Re: Disabled In Socialist Countries
Ugh, I saw the title, decided I wanted to avoid the inevitable dumpster-fire, then the weekend hit and I had nothing better to do and I read the first 8 posts and wish I'd just read it in the first place so as not to be so late.
@ 8: No True Scotsman No True Scotsman! If every time someone has claimed to attempt something, it immediately devolved into totalitarian atrocities, that does not speak well of the ability to attempt the thing. Communism has been tried, just as theocracy and various religions have been tried. I bring up religion because, 15-ish years ago, the debates were about religion (and Dubya's foreign policy, but that's off topic), and the whole reason anyone knows about the No True Scotsman Fallacy is because those often resulted in one side claiming that such and such christians were wrong or abusive or whatever, and the other responding that those were not True Christians. And, you know what? I read the Gospels, and the latter is correct. It is also irrelevant when talking about things at the societal, cultural, or governmental levels. Scandinavian Democratic Socialism, and Soviet Socialism, both count for / against Socialism, just like witch-burnings and soup kitchens both count against / for Christianity. This is why getting attached to a group identifier is a dangerous idea: you cannot eject the baggage you don't like. If you're lucky, the baggage is outdated or defeated or far less extreme than it sounds—After all, 20th century Communism is gone, and unless you count Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Crusades are long gone, and Islamic Terrorism was always exaggerated after its one big victory against The West™. TBH, this rant is as much on Herseth for puting Socialism on the spot as it is on Jayde for the ... I did say I stopped at post 8, right? Because if there's better defenses later, I haven't reached them yet.
@Jayde: the one thing in your first two posts in this thread that really bugged me was how you linked rejection of the Capitalist work-mandate to the implementability of Socialist policies. It's almost a nonsequidor. The question isn't whether you must work for such and such benefits[1], but how such and such benefits are produced and distributed. The complete and utter failure of every Communist government to effectively produce and distribute (their whole schtick!) has done about as much to tarnish their reputations as the brutal dictators, but everyone with any knowledge of recent history has retreated to the Scandinavian style, so I'll drop the references to Communism henceforth.
Scandinavia is interesting, historically speaking. Kinda kept to themselves until the fall of Rome, then grew strong from the loot and conquests of the Vikings, then everyone converted to Christianity and Viking was no longer profitable, there was some dabbling in European warfare and imperialism, but never on the scale of the other European nations (well, the Great Northern War might sorta-kinda count?), then those who weren't neutral sorta-kinda allied with the Nazis, but in more of a "Hey, Hitler said we were cool and he won't attack us. Any idea what's going on down there?" sort of way, then we got today's Demsoc, which I hope is not an abbreviation that is being used by Alt-right jerks because I am getting tired of typing Democratic Socialism every other sentence. And there are whispers of cracks starting over how people deal with immigrants, so if The North should swing back in the other direction, well, it's a 2000-year-old tradition at this point, for what lack of good it does.
I kinda wish I heard more detailed analyses from the center and left, because the only two criticisms I hear toward Demsoc as practiced are the suicide rates, and the ethnic homogeity of the Scandinavian countries. (Racists love to bring up that last one, as though it proves anything that can't be explained by culture clash and long histories of oppression. Included here for completeness. ).
I will add "but they're kinda small, aren't they?" to that. Canada and the UK aren't quite there, and the UK sounds kinda distopic, leaving Germany and the Netherlands as the primary non-Scandinavian contenders. The Netherlands are also kinda small, and what little I know about Dutch politics and such makes them sound kinda borderline, so the real example that doesn't have the benefit of being small, cold, and away from everyone else is Germany.
So how's it going in Germany? I'm on my phone, so will have to add research later. Aiui, Germany doesn't actually have all of those "free food, healthcare, and UBI" features, but is moving in that direction more gracefully than anyone else south of The North Sea. We've got several German members who could comment on how that's going, and I suppose I should actually read the rest of the thread to see if any have.
