Stuff you just can't make up

My father, being a solid white collar liberal, has such a kneejerk reaction to communism that it's almost amusing. It's too bad because I'd like to bounce ideas raised by socialists and communists off him but it's too much work to get past the Cold War reflexes.

The E wrote:I'm a communist, myself. Proper, fully blown communist. But I am realist enough to know that the fullness of the communist vision is unattainable now, so I will settle for something achievable, like stable social democracy.

Uhuh. ‘The Fullness Of The Communist Vision’ is it? Do you have any idea what that is?

The basic tenet of communism is that no individual ‘comrade’ may own anything. Private ownership is capitalism, after all. It denies that part of the collective to the rest of the proletariat. You do not even own the food on your table — oh, wait, the table’s not yours either — the clothes on your back, or the labor of your hands. You have NO property rights of any kind. Anything and everything can be arbitrarily taken from you. You must work where and when and under whatever conditions you are told to work.

There is a much older word for that: slavery.

But just because everybody is a slave, do not deceive yourself into believing there will be no masters. The outrageous excesses of EVERY COMMUNIST REGIME IN ALL OF HISTORY were not aberrations; they were the inevitable consequences of applying the principles of communism to large numbers of people.

The Stasi and the KGB are an absolute necessity to any communist regime. The Stalins and Kim Jongs always wind up running things.

In a communist regime, Walt Disney would have spent his life working in a state factory.
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Under Capitalism, man exploits man.
Under Communism, it's the other way around.

Imaginos1892 wrote: Uhuh. ‘The Fullness Of The Communist Vision’ is it? Do you have any idea what that is?

The basic tenet of communism is that no individual ‘comrade’ may own anything. Private ownership is capitalism, after all. It denies that part of the collective to the rest of the proletariat. You do not even own the food on your table — oh, wait, the table’s not yours either — the clothes on your back, or the labor of your hands. You have NO property rights of any kind. Anything and everything can be arbitrarily taken from you. You must work where and when and under whatever conditions you are told to work.

There is a much older word for that: slavery.

But just because everybody is a slave, do not deceive yourself into believing there will be no masters. The outrageous excesses of EVERY COMMUNIST REGIME IN ALL OF HISTORY were not aberrations; they were the inevitable consequences of applying the principles of communism to large numbers of people.

The Stasi and the KGB are an absolute necessity to any communist regime. The Stalins and Kim Jongs always wind up running things.

In a communist regime, Walt Disney would have spent his life working in a state factory.
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Under Capitalism, man exploits man.
Under Communism, it's the other way around.

See above for exhibit A.

noblehunter wrote:See above for exhibit A.

You have neither denied nor refuted anything I wrote.

Do you deny that the basic tenet of communism is the elimination of individual property rights? Everybody owns everything 'in common' because 'common' is the root of 'communism'.

Problem is, if everybody owns everything, it turns out that nobody owns anything. Why waste effort mowing that lawn you don't own? Why fix the leaky faucet? Why repair the car that doesn't belong to you? Why go to work today? What direct benefit do you get from doing anything?

We are hard-wired by evolution to seek rewards for our efforts. If we don't see direct benefits to ourselves or our close relatives, we are not motivated to make any effort. Communism attempts to negate basic human nature by disconnecting reward from effort. That is why it always fails on any scale larger than a clan.
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Governments can only print money. They can't make it worth anything.

Imaginos1892 wrote:Uhuh. ‘The Fullness Of The Communist Vision’ is it? Do you have any idea what that is?

Yes.

The basic tenet of communism is that no individual ‘comrade’ may own anything.

And that's bad because....

No, seriously, why is that a bad thing?

Less facetiously though, that is an oversimplification of what Marx and Engels were recommending. In fact, what they were talking about was less about you owning a computer or a car or a sofa, and more about people owning land and extorting rent, or owning factories and binding workers to them in slavery.

You imagine communism as a dreary wasteland because you think that, since every necessity for living is provided by the state, that means that private entrepreneurship or artistry would be somehow outlawed. That, frankly, is not the case -- or at least, it isn't the case within a society as envisioned by modern communists. Remember the failure of the USSR, GDR and PRC, and how we need to learn from them?
One of the takeaway lessons there was that the desire to aquire shiny toys is something that can't be suppressed, and so it's better to work with it than against it.

