Progressives Are Socialists. The Left is not "Liberal" at all. (Part 1)
Members of America's Left may not agree on everything. But they are united in a battle Against liberty.
They are waging this war on multiple fronts. On college campuses and in the main stream media, they smother us in their Political Correctness ideology which strangles the principle and practice of free of speech. Any debate or opposition is stamped out with violence and public harassment, preventing any intellectual discussion or counter ideology. So much for them being 'anti-fascist', because it doesn't get more fascist than that - crushing dissent with force.
At least half of America is sick of the PC theology. And a 'silent majority' made their voice heard via votes for Donald Trump, the 'opposition candidate'. Not that they thought Trump was the answer, just that they hoped he would do less damage to their liberties than the democrat party, which moves ever to the left.
Critical to their war, is the capture and redefining of history and language. More than definitions, words can communicate emotion, imagery, and intent. As these are captured by the Left, they, the establishment, can now decide and propagate language that is allowed or not allowed. The same methods were used in Nazi Germany.
From a WWII survivor:
"Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed upon them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously . . .
Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it . . .Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic; they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all."
He noted that it was not because of words that the Nazi's created, though there were some, it was their use of existing words which was more insidious, over and over again in propaganda and media, that they were able to change the meanings and context the language used by the German people.
Sound familiar? The leaders and figures that the Progressives hold in high esteem, were the Socialists of only a few years ago. Their ideals are the same as those tried and failed in countries throughout the world: income redistribution and total government control over personal and economic life.
What Is Anarchy? It’s Liberty, Unchained.
https://www.facebook.com/What-Is-Anarchy-1356777204387924
End Plunder
If I've asked it once, I've asked it a million times... What happened to the Red Scare? What happened to people being so opposed to socialism and communism that we were willing to go to war to prevent it from happening elsewhere? How many countries have we unjustly invaded to "spread democracy"? Yet many are so willing, if not jubilant, to watch it be stripped away here?
No kidding! Now they fight to achieve it! We missed something..
You realize those things are two absolutely separate issues, right?
For instance, I personally absolutely lean left and I wouldn't mind being called a socialist. I think what you in my opinion unjustly are calling income redistribution is the economic policy of the richest paying the highest taxes as they are the ones reaping the most fruit from the civilized society and infrastructure provided by society through the state. From my point of view having the lowest income workers pay a higher percentage tax than the wealthiest is unjustified. I think a flat or even progressive tax is much fairer.
Does this mean that I by any means support reducing liberties for people? Of course not. The fact that I think that the current taxation system is unfair does not mean I want to limit free speech or tell people they don't have the right to be conservative or so on. To me suggesting that everybody who leans left wants something like that is pretty much insane and is a result of not really looking into what the other side is really saying or suggesting and just vilifying them with the primitive yet easy to fall for "us vs them" mentality.
A flat tax is the best tax. Just because someone earns more money doesn't mean they should have to pay a higher percentage of it. I also think said flat tax should be incredibly low. The government is not meant to give everyone everything they want. They're meant to get out of the way and let us do it.
I don't know if it's the best tax really, but there are indeed strong arguments to support it.
I personally think taxes should be as low as possible, but I also think that there are some projects and services that governments should be involved in and should provide and the tax rates should allow for that. So I kind of disagree that the government should always get out of the way. A very good example is health care where the free market approach doesn't seem to be working very well in the US while many other countries are doing much better with single payer systems. It also comes with my moral belief that nobody should be denied medical attention when they need it just because they can't afford it and having a portion of the taxes going to that is something I generally support. In a way, the government can act like one very large scale insurance company that does not need to make additional profit which would actually make it more efficient and would allow for the prices to drop to the levels you see in other developed countries.
The government cannot be efficient, let alone More efficient. Without the function of profit and loss, they lack the ability of economic calculation. Meaning that, without market prices and profit and loss, they will have no idea how to employ people and resources effectively.
Here is a quote from Rand Paul about the concept of having a Right to healthcare:
"Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services, do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? You’re basically saying you believe in slavery. You’re saying you believe in taking and extracting from another person. Our founding documents were very clear about this. You have a right to pursue happiness but there’s no guarantee of physical comfort. There’s no guarantee of concrete items. In order to give something concrete, you have to take it from someone. So there’s an implied threat of force.
