Socialism Kills!
Besides Ché and the Gulag too! It may be causing the high population ages in Europe (very few people in Europe are having more than one child, and some are having 0). The economies of the European welfare states, like Sweeden, are no where near as good as the US.
Glenn Reynolds:
"It's almost as if high taxes, heavy regulation, and an extensive dole sap people's desire to work hard, making the society as a whole worse off so that those policies don't just redistribute wealth, but actually destroy it. That's probably because they do, and have done so everywhere they're tried. People are usually pointing to some socialist paradise or other where life is wonderful, but -- not to put too fine a point on it -- those places are basically a lie. Socialism just doesn't work, anywhere, for very long. You'd think people would learn."
Glenn Reynolds:
"It's almost as if high taxes, heavy regulation, and an extensive dole sap people's desire to work hard, making the society as a whole worse off so that those policies don't just redistribute wealth, but actually destroy it. That's probably because they do, and have done so everywhere they're tried. People are usually pointing to some socialist paradise or other where life is wonderful, but -- not to put too fine a point on it -- those places are basically a lie. Socialism just doesn't work, anywhere, for very long. You'd think people would learn."
posted by Ryan S. @ 5:31 PM
3 Comments:
At 4:21 PM,
M. McKain said…
I think when we have this discussion we need to make a distinction between socialism and a social safety net, which is necessary to make up for market shortfalls in a capitalist system. Of course, the problem is in such a discussion is that one person's safety net (guaranteed healthcare for children, for instance) is another person's socialism.
That said, some of the economics in that article look fairly creative to me. To look at growth in the EU as a block is simply unfair; they keep adding countries from Eastern Europe that are struggling to catch up from the grasp of the Soviet Union. And it only makes sense that per capita income in socialist countries would be a little less; they do not have expenses such as healthcare, etc. to worry about.
Ok, I may be grasping at straws a bit there; we are, after all, a capitalist country and that line of thought certainly has won out in the minds of most Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike. The important thing, however, is that we do not forget those who fall through the cracks of the market economy, as inevitably happens. For them, the American social safety net is the fine line between the opportunity to recover and the poor houses and debtor’s prisons of Dickens' England.
At 5:05 PM,
Ryan S. said…
But the "social net," as you so lovingly call it, is the reason for the economic decline of countries in Europe. The incentive of a better life through hard work is non-existant, and thus people rely on the government to take care of them, and they don't put any money into the economy, which puts other people out of work as businesses can no olnger afford to operate with dwindling funds.
That is somewhat of an exaggeration, as that process is longterm, but the point remains. When people fall into the "social net," they become complacent, because the government provides, and they cannot pull themselves out of it. The government gets to decide what is best for them, and not themselves. I don't expect a bureaucrat in Washington or Dover or Harrisburg to care about my well-being.
Free Market, Free People
At 11:51 PM,
M. McKain said…
Actually, I don't think we're that far from the same page on this one (and I may have to duck as fellow Dems throw things as my moderatism (yeah, totally made that one up) is showing through a bit here); I think one of our government's greatest challenges since the creation of our safety net is figuring out a way to encourage people to get off of it once they are one it. I liked Clinton's welfare reform, where he made people look for work to get back on their own two feet. I personally knew a woman who was abusing the old system and went back to work as a result of the changes. I don't really like the idea of people mooching off of my tax dollars any more than you do.
The problem is, we cannot simply go back to the days of social Darwinism when people were starving on the streets. Sometimes capitalistic market forces give people a bad deal, and they need time to recover. The challenge is figuring out how to help them without them becoming complacent. I think it is really an area where bipartisanship has the potential to flourish, and where Bush could probably win some moderate Democratic support (except he’s really destroyed their trust of him with other issues…that’s not an attack, but a statement of fact). Nevertheless, it is an important and worthwhile debate, and perhaps one we should be having instead of the current fight over privatization of Social Security; who knows, maybe we could even save enough money through back-to-work oriented programs to plug the coming gap in Social Security and kill two birds with one stone.
Unfortunately, I fear Bush lacks the will to work with Democrats and compromise in any way in order to produce real and meaningful progress. I’ve been waiting for five years now for him to prove me wrong about that, but to date, he still has not even come close to fulfilling his promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.”
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