In a response to the last blog, supergoober mentioned the word "socialism", and I responded with the fact that Obama clearly is "socialist" in his aims. I feel that I should define a bit more clearly what I mean by that, and mention the specifics where he, as well as many Democrats and Republicans have socialist tendencies.
But first to address the resistance to the word in general. Many people tie this to the failed economies of the Eastern Block, and rightly so, as those were communist governments (actually formed into oligarchical dictatorships) that had socialized economies - specifically the branch of socialism that deals with the state controling the means of production. The fact that Soviet Communism was deeply entangled with Socialism really did a lot to throw the economic principles of socialism into doubt.
Many people now will debate whether socialism and communism are the same thing, adherents to one socialism generally try to distance themselves from the name communism. Marx viewed the proletarian revolution and socializing of economies (socialism) as a step toward the communist utopia that he posited.
The actual history of the names, however, is much more interesting. Communism was the European term for the atheist utopia that Marx envisioned. In Protestant England, however, the term was deemed to be to close to Communion (the Catholic Sacrament) and the term socialism was favored. They both actually describe the same, or very similar, philosophies, however, adherents to each will spit hairs over who falls into what category.
Even among Socialism, which could be defined as the movement to remove control of industry from the hands of a few "capitalists" and return it to either the laborers or the government, depending on your flavor of socialism. A free-market socialism would have labor organizations running all businesses rather than individuals, while a national socialism (the term now being far out of favor since the Germans used it in that upsetting period in the late 1930s and early 40s) focusses on the state controlling industry. In addition, the Marxist philosophy of "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs" also affects social policy - particularly "liberal" social policy, which flows from the social democrat ideal (most notably used in England) of state ownership of key market industries and tax-funded social welfare programs for the population.
The social democrats (not affiliated with the Democratic party of the USA, though holding many of the same ideas), are the socialist ideology to which Barrack Obama is most closely aligned. He favors punitive actions towards owners of businesses (aka Joe The Plumber, sorry, but it is the most obvious reference) making him "spread the wealth around" to favor people who for whatever reason could not achieve what Joe did. He had some lines where he danced around the issue and said that he would have liked to do things to help Joe reach where he did (not that he needed any help, apparently), but now that he was there, it was his responsibility to help his fellows, not by employing them, but by giving back some of that presumably ill-gotten gain to the government so that Obama could "spread it around" as he saw fit. That is a distinctly socialist idea, and naming it as such does no harm.
If Obama does not like that, he should adopt a philosophy that does not espouse that, but it would undermine everything he ostensibly believes in. He should instead embrace the term and tell people what it means and why he believes that it will work. McCain could reasonably counter with why he thinks it doesn;t work and why free-market capitalism does.
But that would require both candidates to be intelligent and genuine, and it would also require that McCain be a free market capitalist. He is, however, very socialist in his approach to government, perhaps not so much as Obama is (ie socialized medicine), but attempting to manipulate the housing market and control that entire sector of the economy with a government institution is completely and 100 percent socialist. I don't know if he knows that or believes that it is actually the right solution (or is it just what voters want to hear?), but you cannot argue that it is anything but socialism. Government economic regulations put us in this position with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being regulated into making these loans, and main street and wall street were complicit in this action (yes, theGM and I talked a bit about this, and I do believe that it is all three, I always have, but I feel that Wall Street gets all the blame, so my other blogs were an attempt to show where the Wall Street attitude came from. These loans used to be considered to risky, but when Carter started pushing for them, and regulations started mandating them, Wall Street quickly fell into lock-step realizing there was money to be made and that the Feds would bail them out, and main street jumped on board, conveniently never stopping to read the fine print and happy that the world was giving it up for them for once... long parenthetical finally concluding, Socialized Government started it, wall street and main street hopped on for a ride, but the fundamental precipitating act was the government attempt at controlling the economy and money supply).
So, long story short, McCain and Obama have very strong socialist leanings in their policy (government funding of energy - wind, solar, nuclear, etc. also socialist Mr. McCain), and I do not particuarly like either one. I am not a free-market nut, the government should oversee in a regulatory capacity, but I have an intense dislike for government ownership and for control of the economy as an engine for social policy change - because it doesn't work well (if it does at all). The need for social welfare from the government is largely self-fulfilling - the government usurped the roles of the traditional organizations involved in these activities and began doing it less efficiently and in a more dehumanizing way...
