Essay by Eric Worrall
While the author admits that early 20th century socialism was not notably green, apparently the 21st century version could save us from climate catastrophe.
Would there still have been climate change under socialism?
Market failure certainly delays aggressive climate action, but even had the whole world in the 20th century been socialist, the planet would still be heating up.
By Leigh Phillips
10 August 2022
updated 11 Aug 2022 4:52pmIt is common to come across the notion, especially on the climate left, that humanity and the rest of the planet would not be staring down the threat of climate change if it were not for capitalism – from Naomi Klein’s best-selling This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate(2014) to the growing number of activists identifying themselves as “eco-socialists”.
There is however no evidence that this is the case. …
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Consider this thought experiment. Let’s imagine that the 1918-19 socialist German Revolution that failed in the real world had in fact been successful. Rather than being attempted in semi-feudal, largely agrarian Russia, in our counterfactual history socialism emerges instead in the modern, democratising, industrial societies that Marx had predicted would be its birthplace. From Germany, socialism spreads across Europe and thence the world. To simplify matters for the sake of the thought experiment, let us define socialism as a global economy that allocates goods and services through democratic planning on the basis of need, not, as with capitalism, primarily via markets on the basis of profit. Furthermore, in our thought experiment, let’s give our socialists an additional, temporal advantage and say that capitalism is vanquished everywhere by, say, 1930. Democratic socialism is triumphant across the globe. There is no Soviet disaster. No Maoist famines. No Second World War. No Cold War. Colonialism is willingly, rapidly unravelled in the 1920s rather than reluctantly, incompletely, violently, in the 1950s and 1960s. There is no crisis of profitability in the early 1970s and thus no 1980s neoliberal revolution.
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In other words, in our counterfactual world, production might have been organised according to other aims than profit (or much of it, depending on how far one favours socialisation of production), but this would in fact have unleashed much more production. And this of course was what Marx imagined when he expressed his frustration at how production for commodity exchange irrationally constrained what could be produced. Socialism would not have resulted in less production, for the set of all things that are profitable is smaller than the set of all things that are useful to humanity. Instead of coal plants powering factories largely only in Europe and the US by the 1930s, they would have been powering them everywhere. Development would have been limited only by global economic capacity at any given moment.
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Putting all this together, the most we can say is that even though global warming would likely be worse under socialism by the time the full scale of its threat was discovered in the 1980s, the response would have been more rapid and more egalitarian than that of our existing capitalist world.
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Read more: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/08/would-there-be-climate-change-under-socialism
I’m not seeing much evidence of that “more rapid” socialist response to global warming in China, unless we count all the coal plants they’re building.
The author sneers at Russia’s agrarian backwardness as being the factor which caused the failure of the Soviet Union, but industrial backwardness was not Russia’s problem, after Stalin’s horrific modernisation programme. The nation which launched the first man into orbit, and brought him home safe, was not crippled by lack of technological capability.
Russia’s problem was socialism.
The author’s claim there would have been no famines under global socialism is also ridiculous. The Soviets couldn’t feed themselves, even though there was plenty of farming expertise available, especially in the early Soviet Union – Tsarist Russia was an agrarian economy. The rich Kulak peasants whom Stalin had rounded up and killed, or the small private allotments which were permitted in latter days of the Soviet Union, were always vastly more productive than the politically correct collective farms.
The explanation for the failure of Soviet collectivised agriculture is obvious. Food plants are fragile, if something goes wrong the intervention has to be swift and comprehensive. A farmer who stands to personally benefit from produce sales is highly motivated to treat blight or pest infestation as soon as it appears. But for an employee who answers to a collective, reporting blight just creates more work. Their punishment for reporting a problem is to have to work extra hours to fix the problem. So if the problem is small, it is always easier to ignore the problem, to pretend not to notice the problem, and pass the burden of working extra hours on to the next shift.
The thing about blight is it develops exponentially. A few infested plants very rapidly becomes an entire infested field. Days, even hours can make a difference to how far the problem spreads. With everyone trying to avoid having to work extra hours to fix the problem, by the time the collective farm manager notices there is a problem, and demands the workers sort it out, it is too late to save the crop.
China realised pure socialism could never work under Premier Deng Xiaoping, who allowed privatisation of agriculture to restore productivity, after watching the Soviet failures and the experiencing the Chinese failures. Deng justified his Capitalist reforms which saved China from socialist famine and launched the modern Chinese economic powerhouse, with his famous quote “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat.”.
China still imports a lot of food, but their partially capitalist agriculture sector is in much better shape than the Soviet system ever was.
Of course, it is possible a world dominated by global socialism would be like Cuba – a weakly industrial society, where medieval serfs suffer under an oppressive centralised regime. Greens frequently hold Cuba up as some kind of climate action icon, but the idea of the entire planet being run like Cuba is just too horrible to imagine. Even The Guardian admits Socialist Cuba has never been able to feed itself, they rely heavily on food imports, and always have. Cuba suffers the curse of collectivised agriculture producing poor yields, same as everyone else who has ever tried it.
Lenin was never against money. His main beef was that 5% owned most things.
I think it’s 1% that owns most things these days.
I understand why a repressive society like Tsarist Russia tried socialism, I strongly suspect Tsarist Russia was not so different to modern Russia, except in the 19th century Russian oligarchs had royal titles. But in free societies there is no excuse for resenting the rich. If you want money, go make some.
Wow! I love your last sentence.
I think Lenin was referring to the rest of the world and not just Tsarist Russia.
I’m not a ‘commie’ but I think what is happening in the world at the moment, sucks.
I have worked and am leading a modest lifestyle in retirement. There are a whole bunch of people that aren’t.
Hmm. Why does it suck?
Ask some people in the EU if their winter is going to be warm or if they have a job. Same for the UK. Ask people in burgeoning authoritarian conditions what life is like. Australia, New Zealand. Ask minimum wage earners in the USA ($2.50 an hour) what life is like.
I guess it depends on where you are viewing things from. From the top or from the bottom. I guess you are viewing things from the ‘I’m alright Jack, f@ck you’ perspective.
My wife just advised me that a major bank in the UK may require invoices before they release your money to you. It’s to protect you from scammers and some such.
yeah handy excuse isnt it?
You can always find people whose situation isn’t perfect. There really hasn’t been a point in time when you couldn’t. I’ve known people earning minimum wage in the US ($2.50 is just made up) who were quite happy with their life. I’ve known people who were very rich but they thought life sucked. You make out of life what you will. Your last sentence says a lot about what you are about.
Riiiight. People are so happy with their minimum wage, in the USA, they are not striking or leaving these places that pay them a happy wage. BTW, those wages would be illegal in Australia, New Zealand or Europe.
That shows just how much you don’t know. Most people work at a minimum wage job for only a short time in their life. They work into a better paying job over time. They are usually young without much experience and that minimum wage paying job is the start of their work life.
Piffle.
I can’t understand why you don’t go and live in Cuba then?
I said nothing about liking communism. I have mentioned on this site before that my grandfather had his hotel looted by the Soviets. He was dragged off to a gulag where he subsequently died.
I would politely suggest that you go f@ck yourself.
