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The Allure of Socialism

LowDown

Curmudgeon
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At the height of the Depression, several thousand American emigrants left New York on the decks of passenger liners waving goodbye to the Statue of Liberty, bound for Leningrad.

Over 100,000 Americans had applied for jobs working in brand new factories in Soviet Russia, ironically built for Stalin by famous American industrialists such as Henry Ford.

Those American emigrants who entered the “workers’ paradise” were certain that they were leaving the misery of unemployment and poverty behind them. They considered themselves fortunate.

Their optimism would prove to be short-lived. Most were stripped of their American passports soon after their arrival.

Considered suspect by Stalin’s paranoid totalitarian state, the foreigners were swept away in the Terror.

The American jazz clubs, the baseball teams, and the English-language schools set up in cities across the USSR, would quickly vanish with them.

In the killing fields at Butovo, a suburb 27 kilometres south-east of Moscow, several of the American baseball players were executed during the Terror, and lie buried in mass graves stretching for hundreds of metres.

The state powerful enough to tend to your every need is powerful enough to have you snuffed out on a whim.

The Soviet Terror, also called the Great Purge, occurred from 1936-1938. About 1.5 million people were killed for political reasons in two years including most of the Bolshevik leaders of the October revolution. Compare that to the Tsars, who executed 3,900 political prisoners in 85 years. The Purge was later denounced by Khrushchev, and many of its victims were declared to be innocent. Would that the state never had that much power in the first place.
 
While I'm as anti-communist as they come, you better not flip this into whining about universal healthcare and welfare.

From the story:

At the height of the Terror, the American emigrants had besieged their embassy, begging for passports so they could leave Russia.

They were turned away only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents.

Inside, the American diplomats had known about these disappearances almost from the very beginning. But they did little to save their fellow countrymen, whom they had christened "the captured Americans."

They made their bed.......
 
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While I'm as anti-communist as they come, you better not flip this into whining about universal healthcare and welfare.

You mean you don't want anyone telling you how completely stupid it was to force Obamacare down the throats of the American people? I mean, Obamacare is working so well right now and we have a bunch of worthless leftists to thank for it.

Okay. No problem. :2wave:
 
While I'm as anti-communist as they come, you better not flip this into whining about universal healthcare and welfare.

From the story:



They made their bed.......

What do you mean by, "They made their bed..." ?
 
What do you mean by, "They made their bed..." ?

Each generation of socialists believe they are smarter than the generation of socialist before them even though socialism fails with each generation. You see, they keep doing the same thing expecting different results.

Ask the people in Venezuela how they feel about socialism.
 
The state powerful enough to tend to your every need is powerful enough to have you snuffed out on a whim.

The Soviet Terror, also called the Great Purge, occurred from 1936-1938. About 1.5 million people were killed for political reasons in two years including most of the Bolshevik leaders of the October revolution. Compare that to the Tsars, who executed 3,900 political prisoners in 85 years. The Purge was later denounced by Khrushchev, and many of its victims were declared to be innocent. Would that the state never had that much power in the first place.

As the world moves toward more and more automation and less and less human labor, we'll have no choice but to heavily tax capital and use the money to feed and house those left behind. It's pretty much a sure thing.
 
The idea that hordes of people on the left are socialists is an overreaction. I do agree with the OP that full blown socialism is dangerous, but capitalism with social safety nets shouldn't be that threatening.
 
The OP had more to do with the state of government rather than a philosophy of an economy.
 
Each generation of socialists believe they are smarter than the generation of socialist before them even though socialism fails with each generation. You see, they keep doing the same thing expecting different results.

Ask the people in Venezuela how they feel about socialism.

You really don't know the workings of their minds. They may have been seeking a better life, jobs, an opportunity to feed their families. I have a really hard time referring to people who were persecuted and massacred as having "made their bed."
 
The idea that hordes of people on the left are socialists is an overreaction. I do agree with the OP that full blown socialism is dangerous, but capitalism with social safety nets shouldn't be that threatening.

The problem is if you give a socialist an inch, they will take a mile. Full blown socialism is the goal of socialists right now. It's like a cancer. Slowly eating away at the victim. That's us.
 
You really don't know the workings of their minds. They may have been seeking a better life, jobs, an opportunity to feed their families. I have a really hard time referring to people who were persecuted and massacred as having "made their bed."

I never claimed to know their minds. Of course they were seeking, "a better life," too bad they were duped just like every other socialists is trying to do, dupe more people. Sad story indeed.
 
As the world moves toward more and more automation and less and less human labor, we'll have no choice but to heavily tax capital and use the money to feed and house those left behind. It's pretty much a sure thing.