But that is for a later blog on liberal supermajorities in 1933 and 1965, and I think you can already see where this is going. Talk to you soon, I have to go tutor chemistry again :)
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BTW, that was the longest parenthetic tangent ever. Whats wrong with subsidizing wind, gas, and solar energy? We already do it with the Oil Industry, don't we?
Also, re. "traditional organizations", yes, they do wonderful work. I worked in Non-profit for 7 years. Our entire budget relied on grants and private donations...and it was a pathetic struggle to keep anyone worth their salt because we paid close to shit in salary. Not to mention our staffing size ebbed and flowed with the economy. We also couldn't hire any MD's or Psychiatrist even part-time and had to beg Residents to do some pro-bono work on the side for us. And did I mention I left because though I felt I was doing amazing work, I was also worked to death and for shit money?
This whole traditional institutions conversation is huge and one I'm not entirely familiar with, historically speaking. But I do know that some time in the 60's (I'm only making an educated guess here) the helping professionals actually became "professionals", as in College/University curriculum, state/federal licensing, ethical/legal guidelines, and (the biggie) the ability to "bill" the state, the feds, and insurance companies. And I'm glad my job became a "professional" job...along with other therapists, social workers, client advocates, conservators, case-managers, and counselors. But part and parcel with our legitimacy comes a price, as in "real pay". Churches and Charity organizations could no longer afford us bro, and out went "traditional organizations".
But that's just my little job. Traditional organizations would and could never have kept up with the madness of the drug culture's impact on our society, the returning Vietnam vets, the emptying of "sanitariums" and other locked facilities in the 70's, the new problem of new immigrants unable to acculturate or adapt after the 70's, undocumented aliens influx in the 90's, the deterioration of the family, the growing numbers of children out of wedlock and children having children, gangs, unavailable parents, and I can go on and on. Needless to say, the move away from traditional charity based organizations to government supported institutions was less a matter of government usurped responsibilities as it was a necessary evolutionary step in the delivery of services and resources.
Dude, this is too huge a conversation. I should just call you.
Yes it is a long conversation, and I didn't mean to imply that government has no roll. I believe that government has a clear and defineable roll, and right now that may well be too large. My historical perspective starts in a fundamental shift that took place in the 30s not the sixties, and I would contend that a large amount of the reason that one might need the assistance of government on such a massive scale was because those problems were set up by government assistance decades (and generations) previous.
Couple that with the cyclical nature of social trends towards liberalism/conservatism, and you get some very interesting conversations.
Point taken about the helping professions, but I could also contend that the reason for the explosion in the cost of employing those people (apart from increased training costs, which I could also blame on government subsidies for college education - another long tangent, and don't think that I think we should get rid of all of them) could be tracked back to the removal of a fee-for-service mentality brought on by health insurance (which I already tracked back to a government program in a previous discussion) as well as the incredibly declines in generousity of charitable donations to organizations as government expanded its roll - establishing a "I gave at the office" mentality among taxpayers - Why contribute to a charity if you already have a high tax burden supposedly to take care of the people that the charity purports to help. You are looking at a fairly narrow slice of history, I am trying to take a long view based on century long trends (though my view may be just as innaccurate, given that I have to rely on source material that is remote at best, as opposed to your reliance on direct experience - whose to say which is better, I would contend that discussion and consideration of both would probably yield the best result).
As far as your very first point, that is specious reasoning at best. What if I were to say, "You already beat your wife, why not start hitting your kids"? Just because we already do it doesn't mean it is good. Also, define subsidies - if we are paying them money to do something that is a subsidy, if they get a tax break, some people define that as a subsidy as well - I am less inclined to call that a subsidy because that encourages the belief that the money that we pay in taxes is the governments and that should they deign to give some of it back via tax cut it is a subsidy. The problem is those particular energy sources are niche at best (solar and wind particularly) that have huge environmental impacts that people ignore. I am not saying that they are necessarily worse than oil, but they have problems too - for example, for a wind farm to generate 40% of the power of a traditional coal or oil powered plant (that would take up about a square mile of space or less) that wind farm would have to take up 300 square miles. Add on to that the huge load of metal and machinery that you would have to process to connect a power generation grid and the efficiency loss of conductors on that scale and you can see why wind is fairly inefficient. PerfectLine's idea about each person having their own windmill works okay and diminishes this issue, but has a whole host of other problems (what if you do not live in a high wind area, the level of noise is atrocious, the size and heights of the structures bould be long term quite risky, not to mention the fact that you have a level of infrastructure in your home to deal with that you never did before, plus you still cannot remove the grid connection to the houses, so you have just radically increased consumption of resources (metals and plastics, which need to be processed and manufactured, respectively). And that is just a short list and doesn't even touch solar, which has its own set of issues (arsenic anyone - you need silicon in all solar cells, and silicon is a natural resource too, albeit one that is readily available in sand and quartz and rock, but arsenic is used to enhance the semiconductor properties of silicon, and I think it is still used in large quantities in solar cells (though I would need to look that up to see if they found something else to use) but that is also why computer wastes are such hazardous materials...