I have zero interest in going to Cuba or to the USA, for that matter.
Making a comment like yours is something that a teenager would make. Grow up.
You don’t like communism, you just want to convert where you live into a communist paradise.
It seems you are unhappy with the Soviet experience a nation that strived to make everyone equal that means almost everybody was poor which was why they were a miserable people high on suicides and alcoholism rates.
Most Teens in America start at minimum or just above minimum wage since that is a beginner’s employment which I was able to live easily on $5.00/hour wage in 1986 renting an apartment and owned a Truck and ate and slept well.
Eventually in just 3 years my wage went up to about $11.75/hour and higher when my part time work became permanent later in the year with full medical coverage and a state retirement program that ended in 2016 when I went on Medical Retirement.
I have always been happy with being “poor” as teen as I knew I can go up the ladder over time as it was a common experience in America especially when staying away from drugs, smoking and other dumb criminal activities so many people hurt themselves over.
You should try running a business. By the time you’ve paid all the costs involved with employing people, (who don’t have to work for you by the way- they are perfectly at liberty to do something else), you would find that it’s not so easy to make a profit out of it. Here in the UK, the true cost is roughly double what you actually pay someone- there’s NI, pensions, sick pay, holiday pay, insurance- just for starters. Then you’ve got to get them to actually produce enough to show a profit. I gave up on the idea long ago and only ever used self employed people in my business. Out of interest, the top 10% pay over 50% of net tax revenues as well as creating wealth and jobs. Maybe you should move to Cuba.
PS- the idea of Australia, NZ and Canada being examples of Capitalist countries gave me a good giggle. Wake up.
What is the obsession with me moving to Cuba?
‘ the idea of Australia, NZ and Canada being examples of Capitalist countries gave me a good giggle. Wake up.’
They aren’t capitalist countries?
Pray tell who is capitalist then?
None that I can think of really- they are all increasingly authoritarian and pursuing ever more insane green/left policies. Would you seriously consider the UK govt to be capitalistic/ right wing given the tax hikes, levies, green subsidies, benefit increases over the past 2-3 years? Every pub, garden centre, shop, cafe, etc. I see out here are advertising for staff and I know several business/ self employed people and they are all- every single one- struggling to find staff and having to work 7 days to keep things going because they can’t afford to pay enough to tempt people to come off benefits and actually work, (even though everyone keeps saying how poor they are and there are those that can’t eat every day!?) Does this sound like a truly Capitalist country?
I think of capitalism as working for yourself and making extra money to better yourself. the harder you work the more money. Maybe simplistic.
Communism means you get a share of everyone’s labour. Communism doesn’t work because of people. Many are lazy and like to ride on the backs of others. It discourages the hard workers because they get the same money as the sh!t next door who does little. Might as well cruise. Overall production suffers and the country goes to sh!t. Government steps in with whips.
In other words, it’s taxes and welfare. It’s also a belief that you are entitled to be paid more than your labor is worth. IE minimum watge.
It’s because Cuba already has the system that you want to live under.
I see you are one of those people who actually believe that anything that isn’t pure communism is capitalist.
If you can’t see all the socialism/communism that already exists around you, it can only be because you refuse to look.
There are not real capitalist countries in the modern world. The best approximation were America and England of 19cen. We are living under so called “mixed economy” that has both capitalistic and socialistic features. But this mixture is not like Polish vodka that has fifty-fifty shares of alchohol and water, but rather a socialist horsman on a capitalist horse. Capitalism works and earns, socialism grabs, destrubutes and spends. Capitalism has money but all political power belongs to socialism.
The horsman is grotesquely large and fat and getting larger and fatter every day.
It’s a miracle how the horse is still alive..
So you prefer socialist propaganda to the real world. I’m not surprised.
wow what world do you live in?
basic wage casual tends to make you unable to get anywhere ever
you cant afford a TAFE course for example, when every cent goes to rent food and bills
Your correct, to set the record straight unless you’re making tips In a restaurant minimum wage is any where $7.00 + to $15.00 + and 90+% of those making min. Wage are live at home teenagers or college Students.
Even the people working for tips do very well.
How would it be better under Socialism? All that has ever done is make everyone poorer. It generates nothing and feeds no one. It is entirely dependent on Capitalist pigs to tax ‘until the pips squeak’.
Read what I said. I said nothing about liking communism.
You state over and over again how you don’t like communism, however you also keep demanding more communism.
This might be the most immature conversation I’ve ever seen on this website. Thanks for contributing. If you don’t think capitalism is flawed, you’re a fool. It just happens to be much much better than any other socioeconomic system on earth.
Alexy, minimum wage in the US hasn’t been $2.50 since 1978. It was recently pushed up to $15 per hour in the state where I live. It is so much that we now have adults doing jobs that once were intended for high school students and beginners in the work force. The current reason that minimum wage earners aren’t happy is because our current democrat administration has caused record inflation that makes that $15 feel like $2.50.
Absolute wages are meaningless without factoring in the cost of living and exchange rates.
15 US dollars are currently equivalent to about 21 Australian dollars.
Why do you believe people would be better off unemployed rather than working the current minimum wage?
Those “wages” are illegal, here. Your ignorance should be embarrassing, but I doubt that will stop you.
The vast majority of people who make minimum wage are high school and college students. The next biggest group are people who’s spouse is the major breadwinner for the family.
Minimum wage in the US is $7.25 though many states have significantly higher rates. See https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state
I heard that some restaurants pay $2.50. A$21.38 in Australia.
In many restaurants, staff receive “tips” or “gratuities” from customers and these performance based rewards actually comprise the major part of their compensation.
In many circumstances at good restaurants, staff can receive an order of magnitude more pay than what is earned in Australia and they also pay less tax. Customers generally receive better service.
Yup. When my wife worked as a waitress years ago she was assigned 3 tables for four that would typically turn over 3-4 times during a shift. That’s 36 -48 meals. These days that would be $40 x 36 = $1,440. Tips of 20% are standard so that’s at least $288 in a shift. In some restaurants tips are shared with bussers and dishwashers, but many wait staff make quite good money.
When you’re served in a upscale (really expensive) restaurant, your server may well be driving that new Mercedes in the back of the parking lot while the restaurant is pay minimum wage.
However, the prospect of a tip doesn’t always result in quality service. Many have come to expect a tip regardless of the quality of service. I remember once getting exceptionally poor service in a restaurant in New York City, and the waiter was irate that I stiffed him.
In the US, a business can pay $2.50 when tips are involved. But the business must ensure that the final pay, including tips, is at least the minimum wage. If not, the business must provide the difference.
Actual “sub”-minimum wage workers (i.e. tipped workers) tend to protest rather loudly when politicians try to change them to being regular untipped workers. They don’t want the CUT in pay.
Just curious, Alexy. How much do Australian waitstaff make in tips above that A$21.38.
In the U.S., restaurants must pay minimum wage via a combination of a basic wage plus tips. After that threshold is passed, the waitstaff get all the tip money above that.
This link is to the current U.S. minimum wage by State for tipped employees.
