Leftism

[Serafina]

The only problem with that being of course that de facto socialism has been working great in real first world countries for halve a century.

By that logic, over that last 100 years America has vastly outperformed Europe on every metric that matters (to a conservative), so we must all strive to be like the US.

Whoa, really? Didn't I remember that the EU economy as a whole individually dwarfs other bloc or nation in the world, even that of the US?

Here's a tip - free and tax-deductible!
How about asking for some statistics? This one should be easy to back up (if it was true), and even if it wasn't it's a rule on this board that people have to be able to back up their statements.

[bobalot]

I'm confused to Stargilder's claim on what matters to a "Conservative". What does he mean? Conservatives don't care about poverty, education and child mortality? These are all metrics that America has not done well at recently (compared to Europe).

[Thanas]

And Europe does have the larger economy, after all....

[General Mung Beans]

I'm confused to Stargilder's claim on what matters to a "Conservative". What does he mean? Conservatives don't care about poverty, education and child mortality? These are all metrics that America has not done well at recently (compared to Europe).

Which may be because a lot of Europe has more homogenous populations than that of America.

[Thanas]

Which may be because a lot of Europe has more homogenous populations than that of America.

What has that got to do with poverty etc?

BTW, the European Union is a whole lot less homogenous than the USA.

[Bakustra]

Which may be because a lot of Europe has more homogenous populations than that of America.

What has that got to do with poverty etc?

BTW, the European Union is a whole lot less homogenous than the USA.

He's unwittingly employing the American talking point of Europe only managing to implement such marvels as universal healthcare and functioning welfare systems because European nations don't have racial minorities. It manages to be racist against American racial minorities and insinuate that Europeans are all incredibly racist by virtue of its vagueness. It's also incredibly stupid, but most Americans think that in Spain they speak Spanish, if you know what I mean.

[SpaceMarine93]

To Serafina

Whoa, really? Didn't I remember that the EU economy as a whole individually dwarfs other bloc or nation in the world, even that of the US?

Here's a tip - free and tax-deductible!
How about asking for some statistics? This one should be easy to back up (if it was true), and even if it wasn't it's a rule on this board that people have to be able to back up their statements.

Here:

2010 List by the International Monetary Fund (First 10)

Rank Country GDP (millions of USD)
— European Union 16,282,230
1 United States 14,657,800
2 People's Republic of China 5,878,257
3 Japan 5,458,872
4 Germany 3,315,643
5 France 2,582,527
6 United Kingdom 2,247,455
7 Brazil 2,090,314
8 Italy 2,055,114
9 Canada 1,574,051
10 India 1,537,966

Also:

2010 List by the CIA World Factbook (First 10)

Rank Country GDP (millions of USD)

— European Union 16,070,000
1 United States 14,660,000
2 People's Republic of China 5,878,000
3 Japan 5,459,000
4 Germany 3,316,000
5 France 2,583,000
6 United Kingdom 2,247,000
7 Brazil 2,090,000
8 Italy 2,055,000
9 Canada 1,574,000
10 India 1,538,000

There's one in which calculates EU economy by Eurozone, which is smaller than the US, but that's the World Bank to us.

I didn't pull my argument out of thin air, you know.

[madd0ct0r]

last time we had a thread like this, it turned out the American professor was using a definition of socialism that had only once been truly applied - for a 5 year period in Stalin's Russia. So all concerned ought to check they're using the same political dictionary. Terms seem to vary across the pond.

SpaceMarine93, i heartily encourage you to do some wider reading. Forum arguments might be an interesting starting point but some actual political science books will help you iron out your personal axioms, with the rest following naturally.

One nice thought experiment is to split the left-right political spectrum into multiple dimensions.
the next most simple model might be 2dimensional: social freedom on one axis and economic freedom on the other.

[K. A. Pital]

Well I don't know exactly what US libertarians or rather conservatives consider to be relevant issues but I can provide statistics about PPP GDP and per capita GDP as taken directly from Agnus Maddison.

Why not use HDI instead? PPP gdp, by the way, doesn't look so bad considering Europe was utterly wrecked by World War II, while the US hasn't seen a single serious destructive conflict since about the 1870s.

[Skgoa]

@Bakustra: I almost completely agree with you. If you disagree with me after this post, at least one of us has misunderstood the other.

Maybe people should visit Australia, Canada, Britain, France or another socialist helllhole and let us know how horribly tyrannical and corrupt our governments are.

