I ll piss in the soup, but Denmark is also consistently pushing for a total surveillance of all communications in EU
Similar line of thought regarding public vs private service providers. There’s nothing preventing public services from being as good as or better than private ones, but private ones will always want to extract more value than they provide as profit (which is the extra money left over after paying for everything, including staff). Plus they pay a whole team of people whose whole job is about maximizing profit, which can come at the expense of the quality of the service.
And with public vs private healthcare, there’s a whole health insurance industry extracting wealth from the public for the privilege of limiting their healthcare options (otherwise the healthcare providers would be the ones doing the fleecing by recommending unnecessary procedures, which probably still happens anyways). And on top of that, there’s an attitude of “just try it, even if it would be illegal, consequences are always avoided by backing down before it gets to court”.
Americans are way too dumb to grasp the benefit of paying higher taxes in exchange for having more benefits. To be fair, Americans have some of the worst politicians on the planet, so they can’t trust their representatives to use their tax dollars responsibly. But American stupidity is what put those politicians there in the first place. So…
Can’t miss an opportunity to mention the burger place A&W made a 1/3 pound burger to compete with McDonald’s 1/4 pound burger… except the 1/3 burger was a complete failure due to Americans thinking the 1/4 burger had more meat cuz 4 is a bigger number than 3 lol
americans are also exposed to constant propaganda, so no wonder they are messed up
this is so underrated. even smart people can do stupid things. but that’s only half of the story… second half is culture (and here even european countries are not much better). in real life it is almost always worth more to look strong than to be smart. changing your opinion does not make you look strong - it makes the “other” person look like they’ve won an argument and that makes you look both weak (you didn’t stand your ground) and stupid (you didn’t know better). this is both entirely nonsense and perfectly understandable due to the culture (deeper level than propaganda). so nobody who makes it somewhere wants to do it. they will rather invent opposing false story and bend over backwards trying to defend it than concede a point to their percieved opponents… which brings us - here.
Hey we may be dumb, and we may be exposed to constant propaganda, but…
What was the third thing you said?
At least we have enough junk food and oversized burgers covered in a pound of cheese that we’ll die of a heart attack from clogged arteries before ever needing that health care we can’t afford. Yeah baby.
Jokes on you, we can’t even afford that shit these days.
Accidental portion control, here we
comeare.
Short attention span?
You know how abuse produces abusers that perpetuate that abuse? That but on a national level.
The biggest issue is that America is built on the concept that taxes are bad. The whole founding of the country is built on not paying taxes. It’s something kids are taught from a very very young age and even though they are not being directly told that taxes are bad, they are being told how great and important it was to break away from English because they made us pay taxes.
Additionally the taxes that are paid in the USand used terribly. Pretty much no one is happy with how they are allocated. Right wing or left wing. So more taxes just feels like having more blood drained from us while getting nothing good in return.
We need a major tax reform not just an increase or a decrease. I would be happy to pay much higher taxes if I felt the benefits of it. Both for myself and for the people in this country. Instead I know most of what I pay gets wated or lines the pockets of the wealthy.
It’s not stupidity, especially since you’re basically saying that you’re half as intelligent as stupid people.
Enter “Why should I have to pay for someone else’s kid!!!”
Because you live in a society, dipshit. Plus, it’s cheaper to feed him breakfast and cover his daycare than it is to incarcerate him in 20 years.
have you considered how many americans would be happy to pay to just go ahead and incarcerate poor kids right now
and they’re not even factoring in how for profit prisons are literal slave labour camps.
Plus that the low wages outbid other businesses easily and are heavily subsidized by the tax payer.
According to the ACLU and the University of Chicago Law school the value of goods from involuntary prison labor in the US is about two billion annually. That’s not even a rounding error as compared to the annual US federal budget.
hi, public school worker here…it is not only legal but encouraged for districts to buy furniture, air filters, and other goods from prison labor sources. one year we even had a group of convicts come to paint the walls, they did a horrible job and people ended up with stolen money also. it blows my mind that this is acceptable.
Former public school worker here, thanks for sticking it out instead of being a quitter like me! Just curious what state you’re in? I ask cause I don’t remember that from my time teaching in Jersey
iowa, and if i had to interact with students more, i might be a former worker too, so dont feel bad. lol janitorial is fine with me after seeing what the other staff go through.
And that argument would matter if the goal were to improve the state of the budget. But it’s irrelevant to the share holders in the private prison/slavery corporations and the politicians those corporations lobby/bribe. And that last group have the power to keep slavery going.
So you’re saying they should have started using child prison labour decades ago?