Tipped Employee Minimum Wage Laws By State 2022 (minimum-wage.org)
At the very best restaurants, the waitstaff can make $200 to $300 a night. At the midrange restaurants, maybe $100 to $150. Our favorite waiter when we go out to our favorite higher end special event restaurant has made a nice career there and supports a wife and three kids. The tabs there can run $200 to $300 per table (or more!) and he is so good – we won’t go unless he is scheduled, and we request seating at one of his tables – his tips usually run 20% – 25% of the tab.
At the sports bars or casual dining places, you will generally find college students as the waitstaff. They can work evenings and make enough for school and living expenses.
I hope that gives you a better picture of the U.S. restaurant biz, Alexy. You seemed to have mistaken ideas of how the staff is paid.
BTW, most fast-food places in the U.S are currently paying well above minimum wage just to get workers to show up. The minimum wage in my State is over $8.00 per hour but the help wanted signs at those places tout starting wages of $12 and $13 per hour. The fast-food workers aren’t tipped, so that’s their rate. Fast-food jobs are entry level jobs.
Australia is not a tipping society.
Alexy, I thought that might be so, and I figured you weren’t aware of why Australia pays A$21+ per hour and – I think I did see one State with $2.50 per hour on that list – US waitstaff is paid so much less. But then the staff makes up the rest in tips.
So the information you were working from was accurate, I think for one State only, but it wasn’t telling you the whole story on the difference in final pay between Oz and the US.
You will ALWAYS find people who exploit others regardless of the political system and anyone claiming otherwise is just naive. The problem in today’s society is that there’s plenty of money to help those in need but the state is extremely bad at getting it to them.
The vast majority of people do care about others and want to help as much as they can, but the state is inherently driven by politics and bureaucracy, with little accountability against failure. This rewards inefficiency and drives up costs, which just turns into a downward spiral.
The UK is a great example of how poor the state is at doing things. It’s those who work for the state who now take the greatest benefit from it, including gold-plated pensions, which the private sector can only dream of. The irony here is that it’s those who are meant to be helping the needy, i.e. the state, who are the ones mainly responsible for taking the money out of the system that could and should be going to those who need it more then they do.
In a socialist system there is no incentive to work efficiently and politics and bureaucracy take over everything. The system then fails. The Chinese worked this out with their market-driven philosophy, but of course the state still runs things. Very badly.
Perhaps I expressed it poorly, but that was the point I was trying to make. The system sucks for many, no matter the system. No love for communism here.
I got what you meant, Alexy. The only thing you got wrong was the minimum wage figure for the United States.
Something I came across on reddit. Not all things on reddit are true. Not all things on reddit are lies.
Well there is your problem…Reddit 😉
The “system” only sucks for those who don’t , or won’t engage with the system. If you don’t understand capitalism or refuse to engage in capitalism, it will suck for you. Those who know how to engage in capitalism, and are motivated to do so, live very well. In the other systems, there is little to motivate an individual to engage.
The problem is, the things you push to help the poor, actually hurt the poor.
As Thomas Sowell puts it:
Government is the worst way to do just about anything. Especially charity.
The minimum wage in the USA is $7.25/hour
Harry, Alexy was working off the minimum restaurants must pay. I believe Alexy had no idea what actual pay with tips could be in the US. (I commented on that just above.)
Most States have a higher minimum wage than the Federal minimum of $7.25 and most businesses must pay above those higher State minimums just to get some to show up to work.
You realize that the Euro countries that have things the worst are the social welfare states, basically practicing communism without a gun pointed at your head.
The UK has a current unemployment rate of 3.85%. Anything less than 5% is considered “full employment”.
What is the U.K. labor participation rate, Duane? You need both figures to make sense of the job situation.
$2.50 an hour minimum wage in the US? What decade are you living in? I started working in 1982 as a teen and the minimum wage was $3.35 an hour back then, 40 years ago.
And you think these coming winter problems are created by … capitalists?
Minimum wage in the US is more like $12.50.hr. Regardless, minimum wage is one of the worst ideas that the left has ever come up with.
If your labor isn’t worth the minimum wage to your employer, you are going to be fired, and you should be.
One constant with socialists, they are always convinced that some body else owes them a living.
Minimum wage varies from $7.25 in some southern states to $15.50 in more liberal states. However, that is relative to the local cost of living, which is a lot lower in Gulfport than in Seattle.
Minimum wage by Federal law is $7.25/hour and nearly 2/3 of the states are at least $8.00/hour and 50% of the states at least $10.00/hour.
People at minimum wage level can qualify for Food money especially with children in the same house and food banks helps the needy get free box of food.
There is other low-cost support for people as well.
That’s a lie, Alexsky. The minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. 30 states have higher minimum wages – where I live it’s $14.49.
Unfortunately, there’s a strong association between high unemployment and a high minimum wage – employers can’t afford to pay a high minimum wage for entry level jobs. Where I live most restaurants fired all the bus boys (the people who collect dirty dishes and clean tables). The wait staff does table cleaning now. Restaurant service is markedly worse and many restaurants are downright filthy.
Good intentions by politicians who don’t think things through leads to bad results – just like Socialism.
When I was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, fast food restaurants had the drink machine behind the counter and they had an employee who filled the drink orders. If you wanted a refill, you had to pay for it.
Sometime in the 80’s, there was a big increase in the minimum wage. Within a few years, almost all fast food restaurants had moved the drink machine to the customer side of the counter and there was one fewer employee behind the counter.
I don’t know how many fast food places there are in the country. If there are a million such places, that’s a million fewer employees.
There are a whole bunch of people that aren’t… leading a modest lifestyle in retirement.
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Maybe so, but there’s a whole lot of retirees buying new cars, boats, RVs, airplanes, and touring the world on river boats and cruise ships.
And the poor working stiffs are paying their FICA taxes supporting all that wonderful existence. A lot of the so-called baby boomers are living the life of Riley.
I was simply making the point that there are have and have nots under various systems. Far more are in the have not situation.
And under socialism it would be pretty much everyone in the have nots.
Andy – correct. As Marx said ‘ socialism is one small step away from communism’. Take an affluent Venezuela which elected a ‘socialist’ President in Hugo Chavez. Through his total dictates he soon brought the country to its knees. He decided that there was to be a ‘fair’ payment system for everyone, including farmers. Those farmers who sat on their backsides and didn’t produce a bean were paid equally to farmers who worked day and night. It did not take long for the hardworking farmers to spend the day drinking coffee. Business owners were treated the same. Hence absolutely nothing on the shelves for sale.
And under socialism it would be pretty much everyone in the have nots.
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Years ago where I worked, one of the machinists celebrated his 25th anniversary of escaping from Czechoslovakia. He said to me, “You just don’t understand how good you have it here.”
His wife also worked there, and she said about the 1993 collapse of the USSR, “I feel so sorry for those people, they’re going to have to work now.”
There will always be people who don’t want to paid, regardless of whether they decide to work. Those people will always be poor.
Capitalist countries aren’t divided into ‘haves and have nots.’ Capitalist countries are divided into ‘earners and non earners.’ In the U.S., you have according to what you earn. If you have little, odds are you earn little. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
some babyboomers yes
but a lot less than is assumed.
