For "Never Trump" Voters: Would You Rather Have "Socialism" or 4 More Years of Trump?

[ClemVegas]

Originally Posted by censusdata

I not a big fan of either party's platform right now. The middle is gone and everything is extreme.

Democrats demonize majority White culture. GOP demonizes immigrants and Black people.

Democrats will massively increase the deficit with 'free' healthcare, college, and slave reparations. GOP will increase deficits with needless military spending and tax cuts for rich.

Democrats will make me less safe with de facto open borders that allow worst elements from third world in (along with good). GOP will make me less safe but gutted workplace safety and environmental regulations.

Tax cuts don't cause a deficit and Republicans haven't gutted any practical safety and environmental laws. You make partisan assertions while pretending you are not.

[Eli34]

Lol, majority on here would rather have socialism. Maybe people are starting to wake up to the scare tactics that the economic elite have been using on the masses and are realizing the so called "socialism" is actually normal in other advanced countries and nothing to be afraid of....and yes, they have rich people too! It's just that they don't spoil their rich like we do here at the expense of ordinary people.

[ChiGeekGuest]

Why There Are No Libertarian Countries

Does everyone have the same values? Yes, but libertarianism isn’t one of them.

It might seem like humanity disagrees over basic values, but the data is in: we actually don't.

Is conflict humanity's natural state?

Could we ever agree on a set of values?

The knee-jerk response for any student of history would be 'no', but the data tells a different story. Psychologist and author Steven Pinker offers proof in the form of Wagner's law: "One development that people both on the Left and the Right are unaware of is almost an inexorable force that leads affluent societies to devote increasing amounts of their wealth to social spending, to redistribution to children, to education, to healthcare, to supporting the poor, to supporting the aged." Until the 20th century, most societies devoted about 1.5% of their GDP to social spending, and generally much less than that. In the last 100 years, that's changed: today the current global median of social spending is 22% of GDP. One group will groan most audibly at that data: Libertarians. However, Pinker says it's no coincidence that there are zero libertarian countries on Earth; social spending is a shared value, even if the truest libertarians protest it, as the free market has no way to provide for poor children, the elderly, and other members of society who cannot contribute to the marketplace. As countries develop, they naturally initiate social spending programs. That's why libertarianism is a marginal idea, rather than a universal value—and it's likely to stay that way. Steven Pinker is the author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

https://bigthink.com/videos/steven-p...rian-countries

[ohio_peasant]

Originally Posted by ChiGeekGuest

Why There Are No Libertarian Countries

Does everyone have the same values? Yes, but libertarianism isn’t one of them....

To a large degree, this is true. Everyone wants to save money, to minimize their own cost-outlay. But few people are willing to fully and unambiguously embrace the consequences. Few conservative stalwarts voluntarily refuse to accept Social Security benefits upon turning 70, or reject Medicare. By deriding socialism, what we really mean is disinclination to having our own earnings or property compromised, for others' benefit. Rarely are we willing to entirely disavow any receipt of benefits ourselves.

But personal considerations matter too. Child-free people have less personal interest in paying property taxes for local schools. Even if one acknowledges the benefits of an educated populace, it's just more compelling to pay taxes that fund the education of one's own children, than to pay in the abstract, for other people's children. Persons whose elderly parents are still alive, and benefit from old-age programs, would have more direct appreciation for SS and Medicare, for community programs that provide meals or other senior-services and so forth, than persons who have no elderly relatives and who therefore behold old-age issues only in the abstract. Persons with a chronic medical condition, a disability or some debilitating illness, would take more seriously the risks of healthcare, and would be more willing to pay for health-insurance, than those who are nominally healthy and for whom healthcare is more of abstraction. And so forth.

In short, libertarianism has particular appeal to healthy middle-aged people who don't have kids, whose parents have already passed-on, who make a good income and don't have need for recourse to social services.

Returning to our topic, my main critique of Trump is that his behavior his chaotic and destabilizing, being ultimately bad for business. He might be pro-business in avowed attitude, but the execution is shoddy. Trade-wars and sabre-rattling are inimical to accurate forecasting, to investment and risk-taking. Even if Trump lowered corporate taxes and scuppered onerous regulations, his mercurial flippancy is holding back the stock market. On the other hand, if we elected a socialist, of whatever stripe, that would presumably introduce new costs and frictions in the economy. Even if this person is serious, well-tempered and mature, the result would be a climate less favorable to corporate profit, and thus bad for the stock market. Thus my earlier posting on this topic.

Best would be a pro-business candidate who is guarded in word and moderate in action. The best candidate by that measure in the 2016 election cycle was John Kasich. Unfortunately such a candidate lacks mass-appeal, whether on the Left or the Right.