Tho I guess that’s contingent on if there will be a net return from the smaller cells & rations against the lowered productivity.
Im saying it’s not a big enough net boon to the economy that cutting it out would be a problem even from a pure numbers perspective (I feel gross even typing that out). I figure the problem is that people with political power do benefit from that two billion and they don’t want that gravy train to end.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting its economically necessary. I am however suggesting that the people who want to incarcerate poor kids would probably view their indentured servitude as a good thing.
My bad, agreed nobody here is saying it. I guess I’m just trying to point out how pointless it is. I remember from my CJ classes in college that potential punishments have pretty much no impact on the likelihood of someone committing a crime, only their perceived chances of being caught, or their perceived necessity of committing said crime. It’s a shame how “Old Testament” people think things should be. Outcomes should be the most important factor.
Yeah the cruelty is definitely the point for far too many. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that so many people don’t actually give a shit about the area they live in being a nice, human conducive place. Littering, gated communities, pollution, NIMBY bullshit… I could go on forever.
I know a lot of poor people who would absolutely back this measure bc their favorite politician said so
Most of them are too poor to be in a tax bracket that would “pay for it”
“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s kid?”
“Why should I have to pay for a park I’m not going to visit?”
“Why should I have to pay for a road I may never drive on?”
“The American Military Complex is very responsible with my money and keeps me safe from real threats.”
Well, last statement a lot of antitax are also antiwar. Ron Paul attracted some people because of his antiwar, anti intervention, and freedom regarding drugs platform.
I think that basic form of libertarian is attractive to many if you don’t look too closely at what it actually entails and if you only care about yourself and maybe people you know/family.
I generally think of it as childish selfishness we’re expected to grow out of once we learn some basic society facts.
I will say, I have been pretty shocked to watch for president repeatedly blow up his own son’s cocaine supply. He must have switched suppliers
“pay for someone else’s kid” is code for “help someone I don’t think deserves to be helped”.
Conservatives are all about the hierarchy. In their minds it is an immoral act to give someone a benefit that doesn’t deserve it. To do so risks that person getting to be in the wrong place in the hierarchy. And if someone is in the wrong place in the hierarchy, that’s going to cause the bad kind of anarchy.
The idea that your taxes “go to pay” for something is where a lot of people miss the mark.
Taxes are a means of wealth redistribution. Nothing more. The government literally prints money. They don’t need your money.
Every bomb we drop is a school that didn’t get didn’t get funding. Not because you were taxed too little or too much. But because the same people that benefit from the wealth redistribution of the tax system also use that wealth redistribution to fund the Imperialism that they benefit from.
In a way everything is wealth redistribution in some form.
Yeah. But that kid might be black or trans. Have you thought about that?
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
When the racist white people tell you “yeah, that works there because they’re all white” they aren’t wrong. They just are not right for the reason they think they are.
Right wingers are distracted by identity politics because it keeps them from understanding their class position.
it’s cheaper to feed him breakfast and cover his daycare than it is to incarcerate him in 20 years
But then how am I supposed to fear him and blame his hunger on life choices?
“Why should I pay for their burning down house?! Privatise the fire department!”
At some points in history, fire departments were privatized. It wasn’t a great plan. Fire tends to spread.
I agree and I am, if not happy, willing to pay taxes. I am starting to get less and less happy paying into social security knowing im not going to see a dime though.
I get what you’re saying but I want to make a point around this. There is a lot of cynical framing around many issues that I feel like it leads to a sense of acceptance. There is ZERO reason social security can’t be funded. The idea that this is a thing to worry about is just a narrative setup by those that want to kill it.
Social security fully funds itself through paystubs. It is self sustainable. The issue is with the cap. A cap that has been adjusted to average wages since the 1970s. The last of which was increased to $147k in 2022.
The issue is not with social security. The issue is with average wages declining while the wealth of the country is concentrated with the wealthy (who do not even earn a traditional wage).
The cap just needs adjustment to account for this. Something that has happened before and quite frankly the cap just should not exist.
The “cap” here means that if I make $147k in a year I pay about $10k in social security. If I make $1,000,000 a year I pay the exact same amount of $10k because the tax stops being considered past that amount. It’s an inverse progressive tax.
Social security keeps old people from dying in the streets. Anyone with a brain should selfishly want to fund that. I don’t want to live in a world where I see even more old people dying in the streets. I don’t care if they “made bad life decisions”. It’s for me. I don’t want to walk around and see that.
TLDR: don’t let this narrative be a thing. Social security has no reason to not be paid other than a neoliberal narrative that says we can’t adjust a social safety net during a time in which it’s needed the most. Don’t passively accept this framing. Be outraged. Don’t be accepting.