One think for sure, governments are spending beyond their means.
Boomers by and large aren’t hurting yet but austerity will pay their progeny a visit.
Just because you worked is not proof that you are entitled to anything other than what you earned while working.
That’s pretty much what I’m living on, Mark; what I saved and invested while working. My wife gets zero in Social Security, but also has a nice retirement portfolio
I do get a pittance of Social Security. If that was my only source of retirement income, I’d be much better off forgoing the SS check and going to work at Wendy’s or McDonalds or Home Depot.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill
My reading is that Tsarist Russia was hurrying, as fast as it could given its cultural history, to emulate the United States. It just never got the chance to succeed.
In my humble opinion I think there is a fixation on labels so that Tsarist Russian is considered different to Bolshevik Russia, for example. In practical terms they are the same: Top down autocracies, using the same solutions. The Industrial Revolution was unique in that it was bottom up and an important turning point was the English Civil War and the end of Autocratic Top Down rule. Unfortunately Socialism tends to characterize bottom up (worker led) as selfish profit driven individualism and cannot see that all of nature works this way and natural spontaneous collectivism is the outcome of freely associating individuals. Freely associating individuals spontaneously cooperating was actively and forcibly discouraged during the C19 debacle. A perfect example of a socialist and what happens is Trofim Lysenko.
…And, I telling you stuff you know already, but what the heck.
Socialist/communist revolutions just create different “royalty”, like the Kim family in North Korea.
Yes, especially in Russia even though the Russian oligarchs make sure their money is kept safely away in the West! In any case, Lenin knew he depended on the cash his middle-class supporters gave him. And he cleverly invented two kinds of roubles: the version everyone else got and the one his immediate fellow party members got. The latter was worth up to 80 times more than ordinary roubles and could be spent in the special GUM stores that stocked western goods.
The glorious communist system thus ensured that everyone got the same number of roubles in their wages. It was just that some people were more equal than others.
That system was in place in China on my first visit there. They had “friendship” stores. LOL, the USD was coveted and viewed as “hard” currency to them.
Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”
Lenin was the typical deluded megalomaniacal dictator (the only kind) who
ignores that truism & presents their “system” WITH THEMSELVES IN
CHARGE as being the solution to whatever they label as the current evil of
the day. Today, that evil bogeyman- climate change- isn’t even a real
problem but it’s been proclaimed to be such. So it’s standard fare for
dictators to be for power & wealth as long as they’re in charge, which is
what the Greens want today.
“5%”
In 1906, Pareto observed that 20% of the Italians owned 80% of the
property in Italy. This fact was later generalized into the Pareto principle-
the 80–20 rule. It probably was a higher ratio in Russia. If Lenin had been
part of the 20%, methinks he wouldn’t have objected so much!
I don’t see a difference between Greens and Communists. Don’t like either. Not that keen on other parties, either
I think that the National Socialist German Worker’s party was pretty green. They were also pretty socialist.
Anyone claiming that they weren’t socialist, just needs to study their name, and things like ‘Volkswagen’, which means ‘people’s car’. It’s pretty obvious when you look.
Under socialism, it becomes more like the 0.1%.
The bigger government gets, the more concentrated wealth becomes. That has always been, and always will be true.
Alexy,
“His main beef was … ” that he couldn’t control anyone that owned enough (had enough resources) to control themselves.
The percentage of people in extreme poverty is the lowest it has ever been thanks to cheep reliable fossil fuel energy.
Agreed.
Socialism, where everybody is equally miserable except the elite.
Indeed Czar Nicolas was violently replaced by a rather more brutally death dealing ‘Czar’ Joseb Jughashvili (known as ‘Stalin’) who felt his own supremacy was threatened by Red Army commander Lev Bronstein (called ‘Leon Trotsky’) until arranging to have his potential rival brained by an ice ax; all of course under soaring notions of liberation of the common folk from their burdens under traditional kingships. But as recognized by the French: ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.’ [The more things change, the more it’s all the same.]
You are simplifying (many pages are needed to get the full horrifying situation)
Essentially you are correct. I grew up in the Russian community in Australia and the oldies were always on about the Czar would be back.
They got their wish, Czar Putin. I always laugh thinking about it.
One of my favourite shows, “The Blacklist”, that is my theory of why Elizabeth Keen is so important – she’s a direct descendant of Tsar Nicolas. The idea one of the kids survived that awful night is an old story.
“brained by an ice axe”
An ice pick. ie a device for dealing with ice blocks. Not the same as an ice axe,
Yup – word to the wise, never try to clean your ears with an ice pick!
I have been told that one should never try to put anything in their ear smaller than their elbow.
I heard a recounting ~30 years ago that stated the weapon was an “ice axe”, a common mountaineering tool. The Wikipedia article also claims “ice axe” with corroborating detail from the assassin’s statements made at trial.
Trotsky survived the attack for more than a day and stopped his bodyguards from beating his attacker to death, stating “he needs to be made to answer questions”.
Trotsky had survived several earlier attempts, all ordered by Stalin and carried out by NKVD agents.
The assassin, Ramón Mercader, was convicted of murder in Mexico and served over 19 years in prison. On his return to the USSR in 1961 Leonid Brezhnev awarded him the Order of Lenin, the Gold Star, and the title “Hero of the Soviet Union” for his “special deed”.
I think it’s a matter of semantics and translation. The ice axe proper, of that time, had a longer shaft (waist high) with a metal pick and adze combination, the shorter ice pick was a handier tool used to break up large chunks of ice – not really very different and I think the terms are probably interchangeable, certainly with the modern short ice axe.
funny from my viewpoint capitalism gets the exact same result, majority miserable and a few fatcats doing very well off the blood sweat n tears of the less fortunate
Careful saying that here. They will be labelling you a commie and shipping you off to Cuba.
Some above are just trying to convey to you that what is promoted as a so-called utopia or utopian society does not exist in reality and is actually quite miserable.
For whatever the reasons, Cubans risk their lives to get to the U.S. even to this day.
I never mentioned Utopia or that communism was some sort of Utopia. When you mention that things are not perfect in the west, it’s taken as an attack on their personal belief system. The same people complain about authoritarianism in their own countries.
Various embargos keep Cuba poor. The upper echelon is ok but the balance of people want a better life.
You just feel that by introducing communism, without actually calling it communism, you can improve the lot of those who would rather not work.
When you mention that there are problems in the west, it appears as a suggestion that there is a fix to the problems. There is no fix.
Attempts to fix the perceived western problems by moving towards some type of forced shared prosperity harms everyone in the long term.
This is because ‘forced shared prosperity’ does not exist.
We just wonder why you want to turn where ever you live into Cuba, when it would be so much easier for you to just go to Cuba.
I would far rather be poor in Europe or the US than in Cuba.
Who wants to be poor no matter which country? Cuba again.
Would Venezuela be an acceptable substitute for Cuba?
It’s just that the solutions you propose always end up creating more poor.
I never proposed a solution. I don’t have the skills for that. I do know when people are being used and stepped on.
You wanted it higher. That’s a solution.
Being paid what your labor is worth is not being used or stepped on.