But I will point out one thing: we are NOT in a post-scarcity world where the post-scarcity is being held back by evil rich people. As far as food is concerned, yes, we have enough food to feed everyone, if we'd just distribute it. Thing is, food deserts aren't actually that common in the Developed World. The distribution there needs to be from the richer countries to the poorer countries, which, umm, we've kinda been working on for a while. (North Korea relies heavily on their arch nemeses for food, because reality is kinda mean to North Korea but the Kims certainly aren't helping).
Healthcare, though, is really expensive. No, I don't mean the companies that overprice medications and treatments because they're greedy jerks—those guys are indeed problems and we need to do more to stop them from abusing that power—rather, there are three big areas of expense that keep healthcare costs high. These are fairly specific to the US: the cost of becoming a doctor (why does a doctor need a non-medical degree before they can go to med school? This puts them in so much debt that they have to keep prices high just to pay for school!), and the cost of legal protection (Americans are really sue-happy. Maybe this keeps doctors less likely to mess up, but it does mean they have to have lawyers and insurance and that stuff, and that's expensive. Bring the prices of either down, or decrease the malpractice suits (decreasing malpractice would be a good start), and that would help a ton.). The third big cost is R and D, and while a good chunk of that is to get through bureaucratic red tape, a lot of it is because medical research is just really difficult, dangerous, and resource-intensive. Some have said that American healthcare being so expensive is what enables it to be so cheap everywhere else. I expect that's partly true, but only partly.
I mentioned Canada and the UK earlier as not-quite-Socialist. Mostly, what's Socialist about them is their healthcare. Everything I've heard says that the differences between Healthcare in Canada / the UK and the US are a mixed bag, and anyone who can afford American Healthcare, when it doesn't involve a specialist who is somehow busy for the next two months in spite of having fewer patients than a GP, are generally happier with American healthcare. That is, of course, a problem: if you aren't rich enough to afford it, you're kinda in trouble. Although, it sounds like Medicaid and Medicare have some advantages over the Canadian system, while the Canadian system has advantages of its own (ever been to an American Emergency Room? Ever tried to get an unnecessarily restricted or overpriced drug in America? Canada's got you covered.). No one has any good plans for fixing any of these, but it seems extremely clear that if free, high-quality healthcare was something that could be done right now, someone would be doing it. Would "free, high-quality healthcare" describe the NHS, in the opinion of any users here who partake? I've found accounts of the NHS confusing and all over the place. Someone who's experienced the healthcare systems in multiple countries would be very welcome to share their experiences (that's where I got my Canada vs US comparisons).
And that leaves us with UBI. Let's be honest: blind people on SSI and other countries' equivalents are more or less on UBI, aren't we? I hear people trying to push for a UBI of $1000/month. I haven't heard where the money comes from, but I have heard suggestions that it might be more doable than the dozen trillion dollar pricetag makes it sound, but it's not entirely clear. And if we make it more like a progressive income tax... umm, what does that do to me? Like, me specifically. I started working last month, so got my last SSI check on the first. After taxes, this gives me about $1250/ month. The SSA will take $200, because there was some overpay while I was in college. Work actually has food (not exactly the best food, but I don't have to pay for lunch, is the important thing), and it's not in walking distance of my house and buses take literally 10× as long as a car, so in practice I get more free food when family provides transportation. So the money saved on food cancels out the SSA's 10%. If my defered college loans come due, I'm in the negatives every month. If not, I'm actually making enough money to not have to choose between food and heat/air (seriously that happened this winter). Also-also, if we went Socialist right now, that college debt is still there. And about $1000/month. So would the high-end UBI basically be the equivalent of forgiving that debt and letting me actually keep my freakin' paycheck (which, I should add, does not involve anything I learned in college in the slightest)? I can live with that. Crap, that'd basically be $600 in my pocket every month and—wait a minute...