Anyway, I could go on and on, but let me conclude with the fact that I obviously believe that government subsidies in all of their forms cause more harm than good and as such should be kept to a minimum and should be very closely scrutinized - and the tax code should not turn into a replacement for subsidies either, but all that is another long, long conversation/blog.
I didn't intend to go this long, but there you are. See you later.
Yes it is a long conversation, and I didn't mean to imply that government has no roll. I believe that government has a clear and defineable roll, and right now that may well be too large. My historical perspective starts in a fundamental shift that took place in the 30s not the sixties, and I would contend that a large amount of the reason that one might need the assistance of government on such a massive scale was because those problems were set up by government assistance decades (and generations) previous.
Couple that with the cyclical nature of social trends towards liberalism/conservatism, and you get some very interesting conversations.
Point taken about the helping professions, but I could also contend that the reason for the explosion in the cost of employing those people (apart from increased training costs, which I could also blame on government subsidies for college education - another long tangent, and don't think that I think we should get rid of all of them) could be tracked back to the removal of a fee-for-service mentality brought on by health insurance (which I already tracked back to a government program in a previous discussion) as well as the incredibly declines in generousity of charitable donations to organizations as government expanded its roll - establishing a "I gave at the office" mentality among taxpayers - Why contribute to a charity if you already have a high tax burden supposedly to take care of the people that the charity purports to help. You are looking at a fairly narrow slice of history, I am trying to take a long view based on century long trends (though my view may be just as innaccurate, given that I have to rely on source material that is remote at best, as opposed to your reliance on direct experience - whose to say which is better, I would contend that discussion and consideration of both would probably yield the best result).
As far as your very first point, that is specious reasoning at best. What if I were to say, "You already beat your wife, why not start hitting your kids"? Just because we already do it doesn't mean it is good. Also, define subsidies - if we are paying them money to do something that is a subsidy, if they get a tax break, some people define that as a subsidy as well - I am less inclined to call that a subsidy because that encourages the belief that the money that we pay in taxes is the governments and that should they deign to give some of it back via tax cut it is a subsidy. The problem is those particular energy sources are niche at best (solar and wind particularly) that have huge environmental impacts that people ignore. I am not saying that they are necessarily worse than oil, but they have problems too - for example, for a wind farm to generate 40% of the power of a traditional coal or oil powered plant (that would take up about a square mile of space or less) that wind farm would have to take up 300 square miles. Add on to that the huge load of metal and machinery that you would have to process to connect a power generation grid and the efficiency loss of conductors on that scale and you can see why wind is fairly inefficient. PerfectLine's idea about each person having their own windmill works okay and diminishes this issue, but has a whole host of other problems (what if you do not live in a high wind area, the level of noise is atrocious, the size and heights of the structures bould be long term quite risky, not to mention the fact that you have a level of infrastructure in your home to deal with that you never did before, plus you still cannot remove the grid connection to the houses, so you have just radically increased consumption of resources (metals and plastics, which need to be processed and manufactured, respectively). And that is just a short list and doesn't even touch solar, which has its own set of issues (arsenic anyone - you need silicon in all solar cells, and silicon is a natural resource too, albeit one that is readily available in sand and quartz and rock, but arsenic is used to enhance the semiconductor properties of silicon, and I think it is still used in large quantities in solar cells (though I would need to look that up to see if they found something else to use) but that is also why computer wastes are such hazardous materials...
Anyway, I could go on and on, but let me conclude with the fact that I obviously believe that government subsidies in all of their forms cause more harm than good and as such should be kept to a minimum and should be very closely scrutinized - and the tax code should not turn into a replacement for subsidies either, but all that is another long, long conversation/blog.
I didn't intend to go this long, but there you are. See you later.
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