"If I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care, do you have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be. If you believe in a right to health care, you’re believing in basically the use of force to conscript someone to do your bidding."
Who has to pay higher prices for health care? People in the US or people in Western Europe where single-payer type systems are more common?
Also, do governments really lack the ability of economic calculation? That's an ideological claim that is not really tied to facts. Governments all over the world are dealing with budgets all the time and it's always a large part of political debates. Now, you could criticize the job they are doing, but they are certainly calculating and spending money in an organized way that for some governments is actually transparent to an extent. Having to budget your resources without increasing the taxes while still getting the job you were elected to do is what supposedly motivates you since you usually are planning to run for reelection and hoping to keep your job.
And as far as the Rand Paul quote goes, it sounds as if free health care doesn't exist and has never existed around the world. Do you really think medical professionals feel enslaved in those countries? And the same medical procedures cost less there.
I think both you and Rand haven't done enough research on the matter before putting forward your ideologically motivated opinions out there. I find it extremely irresponsible to claim that something is impossible and would be a disaster while it has been successfully implemented on numerous occasions.
Is having a rule of law and a court system slavery too? Are you implying that it's much better for somebody to be able to kill you or steal from you with the only consequences for them whatever you personally or your friends, family and community can muster instead of a tax funded justice system? To me, most of health care should be something that is provided like the justice system instead of something that has to be individually procured at all times like plumbing. It is an opinion, but it is based on what has been successful and what has been failing around the world and what leads to consequences I deem desirable for the society as a whole.
The problem is that if you have one entity (government) that owns all the means of production, then it is impossible to engage in successful economic behavior. The process of buyers and sellers coming together freely in the market results in Prices. But when one entity controls and owns everything, there is not buying and selling, therefore there are no prices. Without prices, it becomes impossible to efficiently allocate resources. As with Socialism, any size of government encounters this problem. Without prices, there is measure of profit and loss, and they cannot distinguish between useful or wasteful uses of social and physical resources. It results in wealth destruction, shortages, and misallocations of capital goods and labor.
Yes, governments really do lack the ability of economic calculation. Just because they have budgets, and can compare tax revenue to their obligated expenses, does not mean that they can ever determine the best use of their labor and resources. Without consumers freedom to choose which products and services they want, they government will not be able to identify what to produce nor how much. Because they get tax revenue not matter what, they are unable to discern consumer preference and without profit and loss, they are unable to discern whether they are applying their resources most effectively.
Yes, taxation is slavery. And the current justice system is not worth it, it is a joke. Suspects spend as long as a year waiting trial, patent trolls stifle innovation, and failed burglars sue homeowners. It is a series of legal plunder against the smallest minority of all, the individual. The Government is the one that robs and kills people. You tax-funded system provides no recourse for that. Law existed before the state, and can be better provided by the market.
When did I suggest that the government should own the means of production? Oh, I didn't.
Still, you are making an assertion here and there are counter-examples. In Chine the government does own the means of production, but their economy is booming...
Everything you are saying is kind of refuting things I'm not saying. When did I say there should be no prices, there should be no consumer freedom or that there should not be any free market?
The current justice system is surely imperfect, but it is orders of magnitudes better than the wild wild west or no justice system at all. As I said, at the very least, it enforces contract and without contracts the market is going to suffer quite a lot. And patent trolls are indeed a real plague, but at least the majority of intellectual property is properly protected. Throw away all patent law and what do you get? No good incentive to innovate...
When you suggest that government should run X industry or service, you are in fact suggesting that it should be out of private hands and therefore the government will own the means of production of whatever it is. (Health care, law, etc.) And in such government run services there is no consumer choice since they are taxed whether they use it or not, and therefore there is no market pricing for those services and no measure of success (profit or loss) for the government to analyze their own actions.
Law and contracts are products of the market which existed before government took monopoly ownership of them. I provided you a recommended reading of a book called The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State. It provides dozens of examples private law and enforcement, and how they out perform their government counterparts.
