What would happen if the proletariat ignored cultural issues and started a successful revolution that overthrew the bourgeoisie? What would happen with the issues of same-sex marriage Aborting the rights of transgender people because it is known that the working class is conservative. Will they be "betrayed" and move to the Far left socially, or will the state be conservative, or what?

"greed is human nature, socialism doesn't offer an incentive to work". Although I am not a socialist I think this argument is very superficial and doesn't highlight the real problem with socialist views on "human nature".

I believe that once our basic needs our met our biggest desire is to be superior to others, whether material (richer, more powerful or reputable) or immaterial (more pious, knowledgeable). However, we are social creatures and we need others to survive, so we opt for a mix of collaboration and competiton. We form tribes, we derive that sense of superiority from our country, company, or race. Even the lowest member of the working class can feel some sense of pride of something bigger than himself even if this is purely a delusion that keeps him complacent, and because there will always be those who are willing to break the rules of this pact to further their own interests (morality, laws, social norms) behind closed doors, those pacts we make will always benefit a few who form an elite. This elite has its end goal being Power and nothing but power, Capital in Capitalism or Titles and provinces in feudalism are only a token for competition but it is never the end goal. The lower classes' competitive instincts are tamed and restrained by self-imposed morals that the upper classes never innerly embrace.

This worldview may sound like one that contains many Marxist elements, except I have nothing against those "elites". Society is a never-ending prisoner's dilemma, someone will cheat, and the first to cheat wins, there will always be a few willing to break the social code and it better be you, and if the masses were not tamed and everyone broke the social code society wouldn't exist, this is the perfect balance.

To quote Arnold Rothstein "if a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don't, you're as dumb as he is"

WORD COUNT

If you can keep your head when all about you   
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Every year, countless Chinese students go to study abroad, do you think they go to North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam?

No, they go to the United States, Britain, Canada, Japan and so on. Yes, capitalist countries.

Anyone who has lived in China knows how eager Chinese people are to live abroad, and the U.S. is always the number one destination for Chinese people who choose to emigrate.

Chinese students who study in the U.S. also do their best to stay in the U.S., including marrying Americans and having children.

Not only ordinary Chinese, even Xi's daughter, the daughter of Huawei's CEO both went to Harvard University in the US, and the son of China's richest man, Zhong Shanshan, is a US citizen.

Many Chinese celebrities went to the US to give birth to their children, so that the children can obtain US citizenship. For example, Zhang Ziyi, a famous movie star who was the lead actress in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, flew to the US twice to give birth to her children, once to give birth to a son, and once to give birth to a daughter.

It's funny how Chinese people want to live in capitalist countries, but some people see China as an example of how communism and socialism can be successful.

A) Deny it’s happening

B) Say it’s happening, but say it’s because of the previous government somehow

C) Say it’s happening, but Argentina is being propped up by the US

D) Admit you were wrong

Also just FYI, Q3 estimates from the Ministey of Human Capital in Argentina indicate that poverty has dropped to 38.9% from around 50% and climbing when Milei took office: https://x.com/mincaphum_ar/status/1869861983455195216?s=46

So you can save your outdated talking points about how Milei has increased poverty, you got it wrong, cope about it

I would understand communism as a broad range of ideals, but what they have in common is a stateless, classless and moneyless society. If you don't agree with this definition then just move on, there are too many definitions of communism and it's not possible to discuss them all at once.

Under this system, can you tell me right now how many bushels of wheat you should be willing to exchange for 1kg of rice? Put differently, how many bushels of wheat is 1kg of rice worth. You must be able to answer this question to allocate resources effectively, and I am interested as to how communists answer this without the price mechanism. Thanks :)

"We are the children of children and we live as we are shown."

