Sumthin on leftists/liberals/socialists

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  • August 1, 2017 at 12:26 pm #71634
    Zooey
    Moderator

    link: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/what-socialism-means

    August 1, 2017 at 5:08 pm #71652
    wv
    Participant

    “..Take single payer health insurance, where the government serves the role typically held by insurance companies, and where progressive taxes help alleviate the burden of paying for care faced by the poor. I support this policy wholeheartedly. But it is not a socialist alternative to health care. “The government pays money for what the people need” is not socialist in general, but rather simply welfare liberalism, as it preserves the role of currency exchange and profit in the first place. A real socialist alternative would be to socialize the health care industry entirely, and have doctors and hospitals provide services based on human need rather than the dictates of the profit model. I don’t think socialized health care is plausible in the short term, and I will take a single-payer system over our current one in a heartbeat. But we should not confuse a single-payer system for a true socialist alternative, just as we should not confuse government-funded college education for a socialized system where education is provided based on need and not on a market mechanism…”

    August 1, 2017 at 6:35 pm #71656
    Billy_T
    Participant

    Good article, Zooey. My only quibble would be that the author seems needlessly tough on Jacobin and its editor. I think an objective reading of that magazine, and the op-ed he sights, doesn’t really support his conclusions. But the rest is really good.

    It’s a tragedy, IMO, that America has no choices, politically, to the left of the Dems, and even their furthest left advocates for more social welfare capitalism, not its replacement. The argument is basically A to B, instead of A to Z. The Dems with their slightly more social welfare, slightly less wealthcare, and the GOP inverting that. Though, in recent years, movement conservatives and right-libertarians have taken over the party so their sights are set on virtually no social welfare and a ton of wealthcare.

    We should have an economic system(s) that make the social safety net all but unnecessary. The economy itself should solve the problem of maldistribution and sustainability, so the government doesn’t have to come in after the fact and mitigate for capitalist oppression. And that means making it fully democratic and publicly owned, without proxies.

    Base it on need and keep it in harmony with the earth and what the earth supports. End profit. If there’s a profit at the end of a transaction, that just means workers are paid too little and the consumer pays too much — but the worker is screwed the most.

    As in, Apple has well over 200 billion dollars in its war chest and makes roughly 40 billion in profits a year. All of that money should go back to workers, minus enough for a rainy day and capital improvements, etc. But the mere existence of that war chest and those profits is demonstrable proof that Apple employees are getting screwed to death.

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