Wait till Americans hear that Danes don’t need to calculate their taxes and pay a fee to file them.
A fee to pay taxes? Why not include it in the taxes at that point? It’s just ridiculous.
Similar to that time I went to the local garage, my car needed a new 12v battery. Fine, it got swapped for a new one. On the receipt, it had the costs broken down. The garage had the audacity to include a line for: “Charging battery 20 Euro”.
The “fee” is using a private tax preparation service. In theory skippable, but it’s just a pain to do.
Once upon a time, maybe forgivable, private sector embracing useful technology before the government was ready, but now the government actively resists making it easier to file taxes, and coincidentally the tax prep companies give a lot of money to politicians…
i used to prep tax. i had a five page schedule of fees.
i was also known locally as the dude with the most fair bills. that schedule was so long because i didn’t bill for shit i didn’t do.
well what did you expect
me with my business: selling uncharged, possibly unchargeable batteries
“dISCOUNT?”
Is there any developed country that does that other than the US for the typical worker?
Canada
But 90% don’t even know libraries offer free help filing your taxes yet.
Here in Sweden you generally don’t even need help. Naturally there are people with disabilities, or complex financial situations, but that’s not most people. For me personally, filing taxes means I log on to the tax office’s website, skim through the details to make sure there’s no egregious clerical error, and then I click a button to sign off on it. It takes about 5 minutes a year.
If you deal in stocks or buy/sell property a lot it might get a bit more complicated. I think my roomie had deductions because of how much they drives for work, so that added like 5 minutes for supplementary information.
I’m convinced the U.S. makes it complicated for predatory reasons.
Intuit (the company that owns turbotax and creditkarma, among others) has been lobbying with H&R Block for decades to make taxes as complicated as possible so you have to use their software. They just got a massive win from the trump admin too. The fed is shutting down the governments free file website. So now the monopoly is the only choice
Fuck Intuit
libraries have books in them, they are afraid they will catch the woke virus…
But libraries are cOmMuNiSm!
I really wish people would wrap their heads around this
I live in Canada and we have some of the same stuff included in our taxes.
Our whole system is pretty fucked up when it comes to taxes, but it is what it is. At least we have things in place.
Sure, I’m “paying” for other people to get healthcare, or to get social assistance, police protection, help from fire departments, ambulances… Good banks and even welfare…
I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit.
I like knowing that, when it’s my turn to rely on my fellow countrymen for support, I will get it. If I’m sick and unable to work, I can get financial support, and go see a doctor without having to take out a loan or anything.
Social services are good. I’m not going to get denied coverage for a medically necessary procedure. It gets booked and performed.
And I know that Canada’s systems are way less comprehensive than most European countries. We have a lot to do before we can get to where we should be. But we’re still better off than our southern neighbors.
In Ottawa I met a guy once who was asking for some money to buy a drinkable meal. You could clearly see that he had something going on with his jaw. Buddy, I think he said his name was Connor but it’s been nearly a decade, was homeless and apparently attacked for some change and even he was able to go to the hospital and get taken care of. Our post-surgery care still needs a shitload of work but at least my tax dollars helped get him that far. Anyone who could look at him and complain can go straight to hell, through it, and into some deep, dark abyss where only the truly rotten can suffer for the rest of eternity.
It’s not everything, but it’s at least something.
Hopefully buddy is doing well, whatever his name is, and wherever he is now.
I wonder if the first guy is just engagement farming or genuinely confused. Either way, there probably are plenty of people who are so “brainwashed” that they can’t fathom that “happiness” and “tax rates” aren’t linked by some law of nature.
I pay for insurance and then pay copay.
And then I pay a school tax and pay for school lunch and fees.
And my health insurance doesnt cover teeth so I have that as separate.
And I pay a tax on my food and then if it’s a specific type of food, I pay a tax on that.
I also pay taxes and yet my friends pay $2800 to put their kids in a day care.
$2800 for a lifetime of daycare sounds like a deal
It’s probably about right if you’re antivax /s
🥇
TBH depending on the specific european country, it doesn’t even look that different, it’s just usually way cheaper and not tied to employment, and heavily scales with income.
Yeah, the NL basically has the US system, except there is only one “network” all providers must be in, premiums are like 150 EUR and there are no other fees like copays or maximums.
OK let’s see. I pay no medical insurance. If I have to see a doctor I pay ~20€ for the visit. If I have to go to the emergency room, I pay nothing. Getting an ambulance is free. The ceiling for my pharmaceuticals bill is ~400€ per year, anything above that is free. Ads for pharmaceuticals are banned.