-Chief of the Waponis

I first started getting into politics in the late 2000s. A big talking point back then was how crime is the result of poverty and that we can solve crime by solving poverty. This made a lot of sense in the world of the late 2000s. The preceding few decades saw a massive reduction in poverty due to the remnants of Great Society welfare programs as well as a concomitant reduction of violent crime from its peak in the 80s. Poverty stricken South America was super violent. Peaceful North America and Western Europe were relatively rich but the pockets of poverty in urban centers were also the most dangerous places. Not only did it make sense by simply observing the world, but there were REAMS of social science studies to back this up! (Nobody was talking about the replication crisis in social sciences back then...)

Leftists used this "obvious" narrative to push more and more and more welfare and social justice programs (that have not solved anything) and to enact soft-on-crime policies that have wreaked havoc on our cities in the years since.

The problem was that this narrative was wrong. Although there is a correlation, leftists were making the classic mistake of confusing this for causation. Turns out, crime causes poverty, not the other way around.

The practical result of this nugget of knowledge is that you can solve crime by... prosecuting crime! Importantly, it's worth noting that most crime is caused by a small minority of recidivists, so putting them behind bars solves the majority of the problem.

Recognizing that crime can be solved through prosecution is a step forward. But that still leaves the question of what causes crime in the first place? How do we head it off and prevent it from happening at all? The answer is what conservatives had been saying for decades: crime is the result of bad social norms, perpetuated by people who grow up without stable families and good role models. New data on weekly crime rates indicates that crime spreads like wildfire through mere social contagion. For example, five days after George Floyd's death in 2020, crime saw a MASSIVE spike that took years to abate. This puts to rest the theory that the crime wave during the pandemic was due to people out of work or not able to pay bills. People just got radicalized and pissed off over the death of George Floyd and started murdering each other. (What makes this deeply depressing is that the killings of about 50 unarmed black men per year by police led to the excess murder of over 100 people per week.) No, civil disobedience is not always justified...

So as strange as it seems to normal people, there appears to be a sizable number of people out there who see crimes happening and then feel an insatiable desire to copycat those crimes. We've known for a long time that social contagion contributes to incidence of suicide, and this also seems to be true for mass shooters.

It will be interesting to see if Luigi Mangione ends up inspiring any copycat terrorists. (Bonus points if you can tell me whether Luigi's crime was the result of poverty!)

Anyway, I'll reiterate in bulleted form:

1. Crime is not the result of poverty.
2. Leftists are not always right.
3. The solutions leftists propose often backfire spectacularly.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

I am interested in learning more about the pros and cons of welfare capitalism vs socialism, social democracy, etc.

I'm open to things other than books as well. For some context, I have leaned more socialist for most of my adult life. Recently I have been questioning how realistic it is to dismantle capitalism completely and if something akin to Social Democracy/Welfare Capitalism would work better to minimize the amount of suffering in the world and encourage progress.

I recognize that I might be using some terms wrong, so I welcome any corrections if my post makes it seem like I have any sort of misunderstandings of these terms.

"I do not think they had any right to live in a country merely because they lived here and were born and lived like savages. And since the Indians didn't have any property rights--they didn't have the concept of property. If so, they didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason to grant them rights, which they have not conceived and were not using. I would go further, let's say this, let us suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages, which they certainly were, and what was it that they were fighting for if they opposed white men on this continent? For there wish to confirm a primitive existence? Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this country. I am incidentally in favor of Israel against the Arabs for the same reason." -- Ayn Rand, The United States Academy, at West Point, New York (1974)

What would you expect if school boys were stranded on a desert island in the Pacific? William Golding asks us to imagine this in Lord of the Flies. And it does not work out well. It is human nature.

But we do not have to imagine. It happened in 1965 to some boys from Tonga. They were stranded on the island of Ata for 15 months. They did not call it that, but they promptly set about building communism. When one of their number fell and broke his leg, they took care of him, with some teasing. To each according to their needs.

A documentary can be found on YouTube. Shorter version.

One thing that usually happens in the gaming industry is that developers constantly lies about their games in order to bring more consumers and then get away with it.