It is my impression that most of the US poor own smartphones, and color TVs, and often have cars. So, poor is relative to the standard of living.
In the US, the official “poverty” line is defined as a percentage of the median income.
In other words, as wealth goes up, so does the “poverty” line.
As a result, the “poor” in the US, would be upper middle class in much of the rest of the world.
That poverty line as a percentage of median income is the same in Canada and Europe. Always 25% of the population is considered “poor” by definition. The UK even considers something called “relative poverty” whereby if you don’t have 2 pairs of rainboots and do not go on vacation each year (can’t stay with relatives either), you are considered poor.
The only way to have increased “equality” is for everyone to suffer huge drops in income.
Several years ago I worked with someone that immigrated from China (legally) and he told me that one of the reasons he chose the U.S. is that even the poor were fat.
He also retired out west, after selling his string of restaurants and collecting his pension, to be closer to his sons and daughters which he thought would not have been possible in China.
I don’t know that the majority of Americans were miserable under free enterprise, until Joe Biden came along. Now they are, but it’s not because of the economic system, it’s because there is a political party, the Democrats, who are currently interfering in the economic system and are causing serious damage as a result.
Free enterprise works just fine for everyone when it’s working. It’s when the system is not free that problems occur, and government interference is the problem.
👍 👍 Well said, Tom.
I’d argue that globally the “middle class” has never been so large as today. It is certainly under attack.
Extreme (or ‘pure’) capitalism is as bad as extreme socialism. Just as well that no country on earth has ever practiced extreme capitalism – every single capitalist economy that has existed relied on some form of government intervention, to a greater or lesser extent. In effect, every economy labelled ‘capitalist’ is, in fact, a mixture of capitalist and socialist ideas. Now can we please all grow up and move on?
Interestingly, though, almost all ‘capitalist’ countries are much, much more wealthy than any communist countries. In fact, the poor in capitalist countries are much better off than the average person in a communist country. Makes you think.
Also note that almost all capitalist countries are freedom-loving democracies. Makes you think, too. That is, if you have a working brain.
There will always be those who are so upset that some people have more than they do, that they are willing to bring the whole system down.
Those who would rather not work, never do well under capitalism.
Bernie Sanders proved that those who would rather not work don’t do well under pure communism either.
He was tossed out of two communes for not working enough. That’s when he became a closet capitalist and politician (spouting the fairness of communism/socialism) with several houses and millions in the bank.
Apparently, we still have a society that requires able bodied people to work. Leftists are trying to change that so that more people are dependent on the largess of government.
Bernie is a grifter.
A successful grifter. You don’t get a few nice houses and millions in other assets by standing on the corner hawking counterfeit Rolexes.
He learned his business acumen from the mob and he’s been ruthlessly screwing his constituents for decades. They are apparently clueless or he found a way to “fix” the competition.
On what data do you base the claim that a majority in the U.S. are “miserable”?
Now gents, let’s cut ozzie some slack about having first consulted a representative survey. No doubt he’ll have looked in the mirror before announcing that miserable outlook. And he will have been standing upside down on the globe at the time so that too may have affected his pessimistic conclusion.
ozzie has a history of hating all things American and capitalist.
majority miserable and a few fatcats doing very well
Seems to me that if that’s the way every system ends up, it says more about the human condition than the system. I’ll take the system that at least gives me a chance to change my station.
This ^
I love this quote. “for the set of all things that are profitable is smaller than the set of all things that are useful to humanity.”
Wow, absolutely true. Unfortunately, the quote is not complete. Here is the rest of the quote.
“Unfortunately, the set of all things that people, who have no real incentive to work, are willing to make is even smaller still.”
So maybe there would have been less production.
One other quick point. Einstein based his Special Theory of Relativity on a thought experiment, “what happens when someone falls off a ladder.”
So now we see the entire continuum of thought experiments. On the one end, a thought experiment so grounded in reality that it changed the way we understand the universe itself. On the other end, a thought experiment (in this article) so completely disconnected from any reality that it is is nothing more than some writers internal fantasy.
Sober up or take your meds. You are incoherent.
Wow, you have problems don’t you.
Just because you don’t understand someone doesn’t mean you can be rude to them.
Seems to be common on this site. Ask griff, simon and others. I was annoyed by his previous comments. So sh__t me.
griff, simon and these others have earned the disdain shown to them by repeatedly posting the same lies.
The same can be said about Alexy.
He is consistently wrong with his data and apparently loves him some socialism.
He pops up from time to defend socialism, all the while telling us that he doesn’t support socialism.
Lies….. haha you are too funny. Whenever I ask you to point out where I’m wrong you run for the hills. An example…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/11/biden-falsely-links-kentucky-floods-to-climate-change-reality-check-floods-have-not-increased-in-frequency-or-intensity-white-house-ignores-pee/
Poor simon, is your life so utterly meaningless that the only thing left for you is following me around and biting at my heels?
Living inside your head is fun. But what is more fun is making you look like the dishonest pillock you are. (No offence)
You think you are living in my head? You’re the guy who keeps following me around.
Perhaps you should get some professional help for these delusions of yours.
Ah the colluuuusion clown appears . Have you found colluuuusion yet…..haha
You are so dumb.
Boring.
Coming from a one trick pony like yourself, that’s funny.
Exactly, you really are. Have you found colluuuusion yet or have you finally come to the conclusion it was all made up?
I wonder if TDS-boi wet himself after learning about the FBI raid.
That probably encourages him to believe there was some colluuuusion. He is that dumb.
You are a little angry dude.
On occasion, when someone presses the wrong button. I guess I’m human.
I seem to be getting many red points. I wonder if they are valuable in some way?
It’s an easy excuse to say that you are only human. Not sure what I said earlier that pressed your button. All I asked is why you thought things sucked? I was actually curious. But you went crazy.
I don’t disagree that there may be issues. We may even agree about the facts. But life is what you make of it. The old half full versus half empty. And it makes a big difference in how you view life. You seem obviously unhappy. I’m sorry for you.
StevenF is correct in his view on the thpught experiment in the article. The article uses so many assumptions, cognitive biases and huge amounts of wishful thinking – so much so that the conclusions are laughable. This is not a valid thought experiment, in that the article writer has not researched or tested each area or stage of his thinking – it might make for an interesting ‘alternative reality’ setting for fiction, but doesn’t work or even hold together as a thought experiment.
Made perfect sense to me.
The problem comes from trying to view everything through a socialist filter.
That was the General Relativity Theory (of gravity), noting that a falling person feels as though they are “weightless”.
The Special Theory’s thought experiment was more like “How long does it look like a photon takes to bounce between two mirrors for different observers moving with a constant relative velocity vector ?”.
Thanks. I had my theories backwards.
Interesting picture. I understand Lenin’s corpse was quite green when it was finally decently disposed of. Wish more greens were disposed of.
You dispose of them by taking away their voting rights. Good luck with that.
It seems that the mob has decided that you are not a good person and will now down-vote everything you say. Of course, the potential alternative is a civil war in which all their rights will be permanently nullified.
