Sunday, July 8, 2012

What Would a Communist America Look Like?


6 comments:

  1. Lol is this a joke?

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  2. Don't know if this is a joke or not, but I guarantee you this would be expensive to say the least. Good ideas though, ahh.......if only...........

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  3. If I knew how to work with Photoshop and upload files, I would append this poster with a few more pictures:

    - A Wise Party Leader leading the masses into the bright future.
    - The Party relieving you of the need to think for yourselves and making all decisions for you.
    - Glorious National Security officers weeding out and re-educating enemies of the people.
    - Everyone needs to sacrifice for the Common Good, bringing the living standard to the 1910 level.
    - And in the end, the largest picture would be a magic fairy with a big bag of cash sprinkling everyone with money to finance this glorious sunny utopia.

    http://j.mp/1hbClUh

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  4. 1. Free, comprehensive, universal . . . and sub-par.
    Don't get me started on how "every other country has universal health care." They do, sure, but it's not what you think. Only a few of them are single-payer, and they either have long wait times and arbitrary rejections, or they are a "pay out of pocket and get reimbursed later" like France. Most of them operate on a 2-tier system where a basic level of coverage is guaranteed, but everything else is paid for out of pocket or by private insurance. Some of them operate with a fully-private system with an insurance mandate, like Germany and Japan. Everyone else has a cheaper system because the US system is dominated by monopolies and cartels backed by government rather than locally owned and operated facilities.

    2. The places where housing is *unaffordable* are all places trying to live the progressive dream. Places like Utah, Texas and other deeply red states have incredibly affordable housing.

    3. The reason why healthy food is more expensive in the US is most likely because the garbage crap is made of highly subsidized ingredients including soybeans and high-fructose corn syrup from subsidized corn. Another interesting reason is that Americans don't believe in seasonal food, they just want whatever it is they normally have instead of picking whatever is in season. Buying stuff out-of-season is more expensive.

    4. Education *would be low cost and high quality* if it weren't for, again, monopolies and cartels dominating the business, protected and subsidized by government.

    5. Seniors *used to retire* in comfort and dignity back when America was still capitalist instead of corporate-fascist. Social Security is one of those things that took retirement away from Seniors, ironically. With the mandatory retirement safety net, people quit saving for retirement unless it's subsidized/partially funded by their employers. Oh, not to mention all the lies that people are told about "8% growth" in markets forever, so they under-save and rely on this mysterious "growth" to give them the rest of what they need.

    6. I'm not sure communism would do any better than what we have now.

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  5. 7. Workers must always receive *less* than the full value of their labor, otherwise there can be no gain for anyone in the economy. In any transaction, including a labor transaction, value must be *created.* That is, the buyer must feel that he is receiving more than the value of his money, and the seller must feel that he is receiving more than the effort put into obtaining the item. When it balances out to equal on both ends, the effort put into the transaction becomes zero.

    8. Women and men are already getting equal pay. The "pay gap" myth comes from the fact that women tend to go into lesser-paid fields like psychology/social work and education, while men tend to go into higher paying fields like engineering and business. Furthermore, women are more likely to take years off to raise children, and are more likely to work part time. When you account for these factors and look at same-job, same-experience, same-education-level, women and men are paid equally. If you want to address the wage gap, you have to push the culture, not the policies. Push women into higher-paid fields. Push men to stay home and raise kids.

    9. There would still be inequality, but the inequality would be the Party Members and politically connected versus the rest. (Oh wait, a lot of the inequality is *already* due to that in the US). In a truly capitalist system, the only source of inequality would be inequality of effort and skill. We had something much closer to that in the 1950's than today, and it was much more "capitalist" and "deregulated" back then than it is today.

    10. Equal rights under communism? Uh, that has nothing to do with communism. Take a good look at Mother Russia. In all her communism, she puts forth propaganda and makes laws to push gays back into their closets. The Communist strategy for destroying America proposed to introduce loose sexuality into America because they believed it would destabilize the country. Homosexuality is related to loose sexuality, but it need not be tied to it.

    11. If women get full reproductive rights, do men get full rights to choose not to pay for child support? Do men get full rights and equal chance to get custody of children? If you're going to talk about reproductive rights, then be sure to talk about the reproductive rights of men or else you're being a gender bigot.

    12. Racism is not something you can address by policy without creating more racism and encoding that racism into law. The only way to address it is culturally. I firmly believe that the civil rights movement got its momentum from the fact that so many white kids were raised by black nannies instead of their absent socialite white moms. Racism is fading, but not due to any amount of laws prohibiting it -- in fact, the laws pushing racial quotas et al are making whatever trace of racism is left keep a foothold in the previous generation. It will be gone by the next generation regardless of law, unless law holds it encoded.

    In short, quit pretending your ideology is better than anyone else's and get the facts before you fire off your propaganda.

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  6. Kudos to Doughboy for the most outstanding summary.

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