For example Ubisoft creating high efforts trailers for low efforts games.

https://youtu.be/xNter0oEYxc?feature=shared

Or CD Projekt making things up about Cyberpunk 2077.

https://youtu.be/omyoJ7onNrg?feature=shared

I figured, this would be appreciated here seeing how there is this never ending debate between what socio economic paradigm/system would be more sustainable in the long run for human relations and the environment, and with everything that is currently going on today, more objective-like discussions like this are desperately needed across the board. I'm sure some of you may be familiar with the Zeitgeist films, particularly the films after the first documentary of focus -Addendum, Moving forward, Requiem ( coming soon). I appreciate this train of thought as it seeks to dissolve the very narrow limits of debate we somewhat confine ourselves to. Feel free to indulge all episodes prior. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5vJBujd8yM

Mainstream economics is constantly changing and improving and many older theories and assumptions are being thrown out daily.

You can think all the theories are bullshit and mainstream economics is a lie, but that doesn't change the fact that it is constantly changing and adjusting the model. And that's true for every disciplines.

I bet socialists who take their theory seriously would work on the theory and revise and improve on it. I want to know how much it has improved.

What improvement to the old theory has been made in the last 20 years? What question was solved and what is the implications of the new discovery?

Hi👋 I'am a libertarian socialist, but I don't know how we could coordinate a world economy without some kind of depersonalized mechanism like markets, also I think people are very used to markets and prices. What coordination mechanism should we as socialists promote? I would be in favour of using at least some market structures, but I still have fear of their negative and corrosive effects on people, because competition is inherent in markets and there will always be a loser and winner. And what happens to the losers?

So at socialists:

Would you be compelled to at least use some markets in certain areas, under the condition that we have workplace democracy?

Edit: This is more a question for anti-authoritarian socialism, rejecting state planned economy.

first i want to say that i dont just support a market economy because i believe private property is some kind of fundamental right and anything that goes against it is agression or whatever, which a lot of libertarians here have a similar view, but i am approaching this from the perspective of looking just at what system would be of the most benefit to people and society in general

(I initially made this as a comment to another post https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/s/QBv5oYPAZb but decided i might as well post it anyway as its something id like to see responses to, its probably not the best way i could have presented these arguments but the bar on this subreddit isnt high so might as well post it anyway)

first of all every economy really falls into a spectrum of a planned economy or a market economy (but each also have different variants), depending on how much is privately vs collectively/centrally owned

a market economy isnt perfect but its the most efficient system at allocating resources

because compared to the alternative which would be a planned economy,

everything is decentralized, so if one business fails thats it vs the whole economy potentally failing dze to central mismanagement,

and businesses operate at a smaller scale and are more specialized so there is less information to handle at once,

and the market has a system of selection where more efficient businesses expand while less efficient ones fail, so the system tends towards the most optimal allocation of scarce resources for meeting peoples wants and needs,

also it doesnt have the problem of having decisions done centrally rather than having individuals make their own choices, as even if its democratic it would still require some form of representation which can create bad incentives, but also it connects to the problem of there being too much information for a central economy to be efficient

The ability for individuals to start businesses on their own rather than having a central system do it allows for more innovation and efficiency

Id also say that having private property allows for a more free society as it allows individuals to act on their own rather than being dependent on a centralized power which can easily become authoritarian as it sees no opposition

information and media are linked to the economy and require resources so having a centralized economy can heavily limit the freedom for diversity of competing ideas that are necessary for a truly free and democratic society

also when it comes to market socialism, that is the kind that is basically like a capitalist economy but with coops replacing regular businesses, those coops are privately owned by people who work there so its still a market economy, just a regulated one But all those regulations do is prevent mutually beneficial interactions so it just makes everyone worse off, and it has the problem of coops lacking any incentive to hire more people, expand or even start in the first place, forcing workers to bear the risk of the business potentially failing, and potentially operating with less efficiency as the workers might not necessarily be qualified to make decisions in how a company should operate in that sense This is a seperate argument from my main one but its one that ive also wanted to make

now i dont think markets are perfect so its best to have a mixed and regulated economy to some degree to adress issues such as different forms of market faliure, perpetual inequality and the lack of a guarantee to meet everyone's needs