... How does Socialism deal with rent, property, property taxes, savings, and investments? Because if my college debt were forgiven in full right now, that'd be the same as the situation above. I own my home, but so does an angry raccoon that murdered a possum in the vents Thursday night, so I don't think selling it would get me diddlysquat, certainly not enough to be worth having to move in with parents or my sister. $600/month is pretty worthless by itself—I could order pizza, get faster internet, or take an Uber to a restaurant or something, but that's kinda wasteful, ne?—so what happens to savings matters. On top of that, my current strategy would be to put a huge chunk of it into Vanguard's best Index as soon as I'd have $3k to spare (not happening soon, irl, because $3k is enough to pay off one of those loans, and free up an extra $50/month). As I understand it, this is basically the equivalent of giving a bunch of money to a pot that much better investors use to fund all the publicly traded companies, adjusting based on apparent value (whether this is a proxy for which can do the most good at any moment, or some weird capitalist witchcraft, I'm not sure anyone knows), then splitting the ensuing interest among everyone involved. This feels weird, because it sounds like hella capitalist, moneysmithing, but it is literally public ownership of the means of production, and public profiting from it directly, so isn't that, like, more toward the Socialist side? Is it Capitalist because I first need that $3k to get started, or because people with more money will make more from such a system?
I think the Index Fund bit is important. Socialism cannot be work vs post-scarcity mass charity, because we are not at post-scarcity levels of total wealth (yet! Growth Mindset!). What does workers owning the "Means of Production"™ even mean? Would it not look basically like a giant Index Fund, except without the rich-favoring barrier to access? And, while Index Funds sound like magic at present—a guaranteed 3-10% annual return on your investment, so 25× your annual expenses is infinite money—it doesn't just make money out of thin air. It allocates the money to the companies that the investment algorithms (which I assume are soulless profit-maximizing robots) think it will be converted into the most value, and the interest only materializes if the value is produced. Under the hood, this is probably some supercomputer from Hell trying to play the Stock Market literally at the speed of light, but in an ideal world that still contains Index Funds somehow, it would be because the companies leverage the money from the investments to improve their output. It would basically be a weird intersection of Capitalist-style investing in businesses with taxing and wealth redistribution.
And you are probably thinking, if you are at all like the author of Planet Seva, that the ideal world wouldn't need businesses to produce value, so that whole mess is nonsensical and pointless. This is, of course, super naive, but since Healthcare came up, I assume you know full well that Healthcare requires technology that has to come from somewhere, and we already established that the somewhere is neither easy nor cheap. (If there is a sustainably farmable Panacea somewhere in the Amazon that changes all of this, then we're good.). Then there's the climate to worry about (it's nice enough right now that I am writing this outside, but a couple months ago, the heater, oven, and three layers were necessary to manage indoors, and last May/June, I had to go elsewhere when my air conditioner broke down, because "barely habitable" is not a bad description of certain latitudes during the hot seasons, post 1998. The ideal world would be post-scarcity, and neither Healthcare nor climate would be problems of an industrial scale or higher. At present, though, they are, and the resources and innovations to deal with those problems, and lesser-but-non-negligible problems like them, must come from somewhere. Impirically, that somewhere has mostly been more Capitalist than Socialist, but Capitalist countries did kinda have a wealth-and-size advantage when Socialism came onto the scene in the first place, so it's hardly a fair comparison. Does Socialism have solutions to these problems? If the solution is something like "in order to improve healthcare, we must cure cancer", that is not a solution; that is a semi-abstract goal. We know what victory looks like, but not how to get there. Capitalism's solution is "the market will handle it". What is the Socialist solution? Where does the free healthcare come from? If you have magic healing crystals, and a fat white man in a tux is sitting atop a pile of them with a glass of Kianti in one hand, and a whip for driving off poor people in the other, then all you have to do is kick The Penguin off the pile and share it with everyone. I'm pretty sure that's not the world we live in, though.
Ugh, this post is a mess. I should read the rest of the thread. *Flicks up a couple times* ... nevermindI'mpostingnowbye!
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