School and school lunch is free. University is free. Vocational training is free. I get a small stipend (~300€) every month that I study to help with expenses, for up to 5 years. If I live away from my parents it’s not enough, but I can get a student loan with 2% interest to cover the rest.
Dental isn’t covered from age 19 and up, so that sucks. A visit to the dentist costs ~130€.
I pay 12% VAT on food, and 24% on alcohol. This is flat across the country and included in every quoted price. When I pay income tax, it’s already been precalculated for me so I electronically sign the bill unless I have a specific reason to contend it.
The cost of daycare is scaled to household income, but it works out to ~110€ per month for a dual income household. I also get ~130€ per child per month as a stipend regardless of household income.
There are walkways, bicycle paths and public transit. I do not need a car, but I have one.
Sweden. Median worker takes home ~€2800 per month after taxes. This is still significantly lower than most Americans make, but if it wasn’t for the housing prices that have risen dramatically in the past decade, it has worked out pretty well overall.
Americans pay high taxes as well: they just don’t get as much for them.
We’ve got to pay the military contractors.
How else would we double tap our neighbors outside our own territory?
Swede here, I have said it before, and I’ll say it again:
The Social Democratic is the best ideology humanity has found.
It combines the safety nets of government run services with the powerful incentive of a free market.
Sure, not all sectors are included in the free market, essential services like public transport, power, water, sewage, hospitals, schools, and similar stuff that you need to live and participate in society should be run by the government, and not just by decree, but actually running them.
Anything more should be on a (regulated) free market.
Progressive tax brackets should be kept st a high level, with a public highscore list with a awards like fancy dinners, medals, and other symbols of status for paying a lot of tax, creating more incentives to pay tax.
That to me sounds like a good society
It’s pretty good while it lasts, but lately I’m getting the impression that social democratic states are kind of weak against propaganda from other ideologies. Core issue being that even in social democratic states, the rich still accumulate wealth, which gives them undue influence over the population.
There isn’t a human on this planet that isn’t weak to propaganda.
That sounds like propaganda.
Yes. The issue is that social democratic states have a general tendency to be very permissive towards propaganda that is hostile to social democracy, because offering a lot of freedom of expression is generally part of the core ideas of social democracy.
This is a problem of any state with freedom of expression, not specific to social democracy. The USA fell victim to it and was never anywhere close to social democracy.
Public education seems to be the best treatment so far, and it’s more prevalent in social democratic states. I sincerely hope something more robust can scale someday.
I think that in Social-Democracy the means by which information is spread should not be owned by the Private sector.
In other words, the Press should either be state owned, owned by its workers (i.e. cooperatives), owned by everybody in the area they cover or some other such form of communal ownership were power over it is not approportioned based on wealth.
Like Tolerance, there is a Paradox here were the freedom of Social-Democracy when extended to structures which can be captured by those who gain from having a different system to undermine Social-Democracy through Propaganda, will end up destroying it, so permiting freedom there Social-Democracy ends up delivering less freedom overall (because it gets subverted and eventually destroyed).
Mind you, this just a vague idea based on having seen in places like Britain when I lived there how the Press, after being almost entirelly captured by a few wealthy individuals in Thatcher’s years, very activelly and openly pushed the country first towards extreme Neoliberalism (which is how the leftwing Labour Party was hollowed out and replaced by the hard-right “New Labour” ideology) and later even Fascism (which is how the Tory party was captured and the “conservative” ideology it was replaced by rabid racist and ultra-nationalist populism and New Labour itself has more openly embraced autoritarian tools of exercising power, such as expanding extreme civil society surveillance more forcefully and deeming groups demonstrating against their policies “terrorists” and arresting those who support those groups).
I think a modified version of social democracy that seeks to prevent excess accumulation of wealth/power would be more resilient to this effect.
There will always be an upper crust full of people that want to be the upperest. That’s how we got here.
I totally agree with you, but it’s not a simple as that is it? What prevents the wolves of this world from attacking and devouring your country and other countries like yours?
I feel sad when I think about stuff like this, but peace is so vulnerable and the world at large is so hungry.
Do say, what “incentive” do you see in this “free market”?
Because just FYI, an overwhelming majority of things that actually progressed humanity forward… We’re not done for capital. They weren’t done in the hopes of getting rich. True innovation, true progress comes not from the want of money or power or control, but by the want of knowledge. And the “free market” most definitely does not incentivise seeking knowledge - in fact said market heavily depends on keeping a big chunk of the population just smart enough to do the menial work they’re “needed for” by the ruling elite.