Private ownership is capitalism, after all. It denies that part of the collective to the rest of the proletariat. You do not even own the food on your table — oh, wait, the table’s not yours either — the clothes on your back, or the labor of your hands.

Except, you do. Again, those forms of petty ownership are not something we can or should fight against. What we should fight against is people owning a piece of land and extorting tolls and taxes from the people living or working on that land.
Basically, if you own something and you use that ownership to bind others to you, then that's something communism seeks to abolish. Noone is talking about taking away your collection of antique cigar holders or fancy shirts.

You have NO property rights of any kind. Anything and everything can be arbitrarily taken from you.

Nope, as explained above.

You must work where and when and under whatever conditions you are told to work.

....you know that's exactly what work in a normal company is like today, isn't it.

Also, please point out the part where that follows from Marx or Engels' writing.

There is a much older word for that: slavery.

And are you feeling happy, slave? Have you thanked your employer for not firing you lately? Your landlord for allowing you to continue living in their apartment?

But just because everybody is a slave, do not deceive yourself into believing there will be no masters. The outrageous excesses of EVERY COMMUNIST REGIME IN ALL OF HISTORY were not aberrations; they were the inevitable consequences of applying the principles of communism to large numbers of people.

The Stasi and the KGB are an absolute necessity to any communist regime. The Stalins and Kim Jongs always wind up running things.

In a communist regime, Walt Disney would have spent his life working in a state factory.

You know, I might have said something about that in that post of mine that sent you flying into a blind rant.

I mean, I certainly think it's possible that happened. Too bad you will never find out, as you seem incapable of reading past the word "communism".

Oops.

The E wrote:Again, those forms of petty ownership are not something we can or should fight against.

But you want 'The Fullness Of The Communist Vision'! How can you allow any exceptions?

The E wrote:And are you feeling happy, slave? Have you thanked your employer for not firing you lately?

An employer is free to fire me if they're not satisfied with my work. I am free to quit if I'm not satisfied with the job, and find another one. That is the exact opposite of slavery, and only a complete idiot could call it slavery.

Do you not believe that you can keep a job unless the employer is prohibited from firing you? I am not so insecure.

The E wrote:Your landlord for allowing you to continue living in their apartment?

I own my house. As long as I pay the mortgage on time, nobody can take it from me. I signed that mortgage contract voluntarily, with full knowledge of its terms. When it ends, I will own my house unconditionally — unless the government takes it from me. Under communism, the government has already taken everything from everybody.

I saved some of my money and bought stock in a number of corporations. I own a tiny fraction of those corporations, and of their profits, which they pay to me as dividends. If I don't like something about one of those corporations, I can sell the stock, pushing the price down a tiny bit by increasing supply and reducing demand.

I also own a rental property. As long as my tenant pays her rent on time, why would I throw her out? I'd have to find another tenant, one without a four-year history of paying rent on time. If she is dissatisfied with the rent, or the condition of the property, she can move out and force me to look for another tenant. I can't stop her.

Rental is not a one-sided arrangement. I pay all the expenses and taxes. If a door is loose, or the toilet backs up, I fix it. When the stove croaked, I bought a new one. When the air conditioning stopped working, I peeled the 1/8 inch thick mat of dog hair off the condenser coil. I advised her to move the dog bed out from under the air intake, too.

The E wrote:You know, I might have said something about that in that post of mine that sent you flying into a blind rant.

Do you deny that every communist regime in all of history has been guilty of monstrous excesses and violations of human rights?

Oh! I know! None of them were 'True Communists'!*

Capitalism is open to everybody. Save up your money, buy what you want, and it is yours by right. Nobody can just arbitrarily take it from you.

It's like Churchill said about democracy: capitalism is the worst economic system ever devised — except for all the rest.
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* If that confuses you, go to Google and look up the 'No true Scotsman' fallacy.
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If an action is evil when perpetrated by a corporation, it is just as evil when performed by a government.
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No system devised by humans for humans can be perfect, because we are a diverse and contary lot.
From observation it does appear that democratic socialism with controled capitalism as appeares in Western Europe, Canada, NZ, Australia and similar countries is the closest we have at present. This is from the various society wellness rankings and economic stability ratings.
A suggested next stage is the universal stipend paid to all. Weird idea that does appear to be getting closer to being practicable as societies get richer and more productive. Everyone has the minimum needed to live frugally provided, but can still get ahead by working if they so wish.
In Australia we have moved somewhat away from the wage slavery that The E talks about. Our minimum wage of about $18 an hour, unfair dismissal laws, industrial courts, and a universal welfare system if all that fails means that bosses can't treat their workers like slaves. We can, and do say no if abused.

