كتب بواسطة Andartes, 20.01.2021 at 11:44
One fascinating thing I noticed about any debate about "socialism" in the context of US politics is that this is a word that can be defined very narrowly or very expansively depending on whatever best suits the speaker's arguments.
When the motion of debate is "should we have socialism," self-described capitalists use the narrow definition of this word, to mean the distinct set of Soviet- or PRC-aligned communist dictatorships that existed in the Cold War, and of course we shouldn't have socialism, because of course we don't want famines, or political purges, or concentration camps, or what have you that characterise these historical communist dictatorships. From that perspective, why would anyone support socialism? What kind of monster would do that?
When the motion of debate switches to "what policies characterise socialism," however, anti-socialists suddenly do a 180-degree turn and define socialism extremely broadly, to mean basically any kind of intensive state intervention in the economy. Of course Western Europe is chock full of socialist states, and since we have already established that socialism is a thing that the United States shouldn't have, it follows that the United States should avoid implementing such radical socialist policies like universal healthcare that Europeans have.
And of course self-described communists do much the same thing, only the other way around.
So instead of trying to write a substantive argument on a foundation that won't support one, I will instead ask the original poster this. When you say that the United States should have "some communism", what, exactly, is meant by "some communism"? What policies does this entail and what social changes does it imply?
Without a clear and agreed-upon definition there can be no intellectually honest discussion.
What about Chinese Communism? One party state with market economy? Since oligarchs can hijack democracies, and votes doesn't matter anymore, we could simply copy Chinese politics: they are executing their corrupted individuals while supporting infrastructure, jobs, and citizen wellbeing.
You can't deny that market-based economies are the most efficient long-term and that authoritarianism is more efficient than democracy - where goals change every 4-5 years after elections, and authoritarian goals are there as long the regime exist.
Do you realize what made the great divergence happen? One of the main factors providing the way to the revolution is the absence of fucking absolutism.
It isnt just a coincidence that this revolution started in England out of all places. The great societies of Islam and China, while being advanced where overrided in less than a century.
Unless China becomes a free society and lets loose the authoritarian government it wont ever reach its full potential nor will it ever do what the free minds of the West did.
ok bud.. don't even go there. If China didn't have a strict government the country would be a god damn disaster. I DOUBT the country would stay in one piece, and it wouldn't the superpower that it is now. A nice example of your imaginary "perfect democracy china" would be hong kong, the place where riots devasted its economy. Even in homeland America, remember the BLM Protests and the Insurrection at the Capitol? I do too..
China is a very prosperous country at the moment, and its currently leading the world in trade and technology, very much on its way to being the Global Superpower, which even Americans are scared of. After all, the tariffs say a lot about it.
Explain to me how absolutism does not hold back innovation.
Explain why industrial revolution happened in England and not for example in glorieus china or glorieus islamic world.
Yes hong kong was close to being a democracy, if you had any knowledge of why they went protesting heavily, its because they are losing their democracy. Stop being so ignorant.
Demonstration and protest is good for a country to become better. Otherwise only a small elite will keep deciding what is good for a country.
The chinese started from rock bottom, for them the only way is up. And they wont be close to Western wealth size in nearly 50 years from now.
The chinese arent prosperous, they are just having surplusses of money because of their export growth etc. The chinese way was to copy the west and make profits out of it. Keep large western companies out of china. Google, FB, even keeping a limit to hollywood films.
When a country has 1.3 billion people and they will not experience large scale war then obviously they will accelerate and become richer. However their system lacks of becoming innovative. And that will always be a totalitarian problem.
Lets put it this way:
When the book print got invented and countries wanted to accelerate the production of it. What did the absolutist countries such as the Ottoman empire do. They banned book print, why? because this new technology will be a danger to their power control of the country.
The same thing applies to any country that has a totalitarian regime. When an innovative product comes as long, which threatens the elite power, they will ban it. Hence, there will be loss of economic opportunity because of it.
China isnt leading in trade nor technology. Nor is it close to being a superpower. It is getting closer by year, but as of 2021, they dont pose a threat yet to USA. The exact moment that changes, is the moment they will invade and annex Taiwan and USA wont do anything about it. I dont see that happening in the coming decades.