Intellectual property could have its own debate. For instance, some hold that it is not even property, since two people can have the same idea, and not infringe on the other's right to do so. IP laws prevent the small business creativity they are supposed to help. Just because someone filed a patent before the next guy has no bearing on how good or successful the first idea will be. All it does is limit the property rights of others. A patent on the steam engine delayed the industrial revolution in the UK by over 20 years..
Amen to that.
The point is that different parts of the left fight against different liberties.
I used to be a democrat, so I am very familiar with the platform. Taxing people 35%, regardless of how much they earn, Greatly reduces their liberties.
If top income earners are able to create value, they should not be punished. The more successful at being productive we are, from the highest paid CEO to the garage start-up entrepreneur, the more wealthy we will be. Taxes prevent reinvestment and growth.
Well, if you are making little, the same percentage reduced your liberties by a lot more, doesn't it?
You could make that argument against progressive tax, but I don't see how paying the same tax rate as everybody else can be called punishment.
That sounds OK on paper but that trickle-down-economics approach doesn't seem to be having the effect it is supposed to under that ideology. The richest are concentrating more an more wealth and capital into their own hands while the middle-class is thinning.
Would a higher tax rate for the richest really stifle growth in any way? After all, to get taxed, you have to be in the green and money you reinvest in your business are not something you really get taxed on. And when you take that into account, I think your argument actually breaks down as reinvestment is something that might allow you to avoid a tax and still keep the capital as resources for your business, so it might arguably stimulate expansion and investment.
The reason the people you refer to as the middle class are suffering is because of the FED destroying the value of their money. Having your currency lose 95% of its value can do that to people.
Unless they earned their wealth by getting in bed with government, and getting special treatment - they earned it honestly, by producing products and services that people demand. Nothing wrong with that.
The only fair tax is a flat tax, and the only fair flat tax is ZERO.
Nailed it.
Thanks
Not all countries in the world are the US and you can look around the world to see what has worked and what hasn't too, not just theorize like you do. Of course, I would by no means claim that the data is cold cut and clear, that is absolutely not the case, but the idea that the free market is a cure-all panacea doesn't seem to hold up by any means.
If there are zero taxes, how do you ensure the well-being of everybody? How do you provide infrastructure, justice and so on?
The evidence IS cold cut and clear: government management of Health Care (disguised as the phrase single-payer) results in higher costs for procedures and medicines, shortages of even the most basic of supplies like antiseptic and bandages, dirty facilities, and patients dying in the hallways as they await service.
There are no taxes levied in order to prove food and shelter, but yet the market provides you food to eat and an apartment to live in. Taxes are not needed, not even for “infrastructure”. By that I assume you mean roads, since most other infrastructure in varying degrees is already built by the private sector (cell towers, power lines, shipping service, security service, arbitration service, etc.). Even public road construction is sometimes contracted out to private companies. In some places, many roads and streets are already entirely privately constructed and maintained, even some utility services; in residential subdivisions, for example.
I don’t have to prove ‘who will do X without the government’, because the market already shows that it can. And it would do more, if allowed to.
What?! You can't be serious. France, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Israel and the like have better health care than the US and they get it cheaper. And I assure you they all have access to cleaning supplies in the hospitals there and they know how to use them ;) And are well stocked on bandages...
It doesn't. There are many cases in history where you find that left to the market, things are not taken care of and the government needs to step in with regulation and often to take the project upon itself. Look at the history of the London sewage system for instance and tell me how well the market handled the problem and how the problem was solved. Could it have been solved in any other way and what would the incentive be for the hypothetical private investor who could have solved it? So yeah, you have to show that this type of counter-examples to your thesis are somehow invalid.
Again, you didn't explain how the market could create a world wide web. If things were left to the market, different companies would have the incentive to create their own local networks which they would control and charge for all the content. We see this even not as large telecommunications companies pushing against net neutrality. The market has not way to preserve net neutrality and thus the free market without government regulation is very likely to destroy the internet that we know, love and almost take for granted. And yes, you have to show that this is not a valid counter-example.