Denmark and Sweden are definitely examples of the direction we should be going, but that’s all - they’re the direction, not the end goal.
With the free market and a well designed tax system, we can exploit greed, let the ghouls work for us.
No, the free market will always find ways around taxation.
If your goal is to lead the race (for best quality of life), then 1st place is the goal. 1st place doesn’t slow down or they won’t be 1st for long. If a utopia is the finish line, but not for another half marathon, then focus on the next mile and/or the next position in the race. That’s how progress is made.
Except there’s no nation-wide drive to be “number one” - except for maybe the US but then again they use that to cover up how shite their QoL is.
Progress on a societal level is made once it happens on an individual level, and society recognises the worth of that progress. See e.g. bicycles, cars, telephone, radio, electricity in general, vaccines, or pasteurisation, or literally any advancement - a personal need (let that be for the thing, or for knowledge) drives the individual discovery, which then gets adopted by society.
In fact you can see contrary examples of the “free market” not innovating but keeping innovation away from people. Not just today, but look back e.g. at the various industry battles that resulted in not the better product but the better capitalist winning. Edison v Tesla - even though we use mostly Tesla’s work today, it’s credited to Edison. For example, Tesla always promoted AC, while Edison was a proponent of DC. Guess which we are using today overwhelmingly? Guess who got rich, and who died penniless?
The free market isn’t the source of innovation, it’s the stifler of it. Period.
The Social Democratic is the best ideology humanity has found.
Ask Palestinians what they have to say about how wonderful EU Social Democracy is. Ask Libyans the same, or Iraqi. Ask Algerians, murdered by the million in the 1960s, Burkinabe or Mali having their central bank in Paris what they think of France’s social democracy. Ask Cubans or Syrians what they think of Obama’s social democracy. Ask the immigrant field-labourers picking up the berries planted in Almería (Spain) that you eat in Sweden what they think of Social Democracy.
Ask the Greeks who elected the leftist party Syriza to government, only to have their state power removed by the Troika under threat of the European Central Bank to drop servicing of Greek state bonds. Ask the French who democratically elected a leftist coalition last elections and their president of the republic rejects to nominate a candidate for them. Or ask them what they think of Social “Democracy” when Macron declares emergency measures to skip the Parliament vote and implement an antidemocratic raise of the retirement age.
Ask the Spaniards what they think of Social Democracy when their police and ministry of interior manufactured false evidence of funding from Venezuela and Iran to the largest leftist party in the country at the time (Podemos) together with a media campaign to leak this “evidence”, when 40% of the media are owned by fucking Silvio Berlusconi (burn in hell, fascist fuck).
Such wonderful “democracies” all of them, raising military expenditure collectively to 5% of GDP without any democratic input from society, all of them enacting exclusively austerity policy for the past 20 years of my life.
People my age (30ish) in Europe have NEVER seen anything other than austerity policy and the ever growing degradation of public services, growth in inequality, stagnation in economics, lowering of purchase power, raising of rent prices and lowering of home ownership rates, destruction of labor rights, and now the fucking raise of the far right all over the continent. In 4 years time, virtually all of the EU will be controlled by far right parties, who will be using the 5% GDP expenditures in weapons of “social democrats” for god knows what.
Tell me again how fucking wonderful this system is
I mean as a matter of fact it is better than the American system, but the rise of far right parties like the AFD in germany is terrifying. I mean what system do you recommend and could it be implemented in Europe?
The rise of the Swedish Democrats is also terrible.
Though the reason is easy to figure out, the other parties decided to not even engage in any way on the question of migration, this lead a LOT of people to feel disenfranchiced, and built up a huge movement.
I sadly have to admit that I have once voted for the Swedish Democrates, I seem to recall it was around the time of the migrant crisis, and I just felt like the political climate was insane, there was NO debate on the topic, and I remember just feeling like we were overrun, while the leadership closed their eyes, covered their ears, shouting “RACIST” at anything that moved.
This was at a time when we were told that there was no Swedish culture, and we needed multiculturalism, just insane stuff.
Then came stories about migrants destroying passports and faking their ages and nationalities to get approved for asylum, then when they get approved and get a ssigned to a facility to stay in, they complain that it wasn’t good enough and hijack the bus that took them there.
Yeah, I know that last past was mostly caused by confusion and people being upset, but at the time, that just fueld the flames.
And through all of this our leaders kept shutting down any debate about the issue, kept cutting services, and increasing prices, while spending vast ammounts of money on strange forigners who not only had lied to get into Sweden, but had passed through several safe countries to pick and choose the “best” country, disregarding rules saying that they needed to apply for asylum in the first safe country they came to, and the EU would distribute them through the member nations.