An old PI of mine used to ask this any time someone used comparative language without actually stating the frame of reference or baseline used to make it. The problem being whether intentional or otherwise, such statements invite subjective interpretation, making the statement difficult to evaluate, debate, or verify. Saying "Capitalism creates more wealth" sounds plausible enough but leaves out critical details: Wealth for whom? Is it GDP, average income, or something else? More wealth than what? And when statements like that get similarly vague replies like "capitalism only works for the rich", you end up with an exchange that could mean entirely different things depending on whatever values you assumptions you inject into it.

The issue here isn't simply that it occurs, it's that it happens constantly. You don't even have to scroll to come across content like this:

In practice, in a Capitalist system those at the very top of the social hierarchy use money as a means for obtaining power. The same is true in al socialist societies, economic inequality can be eliminated but not social power in general. In practice, high ranking politicians and generals hold more power than the average worker. Except that the hierarchy is much more rigid, there is no middle class, there's a small political elite and a working class, social climbing is a lot more complicated

How are we supposed to evaluate this claim that socialism "creates stricter hierarchies than capitalism" without concretely defining power and hierarchies, without any standard or metric for measuring how rigid a hierarchy is or how complicated social climbing is, or even a comment on why rigidity implies something negative? The problem isn't that these things can't be defined, measured, or argued - any one of us is capable of filling in the blanks here - it's that the author isn't doing so. The reader is left critiquing assumptions and implications rather than engaging with a coherent, well-supported claim, which undermines the very purpose of argumentation - communicating ideas in a way that can be meaningfully examined and debated.

It seems like a lot of people are unaware of the financial situation of Americans, so let's take a detailed look. The basis of this study will be consumer expenditure surveys with a sample size of 7000. This survey is also used to calculate the consumer price index and inflation, so it's fairly reliable.

The results of this survey is sorted into quintiles. We can find the after-tax income data here:

CXUINCAFTTXLB0102M CXUINCAFTTXLB0103M CXUINCAFTTXLB0104M CXUINCAFTTXLB0105M CXUINCAFTTXLB0106M

And the expenditure data here:

CXUTOTALEXPLB0102M CXUTOTALEXPLB0103M CXUTOTALEXPLB0104M CXUTOTALEXPLB0105M CXUTOTALEXPLB0106M

Quintiles are formed as follows:

For each time period represented in the tables, complete income reporters are ranked in ascending order, according to the level of total before-tax income reported by the consumer unit. The ranking is then divided into five equal groups. Incomplete income reporters are not ranked and are shown separately.

You can find the raw data here, along with my calculations if you're so inclined to double check my work.

https://cryptpad.fr/sheet/#/2/sheet/edit/N-3TXRd030wpHrmKc1la3olm/

What does this show:

1. Roughly half of Americans do not make enough money to cover their expenses. It's not sustainable to live in America if you're earning less than ~66k/yr, on average (location dependent).

2. Conditions are improving except for the bottom quintile. But even then, it's at a very slow pace over the span of decades.

3. Surveys stating that 60-70% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck are believable.

4. Increased taxation does not necessarily lead to a redistribution of wealth, as seen in 2012 where tax relief expired for high-income earners, leading to a dip in after-tax income. While the wealth of the bottom 50% did grow after the policy was implemented, capitalist accumulation far outpaced distribution.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:1990.1,2024.2;quarter:139;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:9;units:levels

Extra: There is something fundamentally broken with the US welfare system because 12-13 trillion was spent in 2023, supposedly going to 110 million recipients, meaning over 100k was spent per person. Obviously, each person on welfare did not receive 100k last year, nor the equivalent of 100k.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B087RC1Q027SBEA

What does this not show:

1. Social mobility is not factored in. Your income bracket will change over time as you get older. On average, people in their mid 30's hit that 66k/yr mark.

https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-age

2. Welfare and SNAP isn't factored in. But a lot of people are advocating that welfare be eliminated, and so this would be the result.

