I Am Going to Say Something Controversial

I'll believe it when I see it (and see that the statistics aren't twisted up in any big way) - can you link me some of those studies?

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and paying off the national debt make up about 2/3rds of the US budget, compared to the military which only receives a few percent. And police, fire, public education, parks, and roads are things that almost every first world government provides to one extent or another, no matter how far right or left (or otherwise) they are on the political spectrum - so they really don't have anything to do with socialism.

@BlueDiver: I'm not Google but since I figured you wouldn't look it up on your own I took five seconds out of my life to do it for you. There's a lot of studies out there on this kind of thing but the "Happiest" survey is perhaps the most indicative because it takes in to account both "hard" issues like real GDP and life expectancy along with "social" issues like quality of life and social freedoms. (Only look if you want to see a lot of "Socialist" countries though).

https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/non-economic-data/happiest-countries

Not even sure what to say about your 2/3rds assertion. As of 2015, the military was 54% of the discretionary budget. You're thinking about both discretionary and mandatory spending. A bit more than a few percent there. More like 17%.

And just because other countries provide those things you mentioned doesn't negate that they are socialist in nature. It just means that socialism in that context clearly works.

Sorry dude. You shot and missed.

Maybe conservatives do this too, but since I usually argue with liberals, you're the ones who I always see it from - I hate it how so many of you say condescending things like "Sorry dude. You shot and missed." before I even respond, as if you and the half of the country who think like you are utterly right, and me and the half of the country that agree with me are utterly wrong. It's arrogant and honestly just a low way of arguing.

But as for responding to your actual arguments (instead of the being-a-dick part) - in terms of spending on Social Security, medicare, etc - why is it mandatory? Why is giving hundreds of dollars a month through SSD to someone with a vaguely defined "mental disability" mandatory (which, according to a supervisor I talked to at a local social security office, is the case with HALF of all the people receiving SSD)? Why is indefinitely giving medicare to literally everyone below a certain income level mandatory? None of these things are mandatory whatsoever, any more than military spending is.

Okay, so I just looked it up, and the distinction between "mandatory" and "discretionary" spending is that "mandatory" spending runs on a formula where the amount spent is based on the number of people eligible, which means that it runs on autopilot unless congress changes the formula. So if congress decides to change the formula (or to reform the entire Social Security/medicare/medicare system), then the levels of spending will completely change. If you look underneath the misleading term "mandatory," the reality underneath is that there's no meaningful difference between mandatory and discretionary spending, except in terms of how difficult it is to change.

And as for your 54% figure, this article says it better than I can:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/17/facebook-posts/pie-chart-federal-spending-circulating-internet-mi/

I'll admit, the military budget is much higher than I thought - I was going on old numbers that didn't take into account some of our more recent wars. But despite that, when you look at the statistics for the FULL budget, instead of a skewed version with arbitrary distinctions between mandatory and discretionary spending, it speaks much more to my argument against Social Security/Medicare/etc than it does toward the idea that military spending dominates the budget.

Anyway, all of that was just my argument against that one piece of your argument. As for the rest:

I think that your other data is skewed to the point of irrelevance as well, because it takes *all* services provided by the government and labels them as being socialist in nature. But that's just not true - aside from the crazies living in military compounds and telling the government to go fuck themselves, even libertarians (which is about as far from socialists as you can get) agree that *some* level of taxation and government service is necessary, even on the federal level. They want it minimized, and shifted toward local governments whenever possible, but even they agree that *some* level of federal services are necessary. So to say that any and all federally provided services are socialist in nature is like saying that libertarians are in favor of socialist programs.

Socialism isn't about the government providing *some* services paid for by taxation - it's about the government providing *most if not all* services based on massive or total taxation - it's about vast if not total redistribution of wealth through government programs. Saying that countries that provide schools and roads and police and fire etc etc have happier citizens is true - but saying that that means that socialist countries are happier on average than non-socialist countries? That's just not a leap that you can make. Now, I'm not saying that there might not be other statistics that back up what you believe - what I'm saying is that in terms of what you've shown me here, the numbers just doesn't hold up when you really examine them, and the context around them.

Do you see now why saying "Sorry dude. You shot and missed." was stupid? You might not agree with me or my arguments, that's fine, but it's condescending and ridiculous to act like I had "lost" the argument before I even responded.

