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Socialism, Capitalism, Communism
MindGate
United States Veteran
I am pretty well learned in politics. One of my weaker subjects is economics though. I'll admit I know little to nothing about fiscal policy. What do you guys think?
My thoughts:
America is really big on capitalism it seems. This seems to lead to monopolization by some companies and doesn't some to give everybody an actual equal chance. Its great that things are unregulated and people get to do what we want, but the downfall of this system seems to come by way of greed. The greed of people causes a huge economic barrier between the rich and poor. In a Utopian society, capitalism would probably work fine, but this is just not the case.
Europe, from my knowledge, seems to be quite socialist. In America, "socialist" seems to be a naughty word - equating it to the likes of Hitler and Stalin. I don't know much about socialism, though. From what I do know, it seems to level out the playing field a bit more. I've heard good and bad things about this. Apparently Europe has a lot of jobs, people make quite a bit of money, but it seems the governments and the people are in a lot of debt. Don't quote me on this, though, because I honestly have no idea if what I am saying is correct information.
And, well, communism I have no idea what-so-ever about.
My thoughts:
America is really big on capitalism it seems. This seems to lead to monopolization by some companies and doesn't some to give everybody an actual equal chance. Its great that things are unregulated and people get to do what we want, but the downfall of this system seems to come by way of greed. The greed of people causes a huge economic barrier between the rich and poor. In a Utopian society, capitalism would probably work fine, but this is just not the case.
Europe, from my knowledge, seems to be quite socialist. In America, "socialist" seems to be a naughty word - equating it to the likes of Hitler and Stalin. I don't know much about socialism, though. From what I do know, it seems to level out the playing field a bit more. I've heard good and bad things about this. Apparently Europe has a lot of jobs, people make quite a bit of money, but it seems the governments and the people are in a lot of debt. Don't quote me on this, though, because I honestly have no idea if what I am saying is correct information.
And, well, communism I have no idea what-so-ever about.
0
Comments
In my view they each have negative sides and the purpose of mixing free market with government control IMO is to reduce those negatives.
I'm no expert so I'm not able to go into details, just my two cents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries
Looks like about half of Europe is, anyways. I'd say that is quite a large amount. Let us not get caught up in this single issue, though.
b) It is NOT great that things are unregulated!! :rarr: De-regulating everything, especially the financial services industry, is why we're in a Great Recession, a big mess, major unemployment! Regulation keeps the greed-heads at bay, repeat that daily like a mantra. Regulation of the financial svcs. industry, banks, the stock mkt, all that, happened after the Depression (thank FDR), precisely in order to avoid what JUST HAPPENED. AGAIN!
Huge economic division between rich and poor, the decline of the middle class, happens mainly because of totally irresponsible tax policy ! :rant: After WWII up until Reagan began instituting tax cuts for the rich (which became a huge trend followed by Republican presidents after him, especially GW Bush), the top tax rate in the US was 90%. This applied to people like the Rockefellers, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, those types. Upper-middle class types like higher-end lawyers and doctors got taxed around 65%. This tax rate didn't hurt them, they still lived well and sent their kids to private schools. The middle class paid around 25-30%, and the poor paid nothing or close to it. That created a prosperous society with plenty of money for infrastructure development, public services, college scholarships (not loans--scholarships, though there were loan programs too), etc. This also resulted in an expansion of the middle class, more people owning homes and getting college educations, a measure of democratization.
All of that has gone down the drain, as you may have noticed, as taxes for the wealthy have been slashed back to well below 50% of income, with lots of loopholes and credits to allow people (not to mention CORPORATIONS :rant: ) to wiggle out of paying any at all.
This is an important subject to have a handle on. Since you like politics, you might enjoy a political economics course in college. I suggest putting it on your list of subjects to try out. How are you at math?
For good reading, lots of info and a good laugh, I recommend Lee Iacocca's book, "Where Have All The Leaders Gone?" He's a Republican who thinks Repubs should pay more taxes to contribute their share to rescuing the country. He's informative and funny.
Many European countries have socialist-leaning social policies in that they have things like universal healthcare and higher taxes to compensate for social programs, but none of them have actual socialist economies.
As for Hitler's Germany (as well as Mussolini's Italy), it was considered fascist. While definitions of fascism vary, I suggest checking out Leon Trotsky's essay "Fascism:
What It Is and How To Fight It." Stalinist Russia, on the hard, has been called communist, socialist, and state capitalist. I'm in the camp of calling it (as well as China) state capitalist.
In most cases of so-called socialism, the state claims they are the 'representatives' of the working-class; but the fact of the matter is that the state is almost always in charge of the country's means of production, not the workers themselves. If one defines socialism as an economic system characterized by worker control and ownership of the means of productions, then state control and ownership, even if it's in the name of workers, isn't technically socialism. This very point was made by Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1896 when he said: Frederick Engels also made this distinction a decade earlier when he argued in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that state-ownership of certain industries isn't the same thing as socialism, nor does it solve the problems inherent in the capitalist system, most notably the exploitation of its working-class citizens. In fact, he argued that "the more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit." The U.S.S.R. is the perfect example of this.
Engels argued that state capitalism "does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces," and that it would be an even more oppressive system than capitalism on its own. The only bright spot he saw was that it would become so oppressive it would hasten the revolution and, with it, capitalism's iinevitable downfall.
Unfortunately, this didn't prove to be the case. In Russia, for example, what was left of the emerging workers' councils (soviets) that started to form after the revolution were essentially stripped of their control by the state not long after the overthrow of the Czar and the country erupted into civil war. The Russian working class itself was decimated on the front lines of WWI and the Russian Civil War, as well as by famine, and the Bolshevik Party, along with its new base of peasants-turned-proletariats, basically ended up substituting itself for the working class by taking over its role in the government (the Allied Power's intervention in Russia's Civil War on the side of pro-monarchist and anti-Bolshevik forces didn't help matters any, either).
During this period, the Bolshevik-lead government became increasingly more brutal and repressive in an effort to hold on to power amidst the chaos and upheaval. They suppressed rival political organizations and began shifting power away from what was left of the directly democratic workers' councils by putting the soviets under Party control. Even after the civil war was over, however, the state kept control under the guise of protecting the revolution from the ever-present threat of counterrevolution. Russian workers were never really free to organize and make their own decisions. It was either the Communist Party's way or the gulag. Ironically enough, it was the Communist Party itself that effectively killed the revolution in the end.
And, while most people don't realize this, even Lenin disliked Stalin, going so far as to warn the Central Committee in 1922 that: "Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution."
Finally, if you don't have the time or motivation to read Marx's Captial, I highly recommend listening to David Harvey's lecture series on Capital if you're interested in learning more about critiques of capitalism and critical economic theory in general.
Or if you adapt, like China did. Then you have an endless supply of other people's money.