And our leaders just kept their mantra, “open your hearts”, while offering no real sollution or even debate.
Today it is easy to say that nothing could ever justify voting for racist parties like the Swedish Democrates, but at the time it felt like someone had to pull the emergency brake and let us a good honest discussion.
I didn’t vote for the Swedish Democrates because I hate forigners, I voted for them as a protest against the status quo, I just wanted an honest, non hysterical debate, and they were the only choice for me at the time.
Since then, I have not voted for the Swedish Democrates again, they have too much support as it is right now.
I liken the situation to that of the lastest US ellection, the Dems had disenfranchiced a LOT of their normal voter base by just having the status quo rolling on, they didn’t get any change, and when Trump cam with his ridiculous promises about change and prosperity, it was enticing, obviously.
People had experienced what the Dems gave them, and they were tired of it, so they voted to stir the pot, thikning any change might be a good change.
To claim that people who vote for these terrible parties only because of racism and refusing to try to understand the real reason is why Trump won, and it is why there is sadly a high likelyhood that the Swedish Democrates migh be able to gain real power in the 2026 ellection.
Me, I have got what I wanted, a debate about the issue, I will not be voting for the dickheads over at the Swedish Democrates and I wish they loose a lot of influence.
Regardless of who you are and what your opinions of the issue are, I wish you a very merry christmas and I hope you get a very happy new year.
Well, you may guess from my username, I’m a socialist. Not as in socialdemocrat, as in socialism socialism: expropriate the capitslist companies, provide guaranteed jobs for everyone, provide guaranteed housing for everyone at low prices, free education to the highest level…
Note how I said ideology, not party, I an not a super fan of how the current social democratic party has been handling things
So you hold separately the ideal of social democracy in your head from its actual implementation you see in the real world. Maybe you should consider how the fundamentals of social democracy might just naturally lead to the problems you see with the current social democratic party.
A lot of communists online do the same thing you’re doing; not reconciling the ideal they have in their head with the actual implementation in reality. Just like how there are fundamental problems with Marxist theory that result in attempts to implement it devolving into authoritarianism (centralised state power, vangaurdism, “dictatorship of the proletariat”, cults of personality, etc.), there are fundamental problems with social democracy that result in flaws in its implementation (weak/shallow analysis of power dynamics, reliance on imperialism/colonialism in the form of unequal exchange, regulatory capture, influence of money in politics, etc.)
Generally, as long as the economic system allows wealth to be converted to political power (as in the case of social democracy), or the political system allows political power to be converted to wealth (as in the case of centralized state communism), there will be corruption that eventually snowballs into major issues that cannot be solved by working within the same system.
Drop the condecending tone.
I am well aware of how the social democratic party has shifted their politics away from the social democratic ideology.
That does not change the ideology, it just re enforces the need to put stronger protections of government run companies.
I didn’t intend to sound condescending, I just come across that way sometimes. I am just of the opinion that stronger protections are only a temporary fix because the capitalist economic system eventually erodes any protections you could possibly make, and I believe that is a fundamental flaw in the ideology of social democracy. Not to mention that preserving capitalism also preserves a system of exploitation that extends beyond the borders of the social democratic society and generates wealth for the in-group at the expense of the out-group.
Edit: I want to add that this isn’t just speculation, it happens repeatedly throughout history. We actually had a social democratic government in the US under FDR, and it had enormous economic and social benefits, but it ultimately failed to curtail the power of big business and was rolled back. That’s why I say - no half measures. Capitalism must be destroyed entirely or it will inevitably become the dominant power system in a society.
Their taxes probably go to things like education and social services instead of bullets and bombs to kill brown people in other lands.
That’s just ridiculous. You don’t think that we’re spending tax dollars on bullets and bombs to kill brown people in our own land? Look up the 1985 MOVE bombing and any one of the countless events where a cop shot an unarmed law-abiding minority. We don’t need to go somewhere else to kill brown people when we have perfectly good brown people at home. Not endorsing it btw, just pointing out the fucked up thing that my country regularly does while somehow still trying to claim with a straight face that we’re not racist and “this isn’t who we are” every time we do this thing we keep doing…
Unfortunately if the orange buffoon gets his way they may end up wasting a lot of good money defending Greenland.
I mean really socialism is a scale. A true free market would have no regulations, meaning monopolies would form and the biggest company would basically become more powerful than the government (which is kind of what blackrock is, to most countries outside of the USA.) Whereas there’s a system which is so regulated that everything is controlled and owned by the government.