In conclusion:

American society is broken to the point where heavy government intervention is necessary for the continuation of its existence. Capitalism is not a self-sustaining system and the amount of intervention is under-estimated. At best, the guiding hand of the free market carefully calibrates income and expenses to maintain a deficit for the lowest quintile, because after adjustment for inflation, that hasn't changed in a while.

For socialism to function properly, people need to be instilled with a sense of solidarity/comraderie, generosity, and simply a general sense of care for the people around them. Ideally, only those who cannot work do not work, and those who can work are proud to help those who are unable to work. There should be a sense of united purpose in making the world a better place to live in for your fellow humans. Awesome. Sounds great. I have no objection to the ideal here.

Unfortunately, incentives point people in a different direction.

If a system can be gamed, it will be gamed. A system like this is, sadly, fertile ground for free riders. Just as green beard altruism gives rise to non-altruistic green beards, so too will socialism give rise to fakers and mooches. Sure, it isn't going to be all of them, but it's going to be enough to breed resentment from those who do work. We see this already with welfare systems in the developed world.

Oops, you accidentally incentivized not working because it's easier than working and you can still afford to live. Unless Star Trek Replicators exist, this is a disaster (especially as the others start catching on) and is a big reason why most real-world attempts at communism/socialism have responded to this problem with forced labor.

Another unfortunate implication of wealth redistribution (though less of a problem for income redistribution) is that it disincentivizes saving for the future because those savings are just going to be taken. Thus it leads to higher time preference. People start thinking less and less about the future and procrastinate more. If left unchecked, no investment occurs and infrastructure goes to shit.

Inheritance taxes sever family relationships, though there's not much to say here since you think that's a feature, not a bug.

The collective ownership of housing reduces the incentive to maintain it. It's always someone else's problem. You have no reason to care about the condition of your home if you don't have to sell it at some point. Then when some bureacrat decides it is time to upgrade, they're spending someone else's money for someone else's benefit, meaning they have no incentive to care about price or quality, and you often get overpriced garbage as a result.

I could go on.

Point is that incentives are the problem all the way down. You can try to fight this nature with education, but there's only so far you can go with it when your system inadvertently incentivizes its own demise.

Question for both socialists and capitalists: what kind of arguments can you provide to support the system you favour?

Also, what is the most common argument against capitalism or socialism which is easy to debunk, but no one really cares to understand it?

Perhaps it’s no surprise that one of the earliest known examples of writing features two basic human concerns: alcohol and work. About 5000 years ago, the people living in the city of Uruk, in modern day Iraq, wrote in a picture language called cuneiform. On one tablet excavated from the area we can see a human head eating from a bowl, meaning “ration”, and a conical vessel, meaning “beer”. Scattered around are scratches recording the amount of beer for a particular worker. It’s the world’s oldest known payslip, implying that the concept of worker and employer was familiar five millennia ago.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094658-the-worlds-oldest-paycheck-was-cashed-in-beer/#:\~:text=Scattered%20around%20are%20scratches%20recording,one%20of%20the%20first%20towns.

1. Introduction

Broadly speaking, the history of political economy contains two approaches to value and distribution. For purposes of this post, I do not distinguish between classical and Marx's political economy. Institutionalists and those who know about German historical schools, for example, might have a complaint about being ignored.

This post is quite unoriginal. I thought I would just record these properties of two approaches.

Can you acknowledge more than one approach for understanding capitalism exists within economics?

