LogFAQs > #885484028

Mal_Fet posted...

Kineth posted...

No counterarguments provided so far. Only validations or insults. Pretty sad.

Countries that eschew the free market in favor of heavy social programs and nationalized commodities invariably become tyrannical dictatorships.

The path to Hell is paved with good intentions, friend.

Well, thank you for actually providing a counterargument though I feel that it is not phrased truthfully. It is true that there are plenty of examples of such events happening where the relation is not mere happenstance and that they were a direct cause; however, there are just as easily many examples of the opposite happening and the results at this point in history seem to show better economic outcomes.

To be fair, plenty of countries have gone through transitions like that in recent history. In many of those negative instances, there were surely many other factors at play that were merely accompanied by such endeavors. I mean, to be fair, the 5 year plan is an early Communist tactic that was also used by Mao in China, HCM in Vietnam and the Kim family to a lesser extent in North Korea. The tactics used by the governments, which tended to be very despotic and totalitarian, are not a reflection of the economic system, but rather a reflection of an economic system being used by an extremely controlling, absolutist state.

And to be fair, socialism is generally only viable when you have a healthy, robust middle class population. It's very economically feasible to implement if there's a more fluid transition between the economic classes with an average individual income being enough for them to be a market participant and actually be able to save money which they will reinvest into the economy and thus increase its total size, assuming people are actually able to save up money to start small businesses that potentially could compete with national chains in their local economy. Point is that socialism isn't meant to keep people poor. It's meant to make it so that being poor isn't as close to a massively increased possibility of dying as it can and has been.

In an economic sense, it acts like how insurance does. People put money into risk pools that when they pay for insurance. Generally if you're higher risk, you can only qualify for ones that require steeper rates, due to the increased likelyhood of having to pay out. All it really does though, especially with the state monopolies that the insurance industry has, is split up the pools so that the risk is not mitigated as much by the rest of the population, in all the sub-pools that the companies make for classifying applicants. Having a central pool through taxes that aggregates the population, the fund from a portion of the people's taxes where everyone pays a small percentage that goes towards everyone's treatment would quite simply lower the rate that everyone has to pay on average. That's not an absolute, but it will have that effect in a sweeping, "omg, the market said what??" kind of fashion.

Functionally though, the implementation, governance and simple understanding of what socialism is in the first place, would go a long way toward seeing it as only being a nefarious plot meant to exploit people's hard work for nothing. It's not like you wouldn't also receive a benefit as well, at least in the health care scenario.

So I will be very surprised if this gets even 1/10th of the effort put into this as a response, but I'll only call you shortsighted this time. People seem to have this common misconception of what socialism is. It's an economic system. How the government plays its part in that system is entirely dependent on the governance and those who writes the laws and so forth. If a coup was imminent in those states, it is highly likely that the welfare policies were implemented to placate the populace and buy some time.
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If you're not looking for any honest discussion, agreement, meeting halfway or middle ground, don't bother arguing with me. Selfish narcissists need not apply.