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The Challenge of Marxism

Craig234 said:
European countries are closer to it, see countries like Norway.
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Small homogeneous population and 20% of their economy is the government owned oil business. I don't think that's an applicable comparison. And those countries economies are no more or less plutocratic or democratic. We could match their higher tax rates, put it all into social programs for the poor and match their poverty rates while average income overall drops. And will have fewer of the super achiever wealthy and reduced GP per capita overall.
 
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Remind me again why we are all supposed to devote so much time, effort and energy to worrying about Marxism.
The number of real, actual "card carrying" Marxist "revolutionaries" is about 0.1 percent of the total number of Jo Jorgensen supporters.
Are we supposed to be on alert for a wave of Marxists overthrowing our society and our government?
Can we just hit them with our purse and call it a day or did someone pay for some messaging and they're not satisfied with the results yet?
 
dixon01767 said:
Small homogeneous population and 20% of their economy is the government owned oil business. I don't think that's an applicable comparison.
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And I don't really care that you think that. I see ideologues make up any excuses to distort facts. "It's further north, not the same". "It has six letters in its name, not the same." Small homogenous population are excuses, not relevant differences to the economic principles, and it's a waste of time talking to ideologues.
 
dave8383 said:
Well, I'd disagree with you in terms of the young here in America hating this country. I have some grandchildren in their 20s who lean pretty far left but they don't hate this country. They just feel a strong sense of responsibility in terms of helping the disadvantaged.
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Does that sense of responsibility lead them to actually help the disadvantaged? lead them to insist that the government fulfill their responsibility for them? lead them to yell at white people for exercising their white privilege to perpetuate white supremacy?
 
Communism is a naive pipe dream that completely ignores human nature and the kind of leader who could first convert the economy to a socialist one by seizing the means of production from private hands. It's no better than anarchy or what I'll call "Big L Libertarianism."

Communism requires you to first be stupid enough to think government could be lead by decent people who are willing to ruthlessly seize the means of production from the people, that purely centralized economic planning would work, and that ultimately the need for government would dissolve and so would government along with it, ownership of the means of production then resorting to the people who run it.

Anarchism requires you to be stupid enough to fail to recognize that where there are >1 people in each other's proximity, there will be a governing body of one type or another. With even two people, you're either going to have a democracy, a stilted democracy where one person has more say usually, or a dictatorship, one telling the other what to do. This is true for all greater numbers. Either you're going to have cooperation (some form of loose commune democracy), or something all the way on the other end like a strongman warlord / dictator. You are never not going to have governing bodies.

Big L libertarianism is hardly any better. This mainly describes people who think that the federal government should be virtually non-existent and that local/state governments should do far less than they already do; that this would work without the US splintering into 50+ effectively separate countries a la Articles of Confederation. You'd be hard pressed to get them to name a government program that should exist. And they, like the naive anarchists and communists, simply do not stop to think long enough to realize that where official government, unofficial government steps in. Could be in the form of corporations taking over the roles of government as it recedes. Could be straight-up warlords. Depends on your environment. But you are never - never- going to have a no-government or virtually-no-government situation last. (Nevermind the utter chaos of having overlapping and conflicting laws between localities within states, and states within federal government.

You'll never get a Big L to explain why they think their principles could possibly work in action. All you're going to get is bland statements about "freedoms" mixed with the assumption that government is inherently evil, plus the assumption that nobody is going to step in to exercise the power that government currently does if you mostly dissolve it.

The plus side is that these philosophies let people tell themselves that they're non-conformist principled persons, while everyone else is a drone who mindlessly supports the status quo because they aren't brave enough or intellectual enough to see the better way. It has the benefit of allowing you to have your cake and eat it to: the people who wave these philosophies around know they're never going to see them in action. So they get to pose as principled while knowing they'll never actually have to pay admission. There's a reason anarchists didn't fly out to war-torn Somolia to get in on the lawless awesomeness.

It's because lawlessness actually kinda blows and they wanted to keep their limbs where they were thank you very much.


Note: on DP, it's usually the libertarian-right people who are Big L Libertarians. Though half of them are really just extreme conservatives. The left-libertarians seem to understand that we need a government to do any number of things it does, that government isn't inherently evil but rather as good or bad as the people running it, and generally oppose government abuses rather than the having of policies by government. You'll find them despising the pointless waste of stuff like the War on Drugs, or arguing against government restrictions on who can marry whom, or expressing outrage at government agent abuse of the citizenry.




All three of these belief systems require an inherent naivety about man's fundamentally poor nature. You're gonna have government. Best pick the one that gives you the least worst amount of power for the least worst trade-offs, but also one capable of governing an incredibly complex nation like the US.
 
