The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[YaBoyNY]

Historically, socialism has never worked.

See: Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and practically the entirety of the developed world for flavors and variations of substantially socialist policies. The US invented the largest and most socialistic program in the history of the world - it's called Social Security. I'm sure there will be a cadre of right-wing and socialist posters alike screaming "this is not socialism!11", but they are in fact elements of socialism isolated from a purist system - and they are superior to capitalist "equivalents".

In addition to the obvious examples of the Eastern Bloc during World War II, socialism has also failed in modern-day Europe, which is suffering far worse than the much more capitalistic United States, and, prior to the early 1990s, India and even "socialist utopia" Sweden, which only recovered from their recession by reforming to a less socialistic model.

Europe is suffering today because they pursued policies of austerity far deeper than the United States. Europe enacted austerity. The US enacted a stimulus (albeit milquetoast and minuscule in nature; the main element here is that we didn't shoot ourselves in our already-wounded foot). During the height of the global recession, Europe as a whole cut spending; the US increased spending. Even before the recession, European countries as a whole had a lower debt to GDP ratio than the US. Today, the US has the highest rate of economic growth for any first-world nation when balanced with population size. Half of Europe continues to teeter-totter on the brink of recession. Yes, Europe is faltering: now look at the policies they pursued during that time.

Socialism slows down economic growth.

This is quite debatable, but the rate of economic growth is not all that important - where that growth goes is important. A 4% rate of GDP growth in a country with levels of economic inequality like the US is objectively inferior from the perspective of a consumer-based economy than a country with 2% GDP growth that has economic inequality comparable to that of Denmark. Why? Because in the former, wages and earnings for >90% of the country remain flat or decline when measured across decades; in the latter, real income continues to grow and tangible standard of living increases. Rich people do not grow the economy; they redistribute wealth from others to themselves.

It causes unemployment to rise by raising taxes to an unsustainable level. It makes the people dependent on the government by having the government provide everything, funded by taxpayers. Socialism requires the establishment of a nanny state and increased authoritarianism to function. Socialism is ineffective because the government is inherently inefficient at managing industries. Just look at AmTrak, which has never turned a profit.

Everything doesn't exist to turn a profit. Believe it or not, many public services exist to improve quality of life, which almost always have an impact on the standard and cost of living for the people it influences. AmTrak's NE Corridor results in stations being within 25 miles of 30% of the country. Over 12,000,000 passengers use it annually, with 70% of them travelling 100-300 miles per trip. In smaller trips and along different routes, many people leverage the infrastructure to be able to work in higher-paying areas and export that income into more rural and suburban areas, even after absorbing the cost of the train. Along the NE corridor, it is sometimes actually quicker to take the train than drive. This is just one example. If tax cuts, profusely and almost meaninglessly distributed throughout the country to millions of people to create drips and drops of quality of life improvement while simultaneously resulting in expanded deficits makes economic sense to you, then this shouldn't be any more difficult to understand.

Finally, socialism is bad because it increases government overreach. My views on welfare can be summed up as "Government has the responsibility to provide what individual citizens cannot do for themselves", but socialism goes far beyond that and attempts to provide all basic necessities for everyone even if they can afford it themselves, resulting in a secure life where all basic needs are met, but people live in perpetual poverty.

First of all, please abandon your buzz-words like "government overreach". Secondly, why is the free market afraid of a little competition? Because it knows that government can in many instances provide a comparable or superior service at a lower rate than the private sector, merely because profit is not the objective - merely breaking even will do in this case, and sometimes, not even that is necessary - and overhead costs are lower. More choices, I say!

This is such a beautiful post.

[YaBoyNY]

I see you're new here. Many of the lefties/Democrats on this forum have some odd fascination with poor white Appalachian men, and are desperate to get them to vote Democratic by any means necessary. It's quite an odd phenomenon. As I said earlier, it would be like the GOP constantly pining for the days when Vermont was a red state. Granted, we do have a few of those here, but not anywhere near the scale of the former. Times have changed and coalitions have changed, get over it already. The GOP already has.

Also, per Atlas leftie rules, poor white Appalachian men are the only people immune from criticism and should be treated with the utmost respect. But you can bash blacks all you want for voting for the she-devil, and are free to hold positions viewing gays and illegal immigrants as less than human. That's just respectful political disagreement after all.