No, you dispose of them by having them charged, put on trial, and sentenced by a jury of their peers for breaking laws. Many of the laws would be felonies which removes their right to vote in national elections (at the least) in the U.S.
Rather extreme for voting the way you don’t want.
If they just stuck to voting the way we don’t want, then that wouldn’t be a problem. However they have a track record of fraud, theft, malfeasance and domestic terrorism – somewhat extreme, wouldn’t you say?
What utter tosh
Even for the wettest of socialist dreams, this statement takes some beating
I wonder. Would a socialist world even have climate scientists, or scientists in general? My impression is that socialists focus on things like agriculture, mining, manufacturing, blue-collar tasks with immediate use. I doubt that a socialist world would even consider concepts like global warming and climate change. Perhaps they would have meteorologists to assist agriculture, but not climate researchers.
The fascinating aspect is that this is just another proposed solution that lacks any and all degree of substance. The solutions “paradigm change””system change” “systemic turnover” “political system change” do not heat your home, do not harvest the wheat ” do not trade the rice ore and do not power your sockets. They do not insulate your walls, or get you to work. We just have to deal with changed and changing weather like humans have done for over 200.000 years.
Europe has been under modern (?) socialist control for quite a while and the results speak for themselves.
Fraudulent, negligent and deluded individuals don’t make good decisions for their electorate.
Besides, behind every great socialist is a lot of hard working, tax paying capitalists.
The party name by which the politicians go is not really that important. It’s the extent of their philosophical belief in central control. Communists believe in direct state control, socialists also, but possibly dictated prices instead of directly running factories. But there is a problem with central control in that it can easily get top heavy, inefficient, politicized, and a burden on the workings of society. On the other hand a market system with individual profit motivation results in many people constantly fixing the supply chain, if it is broken, so that they can “make a few bucks”. The system ends up supplying more of what the population demands with less “overhead”…. by using Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
Communist China failed for years until they enabled individuals to make a profit from their production instead of their production being confiscated by the state.
So far in recorded history, the greatest successes of improvement in living standards such as the Silk Road, the Fertile Crescent, the Industrial revolution, seem to have a basis in individual profit motive…while other epochs such as the Dark Ages were based on large scale governmental or church control…..
The WEF is a body that believes in central control….another in a long list of factions who believe central control will be great cuz we are going to do it right this time.
Eric,
As those who read Rupert Darwill’s “The Age of Global Warming: A History” will know, Maurice Strong and others were faced with the reluctance of Soviet Russia and Communist China to subscribe to their environmental goals and so a deal was struck at the Villach Conference in Austria in 1985.
Marxism put little economic value on Nature and the environment.
The deal was what is now known as the Key UN Principle- “Comparative Obligations but Differentiated Responsibilities”.
Translated,this means that for some 165 Developing Countries where there is a clash between economic imperatives and environmental obligations the former prevail.
So here we are with socialist and Marxist countries having no obligations to reduce emissions and 28 Developed Countries (Annex 1) footing the bill for the “historical injustice” of the Industrial Revolution.
My theory is the explanation is even weirder than the obvious inference that Maurice Strong was just a scoundrel who wanted to give Marxists a pass.
There seems to be an idea in Western green circles that it’s OK to let developing countries off the hook, because as soon as they see how successful our green programmes are, they’ll copy our example without further prompting.
That was my biggest shock from reading Climategate – they all actually believe in the nonsense they are peddling.
Yes, agreed. This ‘force of example’ stuff is just utterly weird. Why does anyone think it? Even the true believers should have woken up at the end of COP26, when it was perfectly clear that none of the fastest growing biggest emitters had any intention of reducing, regardless of the example and the entreaties of the West.
Not that the West, in any case, shows any signs of reducing in the first place!
The image at the head of the New Statesman article is photo-shopped to make the ‘satanic’ cooling towers glow menacingly 😆.
It is actually the Jänschwalde lignite power station in Germany one of lignite plants that is being prepared to fire up as part of an emergency plan.
Hilarious :-). If they are photoshopped they did a good job.
The link doesn’t work for me.
Putting all this together, the most we can say is that this is mental masturbation
Hmm. Somewhat along the wishful thinking/wish fulfilment fantasies of the young teen. The kind you grow out of as you get older and more mature.
It has been my experience that most people don’t actually mature. They just get old and wrinkled.
Funny how synergy works. Just seen a news article that Manchester University allowed a PhD student to submit a final thesis detailing his personal masturbation over a period of about 3 months. Seems like students are all doing it these days; either with computer modelling or submitted papers!
Guardian: “Construction of a huge electric car battery factory that has attracted tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer cash and been hailed as a flagship project of Boris Johnson’s levelling up policy has been put on “life support” to cut spending, leaked internal documents suggest.”
Local crematorium is testing use of lithium used car batteries in order to increase efficiency in their disposal business. Initialy temperatures of 2000C have melted their combustion chamber, now to the delight of relatives they obtained permission from local council to do it in the open air so those present can witness remnants are truly raising towards heavens.
If you ever see a Lithium fire, run away from it – Lithium fumes are toxic as hell.
…and almost impossible to put out. I have handled lithium metal in the lab, and was advised not to try extinguishing it if it caught fire, but merely to dump sand on it and let it burn itself out.
It’s ‘pie in the sky’ thinking all the way down – they interviewed the manager a little while ago and he admitted the factories were being planned and built now for a new battery technology that hasn’t even been invented or researched and, at best, is at least 10-20 years away. It’s absolute madness.
A few years before Estonia’s independence (1991) from the Soviet Union, there was a news item in Finnish Helsingin Sanomat. A local Estonia man was smoking and threw the cigarette butt into the river next to him. The river and the ditch of a nearby Soviet military base caught fire. The activity of Soviet air bases was measured based on the jet fuel used. But there were a lot of broken planes, so they dumped jet fuel in the ditch to keep the bosses happy. This is one of the worst stories I remember from Soviet times, but not the only one.
In regards to the idea of problems getting fixed sooner (eg. AGW) under soviet communism there was a rampant sort of for profit responsible for many results. A local manager reports good results (potato production is above quota) and he is rewarded. Report the truth and he is likely off to a gulag.
I toured behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of the USSR. The pollution was terrible. The people were miserable and fearful. Brown coal was the fuel of choice and the emissions from the numerous coal-fired plants were dreadful. Efficiency and productivity, let alone environmental concerns, didn’t figure. If communism had triumphed the earth would have turned from a blue planet to a brown planet.
Sci Fi author Isaac Asimov’s wife, on visiting Eastern Europe during Soviet times, turned to her husband and said “This is Mordor”.
Bet he was annoyed that she couldn’t think of a reference from one of his own books!
Socialism has lifted no one out of poverty but the bureaucrat. It has, everywhere it’s been tried, neutered the middle class, placed the many into subsistence life, and because supply has never kept pace with demand, created State to consumer competition through underground grey and black markets. So, everyone’s struggle is to remain “securely” in their social and economic pigeonhole as upward mobility is as rare as hen’s teeth.