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Checkerboard Strangler said:
Remind me again why we are all supposed to devote so much time, effort and energy to worrying about Marxism.
The number of real, actual "card carrying" Marxist "revolutionaries" is about 0.1 percent of the total number of Jo Jorgensen supporters.
Are we supposed to be on alert for a wave of Marxists overthrowing our society and our government?
Can we just hit them with our purse and call it a day or did someone pay for some messaging and they're not satisfied with the results yet?
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Neo Marxists. They don't carry cards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Marxism
 
Craig234 said:
And I don't really care that you think that. I see ideologues make up any excuses to distort facts. "It's further north, not the same". "It has six letters in its name, not the same." Small homogenous population are excuses, not relevant differences to the economic principles, and it's a waste of time talking to ideologues.
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Cute, edit out my argument from my post and make up strawmen instead.
 
dixon01767 said:
lead them to insist that the government fulfill their responsibility for them?
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That is the purpose of government, to act as an instrument of the people - just as we have a car factory make cars for the people to buy, we have the government make roads for the people to drive them on. You radical Libertarians needs to learn both the basics of democracy and of practical governance, instead of your cult-like ideology about government is evil and people should never have any coordination through government.
 
dixon01767 said:
Cute, edit out my argument from my post and make up strawmen instead.
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Whoosh. You made an irrelevant distinction as a fallacious argument. I pointed out that you did, including by showing other similarly irrelevant distinctions. You missed the point.
 
dixon01767 said:
Does that sense of responsibility lead them to actually help the disadvantaged? lead them to insist that the government fulfill their responsibility for them? lead them to yell at white people for exercising their white privilege to perpetuate white supremacy?
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They help the disadvantaged by yelling at certain white people for being supremacists and voting for a government that uses our tax dollars, including theirs, for the benefit of all.
 
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In a more equal society, there's a sense of 'we all pay taxes, and we all get a vote on how much to tax and how to spend it'.

Thanks to the plutocrat Republicans, that changes. A few take nearly all the wealth, and when people make so little they pay no to little taxes, they actually attack them for still wanting any say over how much taxes are and how they're spent. First, they rob them, and then they attack them for being robbed.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Still doesn't matter because there aren't enough of them to fill the typical VFW post in Marquette, Michigan.
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There is a sufficient abundance of them in education and academia where they do their work of evolution, not revolution.
 
Craig234 said:
In a more equal society, there's a sense of 'we all pay taxes, and we all get a vote on how much to tax and how to spend it'.

Thanks to the plutocrat Republicans, that changes. A few take nearly all the wealth, and when people make so little they pay no to little taxes, they actually attack them for still wanting any say over how much taxes are and how they're spent. First, they rob them, and then they attack them for being robbed.
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Top tax rate in 1963 was 91%. Our poverty rate is lower now than it was then. Why didn't the non plutocratic democrats fix it when they had the presidency, house and senate?
 
dixon01767 said:
There is a sufficient abundance of them in education and academia where they do their work of evolution, not revolution.
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Sounds to me like you're doing the exact same thing the ultra-lefty social justice warriors have been doing.
You are, in effect, demanding SAFE SPACES and proposing that a variety of views is unacceptable anywhere.

How very fascist and how very snowflake of you.
 
dixon01767 said:
Top tax rate in 1963 was 91%. Our poverty rate is lower now than it was then. Why didn't the non plutocratic democrats fix it when they had the presidency, house and senate?
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The top tax rate was a MARGINAL tax rate so I think it would be good if you would at least be honest about that aspect of the tax rates of that era, because in 1963 there were plenty of filthy rich people just as today.
And the top rate was actually 92%, thank you.
But it was a marginal tax rate, not a direct across the board tax rate.
There is a huge difference between the two and the purpose of a marginal tax rate is very specific.
If you understand the purpose and you continue to try and shoot arrows at it, that says a lot about your honesty in these debates.

Lastly, your post did not address what Craig234 was talking about at all, and is thus a dodge and deflection.
 
dixon01767 said:
Top tax rate in 1963 was 91%. Our poverty rate is lower now than it was then. Why didn't the non plutocratic democrats fix it when they had the presidency, house and senate?
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They did. Their policies - the war on poverty - created a better economy than we'd had since, and permanently lowered the poverty rate by a third - which is WHY the poverty rate is lower now, along with all the economic improvements that have happened. Medicare helped reduce poverty as well. Before Social Security, the elder poverty rate was 90%; after, it was 10%.
 
dixon01767 said:
Top tax rate in 1963 was 91%. Our poverty rate is lower now than it was then. Why didn't the non plutocratic democrats fix it when they had the presidency, house and senate?
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The economy of 1963 was stronger, better, more robust than any economy in recorded history before or since.
Same goes for the economies of 1953 and 1973, by the way.
 
dixon01767 said:
No Im not. Quote the post where I did.



How delusional of you.
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You did not say that but your knee jerk reactionary response to liberal educators is more than enough.
You are upset because "OMIGARSH some perfessurz might be libtards!"

Enough with your gotcha nonsense.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
The economy of 1963 was stronger, better, more robust than any economy in recorded history before or since.
Same goes for the economies of 1953 and 1973, by the way.
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Actually, in 1963 average real income was lower than it is now and poverty was higher.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
You did not say that but your knee jerk reactionary response to liberal educators is more than enough.
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I simply pointed out "there is a sufficient abundance of them in education and academia'. Think youre still in that delusion.
 
Individualism said:
Good evening,

As an Eastern European whose family seen the horrors of communism which is based on the ideas of a self-hating drunk, Karl Marx, I found this article one of the best:

The Challenge of Marxism - Quillette

I advise everyone with an IQ over 100 to read the full text.

I might add that this idea of marxism also brings out the reaction of ultra-nationalism that is as toxic.

I will end with a question:

Is it idealism or pure propaganda that drives the younger generations to consider these ideas ?
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You left out a choice, ignorance. All these BLM/antifa types are useful idiots.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
The top tax rate was a MARGINAL tax rate so I think it would be good if you would at least be honest …..
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Oh I think everyone is aware that the US has marginal tax rates here without being said and your still floundering about looking for something relevant to contribute.
 
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