Book: Moral Calculations by Lazslo Mero

The Soviet Union was about as far from a true socialist model as can be.


True socialism would be where EVERYONE shares the work and reaps the benefits.


I would say the kibbutz system is Israel is the closest thing to true socialism in the world.


try reading this...


http://www.birdingisrael.com/Kibbutz...ues/vision.htm


Cheers,


Keith

Socialism is nothing more complex than a return to the tribal values built into human instinct.


So, yes, the true socialist model WAS tried, about 3,000 years ago, and in tribes involving only a handful of people.


They tried it again under National Socialism (NaZi's), but the tribe was too big, no matter how much leibensraum they carved out.


To achieve an "extended order of human cooperation" - meaning involving more than a handful of closely-related people - you need capitalism.


To think that, in a world where people have tried licking frogs to get high, "true socialism" has never been tried is laughable.


Socialism has had every opportunity to be tried on a small scale, and to grow and spread if it succeeded. Pioneers tried it numerous times when they first set foot on This Great Continent from Europe. Heck, try it yourself!


But every time it has proven unworkable, whether in producing guns or butter, and has failed to grow or even sustain itself on a scale in which it is workable. In reality, a person living alone on a desert island can become wealthier than an individual living in a large group under the coercive non-exchange, non-cooperation system of socialism - in proportion to its size!


CAPITALISM IS NOTHING MORE THAN A COMMUNICATIONS MECHANISM, beyond what Aristotle called "the herald's call." People who, by its very nature, cannot understand the complexity of what it accomplishes - and as such blame capitalism for the underlying scarcity which it is just the messenger communicating to you - need to get their heads out of their asses!


It is a substantial achivement of capitalism that 1) it has organized a system so complex you can't understand it, and 2) it has successfully insulated you from the true nature of the world, to where you think capitalism itself is the source of human misery!


"He who knows only his own generation remains always a child."


eLROY

Not that it much matters, but the quote was invented as, and shared here as, a joke. (It can't be "wrong." Only unfunny.)


Leroy,


You wrote: "The reason socialism has never worked ..."


What do you mean by "worked?" Can you define it in such a way that some other ism has "worked" whereas socialism never has? We're talking thousands of years of societies here, all over the globe. Must a society call itself "socialist," to be defined as such? What about before that work existed? Get my drift?


If not, that's okay, because I sometime don't get yours either. But I love trying to.


Tommy

Capitalism does indeed use force to get people to produce, buy or sell. It aims to elimate all forms of economic activity except the market. The fathers of capitalism all knew that people would be forced to take place in the market economy and were in favor of it, hiding this behind their "natural hand" rhetoric.


"The Invention of Capitalism" by Michael Perelman and "The Great Transformation" by Karl Polanyi are both excellent on this. [See what I mean when I labeled myself a left-winger? [img]/images/wink.gif[/img]]

It must be the faceless part that makes it so easy for capitalists to exploit people for their own profit, continually denying those that do the work of the world adequate health care, livable wages, etc..


Workers of the world unite.


KJS

Thanks Andy. Glad to know there is another pinko in the bunch. When our President equates the proliferation of "free markets" with greater freedom worldwide I get the willies. Capitalism is coercion--the slickest form out there.


KJS

MDPM,


My belief is that one chooses to do what one wants with this gift of ideas that you submit it is a human right to own. The capitalist sells them, the socialist shares them. The former benefits the thinker above all, the latter benefits all.


KJS

How does the socialist presume to know what anyone else wants?


Is he clairvoyant?


Even inside small families, you end up with a lot of unwanted junk after Christmas - ugly sweaters that don't fit and such - that have to be returned.


With socialism nobody gets what they want, you get a whole nation of junk, and nobody to return it to.


I wish I could give my pole as a gift to all the pretty girls I see. That's what they want, isn't it?


leroy

That's just the point, you silly.


It is impossible to weigh the value of work - and determine what is "the work of the world" and what isn't - without capitalism.


Capitalism is just a way for remote people whom you can't see, often with different skin colors, to tell you how much they value what you are doing.


And what is "adequate" health care, and what is a "livable" wage?


Because if we are going to have to take a popular vote to define what this is, you are going to have to suck a lot of dicks in the political establishment before they even let you live!


Would you rather have capitalists tell you what to do and where to work, what to plant - and then pay you for it and let you buy whatever you want - or would you rather have politicians tell you where to stand and when to speak - and then just lock you in prison anyway, on a whim.


The saddest thing is that you measure the results of capitalism using the yardstick of Western Christian morals. In Africa, forget human dignity, people are lucky just to be alive.


As I said in a series of posts in the "stocks" forum, the principle achievement of capitalism is to help enough people to survive childbirth that they grow up to be whiners. You would prefer a world, quite simply, where with no means of survival, factory workers were simply never born.


Meanwhile, these people whom lazy, upper-middle-class intellectuals are training to be whiners, are risking their lives are drowning just to get here, from places like Cuba - where healthcare is free and nobody is "forced" to work.


The main reason you despise capitalism is because, as a communications mechanism, it is the messenger telling you how worthless the product of your mind really is.


POOR PEOPLE DON'T WANT YOUR EMPTY PROMISES OF A UTOPIA, THEY'D RATHER HAVE A JOB!


So yes, poverty is our way of telling a million starving dirtbags somewhere we don't really need them. But nobody's asking them to show up for a single grain of rice - seems more like THEY WANT TO!


The moment where socialism stops starving people is the moment where it starts having to kill them, or cut their uteruses out, like in China. But people are not your pets.


If poor people want a chance to have kids, what business is that of yours? You would tell them it's better never to have lived then to take the opportunity to live poor.


If death is so much better, than try it yourself. The rest of us will keep springing into the world to chase after the multitudinous fruits capitalism has scattered about.


All systems support poor people, the question is just how many.


eLROY

I'd bet all my limbs against a dougnnut, KJS, that


1) you have never lived in, like North Korea or Cuba, to where you would even know the meaning of coercion, and


2) your parents were rich enough to where you had your own bedroom when you were little.


I can't believe, there were people dying to get out from behind the Berlin Wall, and you're sitting here calling the fact that you have to work 25 hours a week to pay your shag-carpet rent "coercion."


Sure, socialism would work, if only the men with sharper spears and the meaner warpaint didn't push us into the sea. They should just lie down next to their starving kids and wives and die.


eLROY