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| Thread: The CCP is Exploiting us!! |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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JollyJoker
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posted November 16, 2020 07:38 PM |
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Blizzardboy said:
The only "communist" countries that enjoy a significant level of prosperity are the ones that gave up on communism decades ago, i.e. Vietnam and China.
Actually, Vietnam didn't give up on it, but adjusted it. Unlike China.
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Salamandre
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posted November 16, 2020 07:39 PM |
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Rimgrabber said:
In the United States, there are 3 vacant apartments/houses for every homeless person, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of homeless.
What that means, "vacant"? Are those homes waiting to be sold, property of some owner who earned them the hard way, or something else? I don't understand that part.
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 16, 2020 07:42 PM |
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@Rimgrabber
Homelessness can be drastically reduced with housing reform but it is difficult to eliminate completely unless you force people to have a residence, and yes, there are people that prefer it that way.
Btw, having UBI would by default eliminate almost all homelessness.
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Rimgrabber
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posted November 16, 2020 07:47 PM |
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Salamandre said:
What that means, "vacant"? Are those homes waiting to be sold, property of some owner who earned them the hard way, or something else? I don't understand that part.
Vacant as in nobody is living in them. They are empty. Sorry, but I care more about people being able to survive than I do about landlords being able to hoard wealth that in many cases they inherited rather than earned. You want to run an Airbnb or whatever knock yourself out, but if you own several massive apartment complexes and your only job is leeching like 40% of people's income, I'm not shedding any tears over your loss of income if it means everyone gets a roof over their head.
Blizzardboy, I do support UBI, but then what's stopping landlords from just raising their rent by whatever amount their tenants make in universal basic income? There has to at least be regulations about that. Regardless, though, I believe housing is a human right. I'm not advocating for the government to put a gun to your head and force you to not be homeless if that's what you mean by force people to have a residence, but everyone should have a roof over their heads available so that they don't die.
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Salamandre
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posted November 16, 2020 07:49 PM |
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Can I ask you, in which field you work?
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Rimgrabber
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posted November 16, 2020 07:52 PM |
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I don't see how that's relevant at all, but currently, I just graduated high school and I'm taking a gap year to do volunteer work and organizing. Which by the way, I would argue contributes infinitely more to society than renting out apartment buildings that you don't even use.
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Salamandre
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posted November 16, 2020 08:04 PM |
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Rimgrabber, it is relevant. Basically you earned nothing yet, but already you advocate for the state stealing other people earnings and give to the ones who didn't earn them, under the pretext that you care for people. Looks that you don't care about the majority of people, who work hard to secure their family and heritage.
Who decide from which income level, someone offering a house for sale, thus vacant, should be deprived of his work, you?
Also, even if housing was a right, which is not, at least not in the constitution of the USA, neither of any other. From when a "right" should be subsidized by others? Do the state buy you guns? Do the state offer you a newspaper so you can exert your free speech?
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Rimgrabber
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posted November 16, 2020 08:35 PM |
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35-45% of the wealth in America is inherited. Do those people, who inherited everything and worked for nothing, who passively make income by depriving other people of housing, deserve their wealth more than poor people deserve to live? Because that's the logical conclusion of your argument, whether you realize it or not.
Your position is premised on this idea that most rich people worked hard and earned their money fairly, that they didn't have any advantages that they were born into, and that anyone can do it if they just work hard enough. That is objectively false. Even Jeff Bezos, who is often touted as a self-made billionaire, received a $300,000 dollar loan from his parents to start Amazon, which is 10x the median annual income in the United States. 80% of the country makes 30k or less, so if he was born into any of those households, or even most above that level, he would have never been able to create Amazon and become a billionaire. The only reason he was able to earn as much money as he has even then is by exploiting people by preying on their desperation to pay them barely enough to survive and force them to work in conditions that routinely kill them.
Perhaps I've gone a bit off-topic here, but my point is that meritocracy is a myth. If you're asking me for my personal opinion, I think apartment buildings should be seized by the state and the owners fairly compensated, yes, which is something that it already has the power to do. I then think that anyone should be able to "sign-in" and live there indefinitely.