Can we do that without giving the government the power to kill us all for no reason? It'd be nice, but I'm thinking we have already gone past that point here in the US. If, say, a figure like ... Hillary Clinton, for example, were to decide to round up all of her political opponents and have them shot what is there to stop her? You guys?

She already gets away with breaking the law, what with a politically corrupted DOJ, and the demonization and dehumanization of her opponents is already well established among Washington elites.

I might be using a little too much hyperbole here, but you get my drift.

In Venezuela the government has taken control of the food supply and is giving food only to its supporters. Shades of Stalin's use of starvation to kill his political opponents, and in 2016, no less!

For all the millions and millions of people killed in the last 100 years the world learned nothing. Venezuela was touted to be South America's most advanced and sophisticated country, and they still sit on a great wealth of oil that would meet everyone's needs there if handled correctly.
 
You mean you don't want anyone telling you how completely stupid it was to force Obamacare down the throats of the American people? I mean, Obamacare is working so well right now and we have a bunch of worthless leftists to thank for it.

Okay. No problem. :2wave:

Like Romney.
 
Can we do that without giving the government the power to kill us all for no reason? It'd be nice, but I'm thinking we have already gone past that point here in the US. If, say, a figure like ... Hillary Clinton, for example, were to decide to round up all of her political opponents and have them shot what is there to stop her? You guys?

She already gets away with breaking the law, what with a politically corrupted DOJ, and the demonization and dehumanization of her opponents is already well established among Washington elites.

I might be using a little too much hyperbole here, but you get my drift.

In Venezuela the government has taken control of the food supply and is giving food only to its supporters. Shades of Stalin's use of starvation to kill his political opponents, and in 2016, no less!

For all the millions and millions of people killed in the last 100 years the world learned nothing. Venezuela was touted to be South America's most advanced and sophisticated country, and they still sit on a great wealth of oil that would meet everyone's needs there if handled correctly.

At least you admit your hyperbole. I guess that's a start. After all, admitting to a problem is the first positive step toward correcting it.
 
Socialism is not about the state taking care of you. It is about you being the state and sharing in state power, instead of a state run by the collusion of capitalists and government and leaving you to fend for youself with no power to effect any change.
 
Can we do that without giving the government the power to kill us all for no reason? It'd be nice, but I'm thinking we have already gone past that point here in the US. If, say, a figure like ... Hillary Clinton, for example, were to decide to round up all of her political opponents and have them shot what is there to stop her? You guys?

She already gets away with breaking the law, what with a politically corrupted DOJ, and the demonization and dehumanization of her opponents is already well established among Washington elites.

I might be using a little too much hyperbole here, but you get my drift.

In Venezuela the government has taken control of the food supply and is giving food only to its supporters. Shades of Stalin's use of starvation to kill his political opponents, and in 2016, no less!

For all the millions and millions of people killed in the last 100 years the world learned nothing. Venezuela was touted to be South America's most advanced and sophisticated country, and they still sit on a great wealth of oil that would meet everyone's needs there if handled correctly.

I'm not a fan of socialism, but like I said. When the jobs for the low-skilled are gone, what are we going to do?

Soon we will be able to produce everything we need, including high-end services, with nothing more than a few highly skilled employees and a lot of capital. The days of working your way up from the factory floor are long gone.

Soon, even those with degrees in accounting, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. will all be competing with the bots. The upside is things will get cheap, fast. The downside is very few people will have a decent income. But...if we make 99% of everything we need with machines, why should we need an income?

It gets interesting. I'm glad I'm within a couple decades of retirement and not much longer than that on this planet. I don't want to be around when all this shtf.
 
You mean you don't want anyone telling you how completely stupid it was to force Obamacare down the throats of the American people? I mean, Obamacare is working so well right now and we have a bunch of worthless leftists to thank for it.

Okay. No problem. :2wave:

Obamacare helped my family considerably, so spare me the right wing propaganda.

What do you mean by, "They made their bed..." ?

Just a play off of the idiom "You've made your bed and you'll have to lie in it. They walked themselves into that.

The far left in those days were deeply in denial. They picked their devil.
 
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At least you admit your hyperbole. I guess that's a start. After all, admitting to a problem is the first positive step toward correcting it.

So you have nothing to say about Venezuela and Stalin's Purge.
 
So you have nothing to say about Venezuela and Stalin's Purge.

I will say this: If you think that Venezuela's current troubles and Stalin's purges are alluring, I can't say I'm surprised; I consider them the opposite of alluring.

Perhaps you can find an aspect of socialism to admire like trash collection, good roads or the military.
 
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