2. Marginalism

Marginalist economics is about the allocation of given resources among alternatives. In marginalism, the theory of value and distribution is almost co-extensive with economic theory. The givens, for the theory of value and distribution, are:

• Endowments, including distribution of endowments among households.
• Tastes or preferences of each agent.
• Technology.

How to take capital as a given endowment is a difficulty with this approach. It can hardly be taken as a given quantity of value. The theory is supposed to explain prices, including the prices of capital goods. This problem is not just with aggregate theory. It is also a problem with microeconomic theory.

Another approach is to take initial quantities of individual capital goods as given. The neo-walrasian approach abandons the long run and the equalization of the rate of profits among industries. Conceptually, some expectations and plans must have been mistaken before the initial point in time. Yet the theory does not seem to accomodate such mistakes at the given time or into the future. Furthermore, debts and entitlements to future income streams do not seem possible to include among the givens. Disequilibrium processes that change the initial endowments and their distribution do not seem possible to include in the theory either.

3. Classical Political Economy

Classical political economics analyzes the conditions needed to ensure the reproduction of society. For the theory of value and distribution, the givens are:

• Technology.
• Requirements for use, which I take as net output.
• Wage or the rate of profits.

The theory of value can be combined with other elements of political economy. The classicals had various theories of wages, combined with demographics. Marx rejected Malthus and developed his theory of the reserve army of labor for similar purposes. The theory is compatible with a rejection of Say's law and enduring unemployment. Many have argued for combining this theory with a long-period interpretation of Keynes' general theory. A theory of growth and the dynamics of technical change can be built upon this theory of value and distribution.

First i want to stress this is not a defense of nazis/fascists, its an attack on socialist rhetoric using the nazis as a bat. Given what lenin wrote in relation to the national question. If we look at what weimar germany/intervar germany was, an opressed nation that has

1. huge monetary debts put on it as a result of war.
2. land forcefully ceded from it.
3. the free city of Danzig was forcefully kept from joining back to Germany solely as a payment to Poland, who in turn used Danzig for economic gain. And violated the sovereignty of.
4. At this time the dominant capitalist hegemony was. Britain-France-USA. and as the nazi party was against the economic intervention of all of these. It seems to me a socialist should have supported the nazis once they got total control so they can use them to strike against global capital. As even if a national liberation movement is capitalist. As long is it further the global revolution it is good. If indeed you cannot blame pressed people for violently lashing out. Why blame Germans for lashing out with the nazi party?
5. in response to german default on reparations. The french occupied parts of western Germany, and killing civilians in the process.
6. socialists will often defend and support fascist extereme-right wing parties if they view the party as a necessary or or good candidate for stopping the oppression of the nation. Even if that group is anti-communist or capitalist. For example Hamas, Iran, Russia, Taliban. etc.

What would you say defines you as a person the most? Is it the films you watch, the food you eat, or the music you listen to? Or is it the job you work, the art you create, etc.? I'm very curious to see if there's any major trends on either side of the political spectrum. I'm just spitballing here but I imagine that people on the left are more likely to define themselves by their labour, while people on the right by what they consume. I myself fall mostly into the latter category.

One of my friends said that if humanity was a group of 100 people, and 95 had just enough resources, 4 didn’t have enough resources to live, and 1 had over 1,000 times as much as the 95 with just enough resources, people would be outraged if the person with 1,000 times as much did everything they could to hide what they have from the group leaders to keep it to themselves. Especially with the 4 people starving, who may not even be working any less hard than the well off ones, just doing different avenues of work. These people would be so frustrated that they would snitch to the leaders and make the person with 1,000 times as much give to the starving people, and demand that the starving people be paid enough to live.

What they said is that our current world is just like this, it’s just that the media and election candidates/campaigns have all been bought out by millionaires and billionaires so the populace won’t gain awareness.