The middle ground is whatever denmark is doing. Yes the middle ground, not communism, but the middle, where under a largely similar system to the USA, the capital owners, big companies etc, but still, the basic needs of the people are supplied by a governing body. This means that Democrats and other “left leaning” political governments who don’t advocate for universal free healthcare are right wing.
It’s not a scale at all, socialism is worker ownership over the means of production, socialists want things like free healthcare, yes, but free healthcare actually has nothing to do with socialism.
a society is either 100% capitalist or 100% socialist.
a society is either 100% capitalist or 100% socialist.
This is never true in the real world, everything is a spectrum. Do you think there are any countries that are 100% socialist in today’s world? If yes, then I highly doubt it’s actually true, if not, I suppose you count them as “100% capitalist”, which is a classic “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
And then the spectrum not linear either, on the “capitalist” side of the spectrum you have capitalism and fascism, each controlling the working class through different means; and on the “socialist” side you have various ways in which the working class controls (or is told that they control) the means of production; everything from anarchism to councilism to syndicalism to leninism to maoism to stalinism, and a million varieties in between.
I do agree with your other point, though, universal healthcare is almost entirely unrelated to actual socialism/communism, it just turns out to be a (very beneficial) consequence of redistributing power to the working class.
This is never true in the real world, everything is a spectrum. Do you think there are any countries that are 100% socialist in today’s world? If yes, then I highly doubt it’s actually true, if not, I suppose you count them as “100% capitalist”, which is a classic “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
it’s not a no true scotsman, if it were I could use this argument against you if you tried to claim all cats are dogs, you fundamentally misunderstand how that fallacy works, these societies do not meet the well defined criteria and I would say no they are not socialist but may be attempting to build it. The point of this fallacy is when you baselessly claim something is not what it is not according to the defining characteristics but rather by a vague feeling. If I said no true cat mates with other dogs successfully, similarly, I would not be committing a fallacy.
i am stating that socialism is when the workers own the means of production, if they do not then it is simply definitionally not socialist in the same way that if it can only breed with other cats it is a cat and not a dog.
No, there is not a single currently socialist country. It is not a spectrum, either the workers own the means of production or they do not.
if it can only breed with other cats it is a cat and not a dog.
By this overly simplistic definition you would count infertile cats as non-cats. You also completely lose the ability to differentiate the species of non-sexually reproducing organisms. And then there’s the insanity that is hybridization. Is a mule a horse or a donkey? They can occasionally reproduce with either of them.
In reality, differentiating species is a complicated science/art that involves not only the reproductive isolation, but also morphology and genetics, all with the goals of coming up with the most useful definitions for species.
In just the same way with economic systems. Workers in different societies and periods exercise different levels of control (which is the underlying meaning of ownership) on the means of production, it’s not black and white. It can be very roughly defined as (workers control over the state) * (relative assets of state-controlled enterprises) + (relative assets of co-ops or other directly worker-owned enterprises). There is of course a lot more nuances to be discussed, such as the exact distribution of control between different subclasses of workers, or the social hierarchies arising from the structures of control. Once again, the goal is to come up with a useful scale to gauge how much a certain country or region has progressed on its way to socialism, to learn from their mistakes and to build better governance systems in the future.
By this overly simplistic definition you would count infertile cats as non-cats. You also completely lose the ability to differentiate the species of non-sexually reproducing organisms. And then there’s the insanity that is hybridization. Is a mule a horse or a donkey? They can occasionally reproduce with either of them.
this is not the point at all… yes it was an overly simplistic way to explain how you’re using the fallacy wrong. You still used it wrong.
In just the same way with economic systems. Workers in different societies and periods exercise different levels of control (which is the underlying meaning of ownership) on the means of production, it’s not black and white. It can be very roughly defined as (workers control over the state) * (relative assets of state-controlled enterprises) + (relative assets of co-ops or other directly worker-owned enterprises). There is of course a lot more nuances to be discussed, such as the exact distribution of control between different subclasses of workers, or the social hierarchies arising from the structures of control.
no it cannot because it’s referring to whether or not the workers control them and on a societal scale this is a binary flip, at some point the workers are more in control than the bourgoeis and at that point it is socialism and at any point before it is not.
no it cannot because it’s referring to whether or not the workers control them and on a societal scale this is a binary flip, at some point the workers are more in control than the bourgoeis and at that point it is socialism and at any point before it is not.
Aha, so you do agree that different societies have different levels of control the working class and the bourgeois have over production, but you seem to be convinced that if that “relative level of proletarian control” is below 50% the state is fully capitalist, and otherwise the state is fully socialist. Why do you think this definition is more useful than the obvious one, where we retain the scale instead of quantizing it into a binary form?