If you're asking me who gets to decide the actual details? That's what Congress is for. They can debate the specifics and if their constituents support it, they can pass it. Obviously, there's too much corruption for that to happen right now, but since this is all hypothetical anyway, let's pretend that's not the case.
As for the Constitution, it has been amended countless times and was intended to be completely rewritten every once and a while anyway. That said, I don't especially care what slave-owning oligarchs from 250 years ago considered to be rights when they were designing a country to protect the interests of themselves and people like themselves. According to the original constitution, voting was never a right. That was added later by amendments. It originally never applied to slaves, who were considered to be only 3/5ths of a person when counting the population and 0/5ths of a person when deciding if they deserved the same rights as everyone else.
It was written without any of the context of our modern era. It was written without the context of the industrial revolution, of the civil rights movement, of cars and railroads and airplanes, of the internet and of corporatism. That's why it was intended to be rewritten. Should the government provide guns? No, because if your ability to arm yourself was dependant on the government that would defeat the purpose of the 2nd amendment. Should the government provide you a newspaper? Irrelevant in our modern era because of the internet, but yes I believe in today's age access to the internet is a human right because you can't properly participate in society without it. Does that answer your question?
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Salamandre
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posted November 16, 2020 09:07 PM |
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Rimgrabber said:
Your position is premised on this idea that most rich people worked hard and earned their money fairly,
No, my position is that none should have the right to question people's honesty only because they look to him "wealthy", then proceed to seize their earnings, just like that. This is what fascists did, remember?
I leave you on that.
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 16, 2020 09:20 PM |
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@rimgrabber
Private is extremely efficient in ways government agencies cannot be because they are liable to customers and competitive with each other. This has been tried and tested a bazillion times over on multiple continents and private vastly out matches government and this is just a basic and inescapable facet of human nature, love it or hate it.
Where government is handy is to arbitrate and regulate (like eventually banning oil, for example) or to be a backstop for people that need it, but again, UBI could solve a lot of that but it can still exist alongside a safety net.
Parasites in society are annoying but with a high tax rate you can soak up a good portion of that wealth (though statistically, the immense majority of millionaires and up are very busy people)
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 16, 2020 09:29 PM |
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@Sal
Meritocracy is mythology, but you are right that some alternatives are proven to be much, much worse in outcomes. Dodging a bullet and landing on a live grenade.
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Rimgrabber
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posted November 16, 2020 09:53 PM |
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Salamandre said:
No, my position is that none should have the right to question people's honesty only because they look to him "wealthy", then proceed to seize their earnings, just like that. This is what fascists did, remember?
I leave you on that.
No, fascists looked at people's ethnic background, political leanings, and disabilities and murdered them for it. There was actually an extreme amount of privatization in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Blizzardboy said:
Private is extremely efficient in ways government agencies cannot be because they are liable to customers and competitive with each other. This has been tried and tested a bazillion times over on multiple continents and private vastly out matches government and this is just a basic and inescapable facet of human nature, love it or hate it.
Where government is handy is to arbitrate and regulate (like eventually banning oil, for example) or to be a backstop for people that need it, but again, UBI could solve a lot of that but it can still exist alongside a safety net.
Parasites in society are annoying but with a high tax rate you can soak up a good portion of that wealth (though statistically, the immense majority of millionaires and up are very busy people)
I'm not suggesting we deprivatize everything. I'm suggesting we give homeless people apartments and let them buy better ones themselves once they're able to save money and not have to worry about homelessness. But privatization being more effective is only true in certain contexts. For example, almost all medical research is publicly funded. Private companies just buy the patents to medicine and price gouge people for it, but it was developed in most instances by taxpayer money. And again countries like Cuba have made great strides in medical science without monetary incentives. Satellites and mobile telephones were first invented in Soviet Russia. In many cases, I'd argue capitalism actually stifles innovation and technological progress because if an idea isn't fiscally viable it will ruin you, and most people don't have enough time to even bother in the first place because they have to spend most of their life working and sleeping.