All your favourite food (e.g. fast-food or pastries), cinema, movies/TV shows, video games, theme parks etc. -- all of that was a result of capitalism, which produces what we love because people want to make a profit. They're not essential goods and services, and they're not always healthy, but we continue to love and buy these things. They may not be always perfect, and corporations push for unhealthy hyperconsumerism, but it's a matter of personal responsibility for you to decide to or not to buy from them then.

On the other hand, socialism literally couldn't invent or mass-produce these because it only cares for putting essential goods and services first (which it also fails at). Nothing wrong with essentials; only that capitalism managed and manages to provide more than just that at the same time. Socialists claim that communist countries weren't devoid of innovation in non-essential goods/services, and that's true (Soviet cinema was actually decent even), but they could never be as successful without capitalist incentives and entrepreneurship. Then, socialists will claim that a lot of modern innovations were possible because of public government programs and projects publicly funded, but they forget that it was private interests and profit-seeking that expanded those developments (e.g. the internet) and services into what they are today. Even as a simple instance, tell me, would we have a thriving animation industry if it weren't for Walt Disney and his self-interested desire for profit to make his company successful?

I really don't understand socialists. Do you want to force everyone to refrain from buying these consumer goods and services that we all love to conform to your ideal socialist society? Too many people love what they produce. If it's not always good, then it's up to individual choice to decide whether to buy them/how much they want to buy of them.

I’m just curious. I’m 17 and I’d consider myself somewhat capitalistic (I think that goods and services should have a price tag of some sort, just nowhere near as bad as it is now). But I also think the wealth gap, the near untouchable power of the rich and the politicians, and inflation as it is is atrocious and needs reforms to try to fix it. In other words I think there need to be reforms but not everything needs to be wiped as a clean slate. It’s just kinda confusing because people act like there’s no middle ground yet me and my dad sit right there. My mentality on a lot of the stuff is like the song “Rich Men North of Richmond” in a way. Can someone explain the whole situation properly to me?

Chinese are not native to Taiwan. That would basically make them “settler colonists” according to the leftist definition. Under different circumstances, this would make leftists believe in “land back.”

But, at the same time they believe that the CCP should run Taiwan, because it is a part of China. And, because the communists won the civil war.

What are your thoughts on this?

The first fundamental theorem of welfare economics says that the price mechanism, absent externalities and monopolies, is the most efficient way to maximise social welfare. Looking at examples from history, it is overall pretty clear that central planning of an economy goes catastrophically wrong where the market mechanism is incredibly successful.

I don’t think any serious socialist will dispute that the price mechanism, overall, is the best technology we have for distributing resources, but will instead make an equity argument. I might be sympathetic to an argument that says: we as a society have a minimum standard that we are willing to let people suffer at, so let’s just tax everyone to pay these people in cash, and they can spend it how they see fit. In practice, however, socialism tends towards a central planning of an economy, where major projects are determined by the state, and it becomes extremely profitable to know the right people, etc. instead of providing the most value to your customers.

Socialists: why don’t we just hand out cash, given that we have seen how poorly a centrally planned economy can be? Thanks for your time!

Edit: I would really like to understand why I’m being downvoted. Is it just a knee-jerk reaction or something inherently bad about my post?

I have been curious about this question for a long time.

It seems that many socialists and communists have a favorable view of China.

But in fact, according to some lists, China has the largest number of billionaires in the world, which is clearly not a communist country. And the huge gap between the rich and the poor in China also makes China not a socialist country.

In China, people's daily lives are no different from those in the West.

You go to school, you take exams, you go to university, you graduate, you compete with tens of millions of other university graduates for jobs,

Housing prices in Tier 1 cities such as Shanghai are among the most expensive in the world. If you can't afford a house, you have to live on the street.

If you don't have money for medical treatment, you can't do anything but wait for death.

If you can't afford to pay for college, you can't go to college.

You have to buy everything with your own money.

If you are unemployed, you have no income.

It's all the same as in the West. I don't know why so many socialists love China.

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