“Socialism always begins with a utopian vision for the brotherhood of man and ends with people eating their pets”
-Toby Young
It would be interesting to see how semiconductor technology would have developed without the cold war and profit motive as drivers. We might be at the germanium discrete transistor stage by now but I doubt it. At least there’d be no Tw@ter so socialism can’t be all bad.
There has always been a huge free market demand for electronics.
One of the first uses of transistors was in pocket radios, because they were more reliable than vacuum tubes and used only a tiny fraction of the amount of energy, meaning the batteries could be smaller. They were also cheaper to build.
For the same makers of consumer electronics pushed for the development of integrated circuits. (Not all integrated circuits are digital, many of the earlier ones were analog amplifiers)
Speaking of digital, makers of computers were also huge supporters of early integrated circuits. By packing more circuits into a smaller area, they were able to increase clock speeds. Reducing the size of the transistors also enabled higher switching rates.
Beyond that, integrated circuits drew very little power compared to discrete transistors.
Early computers had chilled water pumped through then in order to control heat. Reducing the amount of energy being consumed meant cooling systems could be smaller, cheaper and more reliable.
The idea that NASA, or the military were solely responsible for the development of the small scale electronics is total nonsense,
Marxism is winning people. And we are sitting back and letting it.
This is true. I don’t think most people have been paying attention while the marxist/socialists undermine our society and culture. The underminers have made great strides. They are on the brink of victory. We should start paying attention if we value our personal freedoms because the underminers intend to take them away.
Fortunately, it looks like people *are* starting to pay attention in the United States. Whether this saves us from slavery, remains to be seen.
Perhaps rallying around Trump will accomplish the goal.
They have learned to not call themselves marxists or even socialists.
They claim that their only goal is to help people who need help. And on the surface, many of the problems seem like good ideas. (Such as a minimum wage.) The arguments against them are complex and not always easy to understand.
Beyond that is the idea that forcing other people to pay for all the good things you want to do, is quite attractive to many people.
Socialism/communism has always had the idea that “other” people would pay. Eventually it works its way down to everyone but, that never is stated out loud.
I don’t have direct knowledge but, I have heard that many of the European countries have taxation rates above China’s. They might not have the CCP but, what difference does it make?
In 1990 when Germany reunified it became glaringly obvious what 3 decades of Socialism had done to the environment. The city of Leipzig in former East Germany was the most polluted place on the continent and it has cost the Germans 100s of billions Euros to clean it up, and they are still not finished.
Incidentally, the fact that (West) Germany had the resources to do that decontamination over a sustained period of many years is because it was a free-market Capitalist economy that generated those resources. The essence of the Good Samaritan is that he was rich, else he could not have done what he did.
The writer of that piece lives in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
He’s probably right. Under Socialism, we’d all starve to death. Hey presto- no more problems!
The only people who believe socialism works are dedicated socialists. The rest of us who are prepared to consider all options, are not impressed with socialist regimes past efforts and obvious failures.
A bit of socialism is not a bad thing, but a lot of socialism seems to be counter productive and very damaging to the needs of people in general, and their eco systems in particular.
Think Aral Sea, for a prime example.
It’s a cliche, but some people are always more equal than others.
In any case, it’s possible a free people will find a technological solution to bring the the Aral Sea back. Otherwise, it’s source waters will be continually siphoned off.
Any amount of socialism is a bad thing. It takes root and infects everything it touches. The current state of affairs in Western countries who’s institutions have been completely taken over by socialists is proof of this.
The biggest problem with socialism, is since it doesn’t work, it’s backers are always demanding more power in order to solve the problems that socialism is creating.
Socialism either grows, or it dies.
There are two groups of people who support socialism. THose who have never lived under it, and those who believe they are going to be the ones in charge once socialism is set up.
Climate change activists are pushing eco economics theory of Herman Daley of the Steady State Economy. This is an extreme version of Marxism and eugenics rolled into a nice sounding economic theory.
Ironic how socialism gets praised for the 5% it gets right, and capitalism gets vilified for the 5% it gets wrong.
This ^
“Russia’s problem was socialism.”
Everybody’s problem is socialism.
Communism uses 3 times the resources as Capitalism to produce the same output.
How can that be green?
Let’s not forget that this top-down “democratic planning on the basis of need” also leads to pseudo-scientific thinking by the ones doing the planning — Lysenkoism being the most obvious example from twentieth century socialism. Naturally, the modern socialism boosters don’t want to mention this because of the clear similarities between Lysenkoism and the “theory” of Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming.
Socialism rewards families who have more children by providing more money and larger accommodation. Whereas capitalism passes on the cost burden of raising children to the parents and that acts as a big lever to stabilise population growth. Emissions are directly proportional to population so we already know the outcome of such a shift, along with the poverty and removal of all freedoms that comes with socialism. You’ll own nothing and be happy with your 10 x 10 foot shared accommodation space and daily meal of fried insects after working in a labour camp of their choice for 16 hours a day.
Is that the kind of social environmentalism so beloved of frau Merkel when she lived in East Germany?
Funny how the success of socialism depends entirely on “thought experiments”. Meanwhile, in the real world…
The problem are people who want to do good without having a clue of what actions produce good in the real world.
Socialism is a race to the bottom with a dwindling number of producers trying to feed an increasing number of freeloaders.
Corruption causes a misallocation of resources and is present in any form of governance. Crony capitalism is the problem today which would only get worse with unelected bureaucrats ruling fiefdoms that micromanage every aspect of existence to the detriment of freedom and human development.
So called crony capitalism involves government using it’s resources to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.
That, in a nutshell, is socialism. Crony capitalism is nothing more than another name under which socialists hide.
Even the former Nazis couldn’t make socialism work any better than energiewende has.
Liars liars liars pants on fires.
All Socialists Are Pathological Liars
its where they claim to be sensitive and caring for everybody else when nothing, NOTHING, could be further from the truth.
They only care for themselves.
The NSDAP was socialist, if not Marxist. Ideologues always imagine some form of socialism other than those that have actually existed.
Reading the comments here, Alexy Scherbakoff is taking fire for pointing out the “defects” of capitalism, despite his obviously not being a fan of socialism or communism.
I read Ayn Rand and absorbed her very accurate critique of socialism but was always disturbed by her seemingly cold and clinical “me first” idealized capitalism. It bothers me that we even use the term “capitalism” which was a derisive term coined by socialists to describe freedom and free markets.
There will always be those who for many reasons will struggle to survive. Life dealt them a poor hand like a profound physical or mental handicap and they will depend on the charity of others. Or they were born into circumstances that require extraordinary willpower and effort to overcome: severe poverty, physical or sexual abuse, etc. Or they have mental health issues, or they made choices (substance abuse, promiscuous behavior, etc.) that are difficult to overcome because of the long lasting deleterious natural consequences.
Socialism has no better answer for these people. Free societies with free markets offer the best solutions. With freedom comes both the opportunity for both narcissistic greed and selfless generosity. But experience has shown that the greedy are few compared to those who have charitable impulses. So we arrange our governments to offer “social programs” (not “socialism”) to support the poor and handicapped. It’s not a perfect solution because government bureaucracies are prone to extraordinary inefficiencies and corruption. Private charity and charitable orgnizations do this much better. But it’s a whole lot better than the ubiquitous problems of socialism that lead to societal poverty, which no one has ever solved, though the gullible keep thinking that they can get it right.