As for millionaires being busy, it's not really relevant because 1. I'm not saying there shouldn't be millionaires. I think it's perfectly legitimate for someone who is a doctor or author or whatever and is successful to make a lot of money, and 2. centimillionaires and billionaires are another thing entirely. It's nearly impossible to acquire that much wealth without exploiting other people and extracting surplus value from their labor, which is why I support worker ownership of the means of production and taxing away that much obscene wealth being hoarded by 1 individual.
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Zenofex
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posted November 16, 2020 10:02 PM |
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Quote:
Private is extremely efficient in ways government agencies cannot be because they are liable to customers and competitive with each other. This has been tried and tested a bazillion times over on multiple continents and private vastly out matches government and this is just a basic and inescapable facet of human nature, love it or hate it.
Comparing a profit-oriented organization to a state is even beyond apples and oranges, they are so different that can even be opposing to each other in fundamental concept and purpose. That is to say - you're talking nonsense. 
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 16, 2020 10:11 PM |
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@Zeno
What? You just repeated me.
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Zenofex
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posted November 16, 2020 10:46 PM |
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Hardly. You claim that "private" is more efficient than the state, which is nonsense because there is no common metric to measure that "efficiency" when the two entities are qualitatively different. A greatly simplified version of what I'm trying to tell you is that you're comparing Bill Gates to Henry VIII about who's a better man.
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 16, 2020 11:48 PM |
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I think you just like to disagree with me 
Private is much, much better at generating wealth because it works with human nature instead of against it. And yes, you can find a common metric if you attempt to emulate what private does with a state entity, and vice versa, although to some extent they are interconnected, private is forced to provide optimal value for the sake of its own survival and shareholders. People have attempted the government owning the means of production on 5 continents and they have always failed and caused immeasurable suffering. How many field tests before enough is enough?
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Rimgrabber
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posted November 17, 2020 12:24 AM |
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But private is *not* forced to provide maximum efficiency or a superior product. It is required to create the most profitable product, which is not the same thing. For example, cancer is much, much more profitable to treat than it would be to cure. Same for most ailments, in fact, which is why almost all medical research is done by government funds. Why would you spend millions of dollars trying to cure cancer? You can only sell a cure once, whereas with the treatment you can continually extract money from the patient until they die. Another good example: Apple products, which are produced by children for dollars a day in mines and sweatshops, are designed to break so that you'll buy the next, slightly different, more expensive model in 6 months.
The communist bloc had many extremely authoritarian governments and that's bad, but if you think that it was the shifting of the means of production that caused the suffering there, it wasn't. The Russian Empire was an agrarian, feudalistic society with a 30% literacy rating that was technologically behind most of Europe. The Soviet Union, in 50 years, more than doubled their literacy rating and transformed the country into an industrial superpower that beat the rest of the world to space, greatly increased access to food, water, and medicine and massively increased their life expectancy. Were there famines at the beginning? Yes. Partly due to unavoidable circumstances, the wealthier peasants resisting collectivizations, and government mismanagement. All of these things played a factor. But it's also true that Ukraine had famines quite often throughout its history and the last ones happened in the early days of the soviet union. Same thing with China.
Most of the horror stories you hear about the Eastern Bloc can be chalked up to either the growing pains of industrialization or regime change or corruption. Does it excuse those things? Of course not. But they aren't evils unique to communism. In fact, communism has a better track record on food than capitalism does afaik. 2.5% of Cubans are underfed or malnourished compared to 12.5% of Americans. Take into account the massive discrepancy in wealth between those 2 countries, and it's pretty clear that communism isn't the problem here. In today's neoliberal capitalist world order, enough food is produced annually to feed 10 billion people. The population of the world is something like 7.6 billion, and yet hundreds of thousands die of hunger every year because it is not profitable to feed them.
TL;DR Communism isn't inherently or uniquely inefficient, famine-inducing, or otherwise inferior to capitalism. And let me make very clear that I do not support communism, at least not Marxist-Leninism or Maoism, I'm just observing the facts and coming to the conclusion that most of the horrors of communism happened in the capitalist west too when they were at similar stages in development.
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revolut1oN
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posted November 17, 2020 01:21 AM |
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Dude, seriously? I've been studying Chinese Language at University for quite a long time and I happened to do some research on Communist countries of the east as a part of my dissertation thesis. Believe me that you are clearly lacking in knowledge.
