Do you have faith in capitalism?

t-san
Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:39:22 +0000

Socialism is great in that it protects workers and provides services for citizens,

false…

but terrible in that it helps the many at the cost of the few.

… but true.

Socialism may protect workers in the short run, under an ideal system, but logic and history shows time and time again that any attempts at socialism fail because people are humans. There has been no attempt at socialism where workers end up being protected in the long run, and even if such a system did occur, eventually workers would still be exploited.

You have two scenarios: ideal socialism, where all forms of currency are done away with, and less-than-ideal socialism, where currency exists (but other tenets of socialism are retained).
Let’s look at the latter scenario first - if currency is retained, then all you end up having is money running through a socialistic system. That’s exploitative of the worker almost by definition, because a government that has access to money and control over the market will inherently abuse control to tighten it’s control over the money supply. In other words, money is what a worker can use to protect himself, but since the government controls businesses, they control the money anyway. You have a soldier going into battle but he’s not allowed to use his sword.

The former scenario is where there is no money in the government. Now a worker has no protection against government abuse. The problem with socialism is that if production is misjudged (an almost unavoidable consequence of a command economy) , distribution of goods/wealth will inevitably be challenged. How does a government take care of people whom it cannot feed? (given underproduction of goods). The simple answer - it can’t. The dispensable people in society are left to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, they will not be able to try and pay for goods from a neighbor, or even use the black market. Since there’s no money or stuff.
They’ll have to rely on the kindness of a stranger (HA!) or somebody else to survive.

And given the overly-generous nature of humans, that will ALWAYS work just beautifully.

Of course, my argument doesn’t apply to anarcho-socialism (or whatever it’s called). That’s a whole other ball game.