History has shown that free societies and free markets are vastly better at raising the living standards of all their citizens and fostering personal and societal charity while socialism reduces the living standards of everyone except the governing elite. But the problems I described above remain and it is up to us to figure out how much of our personal time and treasure we will give to help those who need it.
Alexy is under fire for proposing socialist solutions that don’t work in order to fix a problem that can’t be fixed without changing the people themselves.
If you want to help those who need help, go ahead and do it, Having government take money from those who have more than you do in order to give it to those you believe are entitled to help does not help those in need.
I haven’t proposed anything.
You haven’t proposed raising the minimum wage?
In most instances, the living standards of the “governing elite” are totally dependent on the purchase of goods from countries that produce goods under a profit motive.
Tru dat, Clyde. If the GEBs (Globalist Evil Bastards) succeed in forming a One World socialist government, there won’t be any place left making the goodies that the ‘more equal’ people at the top get in their special stores.
The shelves of the special stores will be empty, too.
Leigh Philips is correct in a way: world socialism would give us so many more serious things to worry about that climate change would no longer even merit a mention.
And that’s the irony the greentards don’t realize…
Socialism has always been the goal. Global Warming is just the latest lie to scare the people into supporting more governement.
A worthless solution for a non-problem. What could possibly go wrong?
The greens would be very happy with a communist world as the lack of food and medicines would reduce the population to less than 1 billion
Does the author think that Russian socialist wouldn’t be in confiction with moaist socialist? They started completing during Vietnam War.
The murder of an estimated 100 million people under communism/socialism is not a good thing and the convenience of one in charge to make it easier to get things done is a really bad idea. They had the power to do as they wanted with people and property which resulted in theft of property and murder of people.
Weather is something we enjoy or avoid, while a system where people serve the state is not enjoyed and should be avoided.
China’s success from a primitive world is a result of capitalism, payoffs and theft of intellectual property. Capitalism because their markets and technological advance has come from the Western world. Theft because Chinese students and scientists in the US convey what they learn here to China and China puts the pieces together for the full picture.
Phillips seems to live in a one dimensional world with a single goal and the world with people is not that simple.
Once the US is socialist, CCP style (we are already socialist in the EU style), there will be no more need for climate scaremongering.
So it will end.
A new more, scary boogeyman will be needed to maintain totalitarianism. Perhaps COVID II. or Heterosexual Monkeypox?
Or a predicted invasion of aliens from outer space?
(We already have an invasion of aliens from Mexico)
Or even worse, COVID unvaccinated zombies
who voted for Donald Trump.
Richard Greene: “Or a predicted invasion of aliens from outer space?”
That one is being trotted out. There’s a commission or panel or something like that supposedly outing what the US government really knows about aliens and UFOs and has been hiding. I’ve caught a few bits on TV of the sputtering start.
Covid is losing steam, so I think Aliens From Outer Space (Oh my!) will soon be front and center. You need something to unite the people behind you. What better to unite the World than invading aliens?
Environmentalism has become a religion and religions don’t worry about facts
I knew it. The Inflation Reduction Act is only a down payment. They plan to mine this vein of taxpayer gold for many years to come.
“It does exactly what the American people want us to do, which is to deal with climate change, deal with healthcare costs, deal with energy costs,” said House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D., Ky.).
Yeah, just ask the people living around the Mayak Complex and along the Techa River how eco-friendly the Soviets were.
As far back as 1621 it was obvious that communism wasn’t a sustainable social system. The Plymouth Colony’s charter with the merchants that financed the Pilgrims required the Pilgrims to ship products to England & all the property as well as production was owned by the collective. All nearly perished from starvation the 1620-1621 winter & spring. If it hadn’t been for the Wampanoag tribe’s generosity they certainly would have all perish. One leader of the pious Pilgrims who stayed in England to represent the Pilgrims with the merchants sailed to Plymouth the in 1621. He and the other leaders decided that the communal social structure wasn’t working so they allowed the colonists to own their homes & ag. plots. They just had to contribute production in excess of their subsistence needs to the colony. The leader, Robert Cushman sailed to Plymouth with his son in 1621 gave a sermon to the congregation that laid out the change just before he sailed back to England leaving his son behind. The son Thomas became the ward of William Bradford. Thomas married Mary Allerton and their offspring are the ancestors of all the Cushmans in the US today.
A few first thoughts:
– calling the free market economy ‘capitalism’ is starting off by using the slur Marx had for the free market. He called it capitalism to make it a negative.
– calling the farmers of the USSR ’employees’ is an interesting and unique approach. Socialists always use the term workers, or laborers. You are only what you can do for the ruling elite to a socialist. You are either a party insider, a Socialist, or you are resource to be used by the elites.
– the assumption that socialism would be able to displace free society without resistance in this made up world is truly only possible in the mind of a socialist.
– the assumption that a centrally planned socialist economy would be capable of predicting needs, and then provide for those needs better than a free market, despite every single occurrence providing evidence to the contrary, takes a lot of faith for an atheistic political system.
Continuing my thoughts, the notion that in a pure socialist utopia, where a person is given everything they need without regard to what they provide, there would be people who would continue to strive and develop better technologies and new inventions when they know going in they will gain nothing more than they have by doing nothing is just laughable. There are vanishingly few people who will push themselves that hard for no gain. Granted, many people retire from their career, and spend their days manicuring a flower bed or lawn for the sheer enjoyment of being outside doing something instead of sitting around doing nothing. But no amount of rose gardens and dandelion free lawns will ever invent the smart phone.
I can imagine two ways socialism would be able to improve climate change. The first assumes that CO2 is the cause, and that humans are the primary cause through their own exhalations and the livestock and goods they consume over a lifetime. In this case, socialism’s blood thirst would likely reduce the total population of the world to such a degree that there would be fewer people, and therefore fewer consuming polluters in the world driving up the temperatures. The second way socialism would be able to improve climate change better than the free market is by simply claiming they have done it. Call up the writing staff at the ministry of truth, publish it in Wahrheit, and everyone in Eurasia would know that the party has defeated climate change.
Now get back to the fields, those weeds won’t pull themselves.
Free markets are the most efficient way to allocate scarce goods. Organizing production according to aims other than profit means organizing them inefficiently.
Socialism always makes people miserable, poor and dead. This is why.
The socialists did take over Germany after WWI. In 1933 the national socialist German workers party, best known by their German intials as the Nazis, took over. Their reign of death and destruction should be an example to everybody what socialism does.
Of course half wits like the author above cited will say but we don’t mean that kind of socialists. We mean nice democratic socialists.
They are discussing vegan tigers. Mythical beats who have never existed and will never exist.
Nazi Germany was a real socialist regime, so was the Soviet Union, Communist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Castro Cuba, North Korea, … The butcher’s bill is a quarter of a billion souls and counting.
And laugh at them when they try to claim Scandinavia. They are more capitalist than the United States. A comprehensive social welfare system paid for by eye watering taxes is not socialism.
And, no, none of the real socialist regimes were good for the environment.