Have you ever heard about STATE SUPPORTED murdering of teachers during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in China? Taking property from people just because they were wealthier than average and thus marked as enemy of people? Or Pol Pot's communism in Cambodia where you could have been executed for the mere fact of wearing glasses which labeled you as an 'intelectual element'? Comparing it to what happened in the West is ridiculous and anti-scientific on so many levels that I will just drop it and not talk about it anymore.
And about inheriting wealth, who are you to judge whose property is to be taken? If one's father made a fortune and decided to give it to the son, what right you have to interfere? That truly is the essence of fascism, the belief that the government and the country has the right to interfere with people's private affairs and redistribute their wealth as it sees fit. After all the Third Reich also accused Jews of amassing wealth through exploitation of the German Nation and later redistributed and nationalised it.
These views of yours cannot survive confrontation with the harsh reality and can only be upheld by a citizen of first world country where even poor people are among 1% of world's richest and the biggest problem of the day is whether I want soya latte or something else.
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FirePaladin
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posted November 17, 2020 01:26 AM |
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^
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The Reckoning.... it's drawing near....
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Rimgrabber
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posted November 17, 2020 02:40 AM |
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First let me just say outright that I don't want to give anyone here the wrong impression. I don't support the totalitarian and genocidal aspects of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and I'm not here trying to pretend that they were good things. Let me rephrase my point because you seem to be misunderstanding me here:
A lot of truly horrific things happened in the Eastern Bloc countries. My position is that this is not inherent to economic leftism, but rather a product of the political and developmental environments of those countries.
When I said that most of the atrocities of the Eastern Bloc could be chalked up to industrialization and corruption, I was talking about the things that people usually point to as an inherent flaw of communism: poor working conditions, famines, suppression of political opposition through violent means, etc. All of these things DID and in many cases still DO happen in the West. I'm not saying they were worse than what happened under Stalin or Mao because in most cases they probably weren't. But to act like the West hasn't done genocide or violently suppressed political opposition is completely delusional. Again, I cannot reiterate thing point enough, apparently, I'm not saying that they were equivalent in scale or scope. I'm just saying that the economic system that the country happened to have had very little to do with it.
Yes, when Mao took over in China many of his programs were terrifyingly Orwellian. It goes without saying, that is a very bad thing that nobody, under any circumstances, should support. It is also true that China had just gotten out of a massive civil war, one of many in their long history, and doing horrible things to consolidate power is just a thing that new regimes do. That doesn't mean it's justified, it just means it's not an evil unique to communism. The United States was exterminating Native Americans by the millions when it first came into existence, as well as in the years before and the years after. During the revolution, British loyalists were robbed, beaten, tarred and feathered, and murdered by mobs all the time. During industrialization, construction workers were falling off buildings for like 4 dollars a day and children were getting black lung in coal mines. Lynchings happened all the time throughout most of America's history and sometimes they still happen. Did this happen on the same scale as political violence in China? Depends on the time period and the country in question. Does that excuse any of it, happening anywhere, ever? NO. IT JUST MEANS THAT COMMUNISM WASNT THE DRIVING FACTOR. Political power was.
Again, for like the 5th time so that you get it through your head and aren't tempted to twist my words: Horrible things happen during civil wars and regime change, especially when said conflict was ideologically motivated, regardless of the country's economic system. Got it? Or should I repeat myself a few more times?
As for your comparison of wealth redistribution to the Holocaust, all I can say is... lol. If you can't tell the difference between someone saying "hey maybe 8 people owning the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the entire world's population is unethical and unsustainable" and someone saying "Jews are genetically impure and we should murder them all. Let's make up a bunch of wackjob conspiracy theories to justify it" then man, I don't know what to tell you. Seriously, think about how absurd that is, and then come back to me when you're ready to have a rational conversation about it. I'm not trying to be a dick, I just don't have the patience for that sort of thing.
Small side note: I don't know of anyone, not even tankies(Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, etc which I already said I'm not one of) that supports Pol Pot. Even most Maoists that I've talked to consider him to be a horrific person and a terrible leader.
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