Daryl wrote:A suggested next stage is the universal stipend paid to all. Weird idea that does appear to be getting closer to being practicable as societies get richer and more productive. Everyone has the minimum needed to live frugally provided, but can still get ahead by working if they so wish.

Until the Dolists complain about how unfair it is that they can’t afford all the things people who work for a living have, and they’re such a huge voting bloc that the politicians raise the BLS, raise it again, index it to inflation…wait, haven’t we heard that story before? Somewhere or other?

Daryl wrote:In Australia we have moved somewhat away from the wage slavery that The E talks about.

Well, I knew somebody would bring up ‘wage slavery’ — what a pig-ignorant, idiotic, rabble-rousing term! Don’t apply thought or rationality to the issue, just inflame those senseless emotions! You’re talking about JOBS, voluntarily contracted by both employer and employee. If you don’t like the job, you can QUIT any time you want, and there is NOTHING the employer can do to force you to continue working. Go look up what real slavery was before opening your uninformed pie-hole.

You’d have to be terminally stupid to make a career out of unskilled labor in minimum-wage jobs! Those are called entry-level jobs for a reason. They’re the bottom rung of the job ladder, not an ultimate goal. They need to be low, so that they are within reach for 18-year-olds with no skills and no experience.

Knowledge is freely available. Just walk into any library. You can study, and learn, and develop useful skills, and go get a better job. If you won’t take the trouble to do that, why should the rest of us, who did, be forced to reward your lazy ass?

Daryl wrote:Our minimum wage of about $18 an hour

Yeah, there's a lot of reasons the AUD is worth 72 cents, and that's a big one. Raise that sucker to $25 and see how long it takes before the AUD drops to 52 cents. You can't increase the value of unskilled labor, only devalue the money.
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Governments can only print money. They can't make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.

Thanks for "before opening your uninformed pie-hole.
You’d have to be terminally stupid", "pig-ignorant, idiotic, rabble-rousing".
Adults can usually discuss topics without such childish insults. I'll try to answer responsibly.
In regard to Dolists I can quote the Scandinavian countries that have gone further along the socialist welfare path than we have (and much further than the US). They have quite generous welfare systems, but people continue to be hard working and their economies are sound.
Various agencies like OECD, IMF, UNESCO, Standard and Poor, more still put out annual lists of the best places to live, most stable economies, highest longevity, richest individual citizens. Because they use different mixes of criteria they are all a little different, however the same ten countries fight over the top five spots. It is common for Australia and Denmark to be close at the top. The US usually gets about 30th. Australian have the second highest individual average wealth after Switzerland, and about the third highest longevity.

There definitely is such a situation as wage slavery. Take a young married man with a mortgage, pregnant wife and kids; in a dead end job, in a time of high unemployment. He just plain can't "QUIT any time you want".
I wasn't aware that exchange rates are indicative of a nation's intrinsic worth. You say the Australian dollar is at 72 US cents, but it has been nearly twice that in the past decade, and how many Yen either? We didn't go into recession at the GFC, and our average net personal wealth and earnings are much higher than the US. Australians visiting the US are shocked to discover that service staff have to beg for tips to survive.

As to learning while working, I continually studied throughout my whole career, and retired at 58 because I could.

Daryl wrote:There definitely is such a situation as wage slavery. Take a young married man with a mortgage, pregnant wife and kids; in a dead end job, in a time of high unemployment. He just plain can't "QUIT any time you want"

And buying a big, expensive house, having kids, getting the wife pregnant again, on a salary that won’t support the expenses, all of that ‘just happened’ and couldn’t possibly be a result of bad decisions? Which are not the employer’s responsibility, or mine?

There are no ‘dead-end jobs’, only dead-end people. Improve yourself and get a raise, or a better job. Have some savings and investments because you didn’t spend every nickel the day you earned it. Wait to take on responsibilities until you can afford the expenses. Live below your means!
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Governments can only print money; they can't make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.