I wouldn't even call those socialist countries- I'm trying to figure out whether Skgoa would.

I don't know enough about these countries to say, sorry. France does have some nice socialist "features" that I would like to see in Germany too, though.

Socialism involves state control of the means of production, Skgoa; Europe is only very weakly socialist though there are functioning socialist parties in a number of the countries involved.

Erm, you do realize that e.g. the german governments*, both state and federal, have huge share-ownership of private industry and that the economy is in principle controled by the state? That direct influence is only taken up to the neccessary amount in reality is more due to that being the intelligent choice, "rar, markets must be free!" But in principle, the state has the constitutioal right to take an almost arbitrary amount of control in the economy.
From the point of view of someone 100 years ago, the "social market economy" is textbook socialism.

*scandinavian countries even more, but I don't know that many details about them.

I am going to wait for others to comment on this, as I simply do not know what to say.

If I understand you rightly, your point is that a system which constitutionally permits the state to take over industrial concerns is textbook socialism whether or not it actually does so?

Yes. Just because our politicians/civil servants aren't stupid enough to think a command economy (is that the right english term?) is preferable in every part of the economy - and thus they/we consciously decide to leverage the advantages of free markets where it is opportune to do so -, doesn't mean that at it's heart, the german economy isn't on a pretty strong leash. This leash tends to get longer with right/middle governments and shorter with middle/left governments in power, but overall the german government meddles quite a bid.

Our constitution has this to say on the matter:

(2) Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen.

This translates to "Property obliges. It's utilization shall serve the prosperity of the general public."
Or to put it in franker* terms: In order to encourage commerce, productivity and innovation, you get to take home a portion of the wealth that has been created due to your contribution. Use it wisely, or else. Now, this mostly expresses itself by high taxes and strict standards(for pollution etc.), but e.g. it also means labour rights are such that people employed by a company of sufficient size get a significant say in how its run. Yes, in Germany the employees DO have control over the means of production.

* i.e. more german

My argument is one of empiricism- socialism as empirically brought into existence is either the product of democratic transfers of power or of revolution. Revolutionary socialism leads predictably to revolutionary dictatorship; you can denounce it as unsocialist if you like but it happens every damn time, like clockwork. Socialism brought about by democratic means is a very different form of socialism, and generally one in which the hallmarks of 19th century socialists' goals occur in greatly attenuated form, if at all. Whether the state could nationalize the factories or not, it does not.

Yes, I agree. But the problem that remains is, that we still haven't seen a "true" communist country. Maybe its not even possible to achieve through revolution. (I agree with that notion.) We do see a great number of countries were the second path to socialism/communism has led to a huge portion of the socialist agenda having been put in place. My argument is that we simply compare the situation back when the labour/democracy movement started with the situation we have now. We - i.e. the Left - managed to cross so much of the list that things like "an "allowance" for every citizen payed by the state" is slowly making it's way up to federal level in several left parties here in Germany.

I do, however, disagree with your assumption that we should meassure the "socialist-ness" of a country only by how it structures it's economy. There is much more to socialism than economic theories, indeed many economic systems have been proposed for socialist societies. (StaMoKap comes to mind.) Just like "democracy" is a pretty loose term and there are many forms of democratic countries, in my oppinion a society that has as it's core values the tenets of socialism ARE socialist countries - its just that through hard lessons people learned what works and what doesn't and adapted accordingly.

Social democracy is a different question, since it can evolve naturally from democratic institutions without having to violently overthrow anything the society basic right (such as property ownership) at any point.

Um, social democracy DID have to overthrow basic rights of the people in power at some point. And it wasn't done by asking nicely.

Do you mean in the sense of "the Labour Party won the election," or are you referring to something else? My point here hinges on the matter of violent overthrow, and how the absence of it greatly alters the character of socialism compared to the character it takes on in a revolutionary environment.

If "violence + regime change" is your metric, than no, I don't have an example.

[K. A. Pital]

Lex Volkswagen, a production of the German social democrats I believe, simply states by fiat that to "protect" Volkwagen, the German government will control its shares. That is clearly a violation of the private property rights in the classic bourgeois sense. There are examples of nationalizations as well - those are clearly a violation of the same classic right. Despite compensations to owners, the very idea of nationalization means that the government can decide how to use your property. It will compensate for the broken right, or sometimes not, but the classic capitalist property right is violated at this instance.