In terms of liberals making snide, condescending comments part of my argument - Case and point: in the time it took me to write that, room101 said:


""Boy, Edward Bernays really did a number on you lot. And it seems that he was completely correct when he described Americans (in his essay titled The Engineering of Consent) as:

“fundamentally irrational” and could not be trusted to decide anything for themselves.

Case in point, the 2016 election!"

There's no point to something like that, except to be an asshole and put the other side down. It's petty, and honestly quite childish.

@BlueDiver: Good argument. And no. I don't see that "you shot and missed" was stupid. You shot and missed. You missed the military budget percentage and you missed by not acknowledging what Socialism is and tried to underplay it by saying "everyone does it." That's not slight against you. You're clearly not an idiot. But your response had holes in it.

"Happiest" is subjective. You're right about that. But in this context "Happiness" is used to describe the confluence of both data and social issue beliefs. They probably could have used a better word. Doesn't change the fact that countries with a well-performing "Socialist" government outperform those who don't.

My overall point is that the word 'Socialism' has been highjacked to mean government control. It's not. It's not Marxism, Communism, Dictatorship or any of the other connections made by those with a vested interest in personal or corporate profit.

A great example is how many scream and yell about government control over their lives and want a dismantling of federal programs. That is, EXCEPT when it comes to things like Medicare and Social Security. When issues impact people personally it's always interesting to see their tunes change.

The government is US. American citizens do the work, pay the bills and reap the benefits. And sorry but I would personally MUCH rather have a government that is more committed to the lives of the citizens than they are to the profits of the few. When the richest nation on earth in terms of pure GDP has the most expensive health care with some of the worst results, I have an issue with that. When people have to choose between food and their medication because there's no competition...I have an issue with that. When we under-fund schools and then wonder why Johnny can't read...I have a problem with that. And when people are forced to work longer hours for less money, I have a problem with that too.

One thing I do want to say though. A bit of a look in to the liberal mindset.

Liberals may tend to look at the "idea of things" like you mentioned but to assume that it's not driven by the "reality on the ground" isn't accurate. I think there's a perception that liberals somehow want 'free' stuff for themselves. Well, I'm a liberal as are most of my friends and i can say that's not even CLOSE to the truth. As a matter of fact, what most of my friends are most concerned about right now, as am I, is the impact on those "real" Americans under this administration. They're the ones who stand to lose the most. That's what's historically happened with deregulation, massive tax cuts and a loss of consumer protections. I know that MY life is directly impacted by the quality of THEIR lives. Why wouldn't I want those folks to do as well as possible?

So the frustration comes from what seems to be a lack of understanding in to who the real enemy is. And every time I see lower and middle class folks screaming about something like repealing Dodd-Frank it fires me up. They lose...I lose...and ultimately we lose. The winner is personal profit and greed. Capitalism allows for that. Socialism does too but with ceilings in place to deter the kind of disparity we have now. I'm on board with that in a great big way. I'd rather those folks who talk so much about "freedom" actually HAVE some freedom rather than being beholden to a system stacked against them.

Just my unsolicited 23 cents.

(A good response by the way dude. And nothing personal).

I disagree with some of your interpretations of what I said in your first 2 paragraphs, but I've been on SW for a while today already, and I don't think that it's really relevant to our larger discussion at this point, so I'm not going to take the time to argue with you about it.

That's... actually a really good point. By and large, I do use the terms socialism and communism interchangeably. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I think of socialism as being a mini-spectrum that exists on the far left side of the standard political spectrum, with communism being at the far left side of the mini-spectrum.

Very true - much more often than not, when someone says "I believe that this program is good for the country!" about a program that benefits them, what they really mean is "I *want* this program to be good for the country, because it's good for me, and I'm going to skew my view of the program accordingly." And I think that that's true of republicans just as often as it's true of conservatives.

But anyway, my challenge to you is: even if government control isn't the goal of socialism, won't it inevitably be an indirect result of shifting more and more taxpayer money into their coffers? No matter how many checks and balances are theoretically in place, at the end of the day, it's the federal government that gets to decide what to do with the money from federal taxes and other sources of federal income. If more money flows through their hands, doesn't that by definition mean that more power will as well?