And the most important thing that the market itself can't do - enforce contracts, protect intellectual property and provide justice. I keep asking you how the market would provide them and you keep dodging the question and move on to talk about food and shelter. If you look at the market you will see that business are happy to steal intellectual property if they can, so you need a way to stop them so developing new technologies would still be a worthwhile investment. If you want a thriving economy you need a level of stability and security and if contracts mean nothing, you are not going to have that. Same goes with crime. High rates of robbery and theft don't go well with a booming economy.
If the market was in fact a panacea, it would have already fixed all the problems, wouldn't it?
What is stopping the market from fixing health care right now? Private clinics and private insurance are not illegal, right? If there was a winning market driven formula there, why isn't the market jumping on it? What are the regulations that are stopping it from working?
The London sewer system existed before that time, and it was privately owned by several different companies but they were hampered by rules from local government.
And yes, competition in health care is Highly limited in the US. In every case, when a third party pays the bill (a single payer system/medicare or one with required coverage by private insurers) the cost skyrocket, while the prices for less regulated procedures go down. Consider lasik surgery, not normally covered by insurance but the cost has come down dramatically in just a few years. The American Medical Association also is a huge barrier to entry in the medical field and basically acts as an occupational cartel. Have you heard of a Certificate of Need? It's what you have to get signed off on by local existing medical providers, before you can open you own practice. Spoiler alert, they dont. This is some of what is stopping the market from serving consumers in the health care industry that desperately need more choice and less government.
It can all be provided better by the same people who provide food to eat and clothes to wear - the market.
I wonder how you substantiate that claim for yourself as I personally see the idea that the market is a panacea as just another utopia and simply an instance of wishful thinking.
Don't get me wrong, the market is certainly a great system to incentivize productivity, competition, progress and wealth creation. I don't object to that notion at all. But I certainly don't agree that it can provide a positive and an efficient solution to all problems out there.
To me it sounds like it should be absolutely obvious that the market in and of itself has no mechanism to provide justice and rule of law. What market mechanism do you think can lead to those things that are quite important to a prosperous society? Because if you don't have a rule of law that is somehow enforcible, you loose an extremely important component of the market - contracts as there will be no way to hold people and businesses to the agreements you have had with them. Oh, and patents and intellectual property too...
Additionally, how do you propose the market will lead to infrastructural development in any dependable and all-encompassing way. Keep in mind that it's not like you are proposing something that has never been tried. You can look to the history of the British railway system for instance. When it was maintained by private investors, it was fragmented, inefficient and plagued by incompatibility. The same goes with their electricity grid. Things got better only after the government stepped in.
Another network that would have had a very hard time arising and existing under normal market conditions would be the internet. We currently take it for granted, but many of us forget or never realized that it is in fact a government-sponsored project and it couldn't have remained free and open without government regulation. You see the market pushing for removal of net neutrality quite hard, so it's clear the market is not really incentivizing the providers to keep it open.
Also, how would the market provide disaster relief and emergency services?
And the last thing to mention again is health care. The US where the market has played a major role in it, has the one of the worst and least efficient systems in the developed world. A total market solution to that problem would lead to price gouging of the worst of sorts. Sure, you could say that the medical industry will be thriving, but you wouldn't be able to say that society would have access to proper health care and I don't see that as progress but as failure.
To me there is a long list of things that the market by itself is simply not equipped to deal with and to me it's completely unreasonable for us to expect it to be able to do so. There are projects that are simply best tackled on a larger scale and there is no way to take care of them without getting them financed somehow. To me a reasonable way to get those financed is taxation and I actually don't see any other alternative as to me the fact that they are needed is unquestionable.
In the recent hurricane disasters to strike Texas and Florida, most of the relief came from the private sector, not the government. (individuals donations, private charities, donations by businesses, and local churches that helped demo damaged home finishes)
So, the best thing about government is that they keep regulations to a minimum? They are the source of all stifling regulations. The market is the thing you are saying they do a good job of allowing to work freely.
Like the Greens. They're like watermelons - green on the outside; red on the inside.
As Maggie Thatcher used to say - socialism is a great concept until you run out of other people's money.
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Do you ever get the impression most of these people are just too stupid to understand what they are working towards?
Haha. How's that saying go? Something like: 'A government with the power to make you happy, also has the power to make you very unhappy.'
I have never heard that one, but it's eerily true.
The Liberals today are the New Fascists.