Social democracies do violate property ownership, just on a lesser scale.

[Liberty]

I think one thing missing here is the role of religion. Conservatives don't just want people to be happy or unhappy, they want people to be moral and religious. They also believe in hierarchy and in following rules. Progressives, on the other hand, don't like hierarchy and don't like rules and would rather people be allowed to choose for themselves what to believe or do, so long as they don't harm others. Overly simplistic, yes, but the role of religion and absolute morality (without which they believe society would collapse) in conservatism should not be ignored.

[Thanas]

Lex Volkswagen, a production of the German social democrats I believe, simply states by fiat that to "protect" Volkwagen, the German government will control its shares. That is clearly a violation of the private property rights in the classic bourgeois sense. There are examples of nationalizations as well - those are clearly a violation of the same classic right. Despite compensations to owners, the very idea of nationalization means that the government can decide how to use your property. It will compensate for the broken right, or sometimes not, but the classic capitalist property right is violated at this instance.

Actually, Volkswagen is a very special case. In other cases, nationalization is usually a very long and protracted process with lots of courts.

But yeah, in principle you are absolutely right.

[Kane Starkiller]

Why not use HDI instead? PPP gdp, by the way, doesn't look so bad considering Europe was utterly wrecked by World War II, while the US hasn't seen a single serious destructive conflict since about the 1870s.

HDI estimates as of 2010:

US 0.902
Sweden 0.885
Netherlands 0.890
Germany 0.885
France 0.872
Spain 0.863
Italy 0.854
UK 0.849
Only Norway, Australia and New Zealand are ahead of US.
Although I'm not sure conservatives would consider HDI important. I was mostly trying to answer Starglider's call that someone put up some data.

As far as GDP goes obviously EU area suffered enormous devastation during WW2 however if you look at the chart from the previous page EU recovered and gained on US rapidly until around 1965 and achieved maximum at around 1980.


The chart below shows PPP per capita GDP of various EU countries as percentage of US GDP for 1975-2008 period.

As we can see France and Germany, rather than catching up to US actually lost around 8% of US per capita GDP. Sweden turned around in 1994 but overall it also lost 11%. Spain, as representative of less developed EU country, managed to gain on US but is still less than 2/3 of US GDP.


The chart below shows total PPP GDP as percentage of US total PPP GDP for 1975-2008 period. Just to note that EU total doesn't include the seven smaller countries( Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta) because there are no readily available data for those countries however they don't account for more than few percent of EU GDP anyway.

[Thanas]

The German decline is unsurprising considering the reintegration of East Germany, which had a much lower GDP to begin with.

[K. A. Pital]

As far as GDP goes obviously EU area suffered enormous devastation during WW2 however if you look at the chart from the previous page EU recovered and gained on US rapidly until around 1965 and achieved maximum at around 1980.

Naturally. There are some less obvious things hidden here as well. For example, such things as recurring periodic metal deficit are tied to the destruction of metal stock during World War II. There are other things there as well.

Funnily enough, European nations maintained HDI parity with the US (or even exceed it at times, see Sweden) at the same time as their GDP was lower or even declined relative to the US one.

This actually speaks in favor of the European model, if anything - it gives the idea that a less "rich" in terms of monetary transactions per capita nation may actually be as developed or even more developed.

[Enigma]

Maybe people should visit Australia, Canada, Britain, France or another socialist helllhole and let us know how horribly tyrannical and corrupt our governments are.

I wouldn't even call those socialist countries- I'm trying to figure out whether Skgoa would.

From high school, I was taught that Canada was a socialist democracy.

[bobalot]

I'm confused to Stargilder's claim on what matters to a "Conservative". What does he mean? Conservatives don't care about poverty, education and child mortality? These are all metrics that America has not done well at recently (compared to Europe).

Which may be because a lot of Europe has more homogenous populations than that of America.

Nice talking point. In 2006, 20% of Australia's population were born overseas (of which, almost 14% were born in non-English speaking countries). Regardless, Australia still outperforms America's metrics regarding life expectancy, child mortality, cost of health care, poverty etc.

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe people should visit Australia, Canada, Britain, France or another socialist helllhole and let us know how horribly tyrannical and corrupt our governments are.

I wouldn't even call those socialist countries- I'm trying to figure out whether Skgoa would.

From high school, I was taught that Canada was a socialist democracy.

That may just argue that your schoolteachers were full of crap, not that Canada qualifies as socialist.