Your entire fifth paragraph sounds great on paper, but to me it looks like a textbook example of looking at the idea of things rather than looking at the reality on the ground. Yes, it sounds great in theory for the government to provide food and health care, to the point where no one has to worry about choosing between the two - but in practice what it means is that the people who work make less money, because more of it gets taken out as taxes. And that's not just in terms of the "wealthy few" - it's in terms of *everyone* who works, including a low level cog-in-the-economic-machine like myself. It's a system that rewards you for not working and not contributing to society, and penalizes you for working and contributing.

I have a friend who worked hard for his entire life and earned every cent he ever made. He's retired now along with his wife, and they have a pool in their backyard that they don't want. But they can't fill it in, because the permit costs 15000 dollars. And no, I'm not inflating or skewing that number - that's literally how much they have to pay the government in order to fill in their own pool with their own money.

That's why I look at socialism and see a complete lack of reality-checking - because in my experience, the government is such a giant, bloated, self-serving bureaucracy, full of people so far removed from the reality on the ground, that they inevitably do a terrible job deciding what to spend taxpayer money on. The world of politicians is so skewed by infighting and making deals with each other and favor trading that giving them more and more money is like giving more and more money to a brain damaged monkey and hoping that he spends it on something instead of rubbing his feces on it.

It's the basic psychology of groups - the larger a group, the more inevitably self-serving, stupid and narcissistic the groups decisions will be. The book "People of the Lie - The Hope For Healing Human Evil" by M. Scott Peck gives the best explanation/justification that I've ever seen for why the larger a group, the more evil it is. And it's into that cesspool that socialists want to throw more and more taxpayer money, based on the idea that a more socialist government is a government that "is more committed to the lives of the citizens than they are to the profits of the few."

And as far as socialism creating ceilings on corruption and greed compared to capitalism - I 100% agree with that in terms of everything from individuals to corporations. But the one thing that it leaves out is that the way that it accomplishes those ceilings is by removing the ceilings on power of the government itself. Every limit placed on the power of corporations is a limit that's created and enforced by the government. It's one more bit of power given to the government - one more way of saying that the government has the right to regulate our lives and our choices. Our founding fathers created a system specifically designed to limit the power of government, to create checks and balances, and to limit the judicial branch's ability to put people in prison. It was because they recognized that outside of things like war, the greatest threat to a people will always be its own government. It's better to err on the side of setting criminals free, rather than giving the government such power of imprisonment that they become the greatest criminals of all.

I think that that's the fundamental difference between socialists and people like me - socialists think that the government is at least somewhat beneficent and competent, and that it makes good choices a decent percentage of the time. Whereas I believe that the government is a bloated, self-serving, narcissistic mess that has no fucking clue what it's doing, and never will. And as someone who worked in government, I think that the evidence I've seen supports that viewpoint (I worked at a low, non-political, non-federal level, granted, but I was still in a position to see the priorities of many a politician. I was also in a position to see good, respectable people who nonetheless almost never thought about the effect that their choices had on the citizens of the county. It wasn't that they were bad or selfish people - it's just that they spent day after day with the same set of other government employees, with that being their entire professional world, so that was just where their focus ended up. It was inevitable and utterly human).

I do agree that most people have no clue who the real enemy is. We're so caught up in red vs blue that we completely lose sight of the underlying issues that persist no matter which party holds office. I'm relatively red, and you're relatively blue, and I think that the path laid out by my political beliefs will be much more beneficial to this country than that path laid out by your political beliefs, and I'm sure that you feel the same way about the path laid out by your political beliefs. But at the end of the day, neither of our paths will do shit to fix the deepest issues - not until people wake up and see that there are more important things than which party gets elected.

(Ehh, room101 poked my admittedly-not-tiny-ego with his much bigger ego before I realized that he was toxic to argue with and blocked him, some of what I sent your way was probably blow-back from the anger I felt toward him. So no worries)

@BlueDiver: Well if you're rock solid in your belief that the government is (all the things you said) there's really no argument that would be valid. I can point to the success and "happiness" of countries that have more socialistic governments but I know it's tough to apply some of those things to the U.S. We're a much larger country and much more diverse than those who have seen success. I do wish you might recognize the real enemy and that's Wall St. and the big banks. And my political belief is based pretty much on one thing. I don't like seeing people get fucked by those with power and money. And I don't like politicians who support that. It's all pretty easy for me.
Good luck.