This question is especially relevant because you also seem to believe that there currently aren’t any “socialist” countries by your definition. By retaining the spectrum, we can then make analytical statements like “China is more socialist than the US”.
marxism does not define socialism as “more worker influence than before” but as an actual change in the relations of production. really the decisive question is which class controls surplus and exists and continues itself as a ruling class.
the binary is not 50 percent versus 49 percent. it is whether bourgeois property relations have been superseded.
Finally a correct comment
are socialists better at accounting?
Is Denmark socialist? Or just humanist?
History has shown that this is not true
Exactly.
This is what I’ve been saying for years.
If you have to pay it merely because you’re alive, it’s a “tax”.
Have to pay healthcare insurance because otherwise you will die or lose everything you managed to get from decades of working if you get sick or have an accident: Tax!
Have no other option than to pay for a car and for gas because you have to drive everywhere since the entire infrastructures is designed for that to be the only option you have: Tax!
Need to have Internet access at home because a lot of things must be done via the Internet nowadays and/or you work from home and there only one or two expensive Internet providers: Tax!
Need a mobile phone for everything and there’s only a handful of mobile telephony available, all expensive: Tax!
Need a place to live and because of all the realestate “investors” house prices are insane and totally beyond your reach, and rents are high because of being highly correlated with house prices: Tax!
Must pay for an expensive kindergarten for your young kids because both members of a couple must work to keep up with all the other taxes I described above: Tax!
And, guess what, the Taxes paid to the state (be it Local, State-level or Central Government) at least have a chance to partly get back to you as benefits, whilst the Taxes paid to the Private Sector go entirelly to shareholder pockets and fuck you plebe.
In the Neoliberal era even in Europe the whole Economy is riddled with these Taxes payed directly to the Private sector because politicians in the past were payed to make laws to distort certain markets or to remove the state from regulating markets prone to monopolies or cartels (or, even more subtly, to make sure the fines for breaking competition rules are a microscopic fraction of the gains from doing it) hence large sections of the Economy and Society are little more than rent-seeking, but the US is way more extreme than Europe in this because it’s even more Neoliberal and its system even in the beginning of this era was way less tempered by a tradition of society-oriented politics than most of Europe.
A LOT of effort has been spent into brainwashing Americans to think that Taxes paid into the common pot which pays for benefits for everybody (even though, in all fairness, a large fraction of that pot just to subsidies for politically connected companies) are a great burden for them even whilst they don’t count in the same way all that money they’re forced to put in the hands of certain private entities, even though in both cases the system is structured to make sure they have no real choice but to pay and, you know, money is money so even in the purest most selfish logic it’s no less a burden if you’re forced to pay X amount to the Private sector for unearned profits from merelly having a monopoly or being part of a cartel as it would be to pay X amount to a Public sector that did absolutelly nothing for you (and even in the US the Public sector does do something for everybody, at the very least basic schools and roads).
This shit has been exported to Europe but people here aren’t yet anywhere as brainwashed.
I’d say those are deductions rather than taxes. Taxes just fill the state’s budget, but are not earmarked for specific purposes the same way a car payment is.
The “tax” part is what you pay above what the cost of a Product or Service would be if there wasn’t a Monopoly, Cartel or legal structure forcing you to acquire that product or service.
The actual cost of making and/or providing that Product or Service (plus a bit of profit to incentivise somebody to actual do it) is the part that serves that purpose (and thus can be said to be “earmarked for a specific purpose”), anything above that is just money you are forced to put in the pocked of somebody for holding a dominant market position due to natural or artificial market barriers and/or even having bough politicians to tilt that market in their favor, killing the viability of alternative products or services or even legally forcing you to acquire that product or service.
That “above natural cost” part of what people are forced to pay for essentials like housing is not earmarked for anything (since it does not go into the costs of the other side to provide you that Product or Service or the profit margin needed to incentivise somebody to do it), plus unlike taxes payed to the Public it will never come back and provide you with any benefit and even in a Democratic system you have no control whatsoever over what it is used for unlike one’s traditional taxes where theoritically (the more trully Democratic a nation is, the more it is so in practice) one has some influence in how it gets uses through the vote.
But sure, you can call the part that is used to actually pay the costs of the Products and Services plus a fair profit margin, to be a deduction if you want (personally I just think of it as natural cost of living). Personally I see that part as totally fair, so not at all an unfair burden, whilst more broadly politically I actually favor a system were life’s essentials are take care of for all from the common pot which is the taxes paid to the public, in this specific point I’m restricting myself to a pure Trade logic.
