from entering a very long drawn out depression. We've attempted to elevate everybody's standard of living the best that we can but at some point, the OPM disappears. There simply aren't enough resources left to help everybody in need of financial assistance.
I think the only solution to global bankruptcy is attempting to live within our means. Unfortunately, this plan of attack would eliminate much of the entitlements currently afforded. We are broke and out of money....something needs to be done.
Democrats point the finger at non liberals and accuse us of being cruel and inhumane. However we non liberals tend to be financial conservative and are more accepting that "the world is not always fair" ideology.
So yes, as money is more and more scarce, it's certainly more difficult to be liberal.
Socialism in the US is a different story. It won't work because quite simply, we have too many "takers" and not enough "givers" to make this system work.
This^ In a nutshell, if you look at the life of a middle class(hurry while they still exist) today, and compare it to the life of the top 5% of this living in the 190x's, there is not that much difference. Socialists looked at what the top 5% had in the early 1900s and said, "We all deserve that" to some extent. The only way to achieve that is to make a grab from those that could afford it for themselves and provide it to those that they feel deserve to have it. The basic tenant of Marxism. We are close to the point of running out of other people's money.
Liberal, perhaps. Socialist, no. Socialism is, in truth, is at odds with liberalism, because it restricts individual choice. While liberalism excels in providing civil liberties, Socialism takes away economic liberty. Given the number of moribund economies that resulted from Socialism you'd think we'd learn. After all, Venezuela was the most prosperous Latin American country a scant twenty years ago. Now look at it. Even Sweden has backed far away from its once-ballyhooed promises of its particular variant. I mean, when you realize that corporate taxes in Sweden sit at 22.5%, it's really hard to call that country socialist either.
The problem is that in this country, at this moment, the more liberal party called Democrats are the ones playing with socialism, like it is the answer to all our problems. And the liberal media is assisting them as much as they can.
First is to distinguish between the Leninist-Communist interpretation
and the Social Democracy form of government that actually does work
(and which btw is what is actually being discussed)
Social Democracy is just a new name for the same old socialism that has been tried over and over. It is just an incremental way of selling the same old failing methods.
Funds aren't limited. There is more wealth than ever in this country. Records profits, record amounts of cash (even in real dollars). The amount of wealth is not the problem. The distribution is.
And what that comes down to is that you think you can distribute it better? Most leftists feel that way. Chavez did.
You said it so much better than I ever could have! repped.
Well, it's just the triumph of wishful thinking. I'm not even a conservative or a Republican. But anyone who tries to sell me on statism, regardless of the label, will meet with a healthy dose of skepticism from me.
In fact, as yet another example of statism's failures, we may be seeing a slow-motion disaster beginning to happen on the other side of the Pacific. For twenty years, people have been upholding China as the economy of the future when, in truth, there are some deep contradictions in its economy that seem to be emerging.
It's almost an article of faith among economists of all stripes that China's gaudy GDP numbers are nothing more than a fraud. Lester Turow, the Nobel economist, did a good analysis on China's growth several years ago and found a pretty remarkable tell: The growth of electrical power capacity in China was only half the rate of its supposed GDP growth. This is an economic impossibility, for you need a corresponding growth in electrical product to power all those new lights, computers, and heavy equipment. The conclusions should be obvious. When you have to toss out empirical measurements in order to justify statist economic policy, the problem is with the policy not the numbers.
So when you start thinking about the widening gap between China's actual growth over time and what its ostensible economic growth is supposed to be, the picture becomes a little frightening. Because of the highly centralized nature of China's planning, its state-owned industries, its blatant malinvestment (Look up 'ghost cities china' on Google), and rampant corruption, there will eventually be a reckoning. And that's not even taking into account the looming demographic crisis in China. It won't be pretty. And when it happens, I'm pretty sure there will be a gaggle of rationalizers who will explain how that version of Socialism didn't work, but how the next version will.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
