Socialism is Communism.

The OP is pure trolling, but I'll answer the question.

The answer is it's a bad question, one that is hurting discourse about policies.

It's the 21st Century. We're post information age.

Political categories laid down/invented/solidified/popularized mainly to describe post-Napoleonic Europe are not sacrosanct and I question how even useful and valid they are nowadays.

Now in the past I've jokingly called Socialism "Passive Aggressive Communism" or "Communism but it's okay because it's for your own good" or I still think that's sorta true, I mean in both cases someone who isn't me is deciding way too much about things and the distinction between Communism and Socialism in that context is much more about the motivation and that's not really a huge difference to me.

But even then it's because the terms are bad when applied to modern government.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Some services are better funded by the community: police, fire, basic government, infrastructure like roads and public buildings, the military, Medicare, Social Security, some utilities .... Some of us think that should include better social safety nets and universal health care.
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The EPA approves and registers pesticides for use in the US. However, all 50 states and DC also approve and register those same pesticides for use in their regions. Most of them just say "It's registered with the EPA? Okay, pay the registration fee and you're ready to go." My job would be so much easier if there was just one central registration instead of 51 state registrations.
On the other hand, some states do have specialized requirements, such as New York prohibiting the use of specific chemicals that move easily through soil on Long Island to protect the groundwater there.
 
As I pointed out in another thread a while back, public roads are pure socialism: They are built and maintained by the government for the good of society. Very few people seem to be opposed to them.
 
Trebuchet said:
As I pointed out in another thread a while back, public roads are pure socialism: They are built and maintained by the government for the good of society. Very few people seem to be opposed to them.
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There's actually a rather large groundswell of opinion against public roads. It's just that they are always late to the meetings to complain about them ;)
 
Trebuchet said:
As I pointed out in another thread a while back, public roads are pure socialism: They are built and maintained by the government for the good of society. Very few people seem to be opposed to them.
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Well yeah.

Outside of the fringiest of the fringe of the various political fanboys everyone gets that we're talking about blended systems.

The "gotchas" only come out when people pretend like preferring a political system is the same thing as demanding a 100% pure version of the political system.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
Well yeah.

Outside of the fringiest of the fringe of the various political fanboys everyone gets that we're talking about blended systems.

The "gotchas" only come out when people pretend like preferring a political system is the same thing as demanding a 100% pure version of the political system.
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You mean Trebuchet is NOT proposing that we fill up the land with nothing but roads????
 
Belz... said:
You mean Trebuchet is NOT proposing that we fill up the land with nothing but roads????
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*Laughs*

No but seriously that's what always happens.

"I tend to prefer political/economic system X..."
"Oh so that means you want (insane strawman scenario of economic/political system X)."

It's why if you arguing for less government you're want to live in Somolia and if you argue for more government you want to live in 1984 regardless of the scale, context, scenario, or structure of what you are actually arguing for.
 
JoeMorgue said:
*Laughs*

No but seriously that's what always happens.

"I tend to prefer political/economic system X..."
"Oh so that means you want (insane strawman scenario of economic/political system X)."

It's why if you arguing for less government you're want to live in Somolia and if you argue for more government you want to live in 1984 regardless of the scale, context, scenario, or structure of what you are actually arguing for.
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Maybe the problem is that our forum population is too small and our interactions too well established, so people assume that poster X means to say A.
 
Belz... said:
Maybe the problem is that our forum population is too small and our interactions too well established, so people assume that poster X means to say A.
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Or that we're about 60% troll by volume at this point and the internet has spent the last 2 decades destroying every possible means of effective discourse and leaving nothing but nitpicking, semantics, pendantics, and sea-lioning faux-obtuseness in the rubble.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Or that we're about 60% troll by volume
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But not by mass.

the internet has spent the last 2 decades destroying every possible means of effective discourse and leaving nothing but nitpicking, semantics, pendantics, and sea-lioning faux-obtuseness in the rubble.
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It's an interesting progression. The way I see it, people see others use the term 'strawman' and then assume that they know how to use it, and then the quality of the uses of the word diminishes; a bit like old genre movies when they made too many of them. The same is true for memes: several of them start out clever and funny, and then they become extremely diluted after a short while.

So people see others nitpick and argue definitions and then they think they should do that too, but they don't understand why the ones they observed did it, so they necessarily are worse at it.

Of course, then there's the actual trolls.
 
Trebuchet said:
As I pointed out in another thread a while back, public roads are pure socialism: They are built and maintained by the government for the good of society. Very few people seem to be opposed to them.
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Roads are a "Socialist" as anything else the far right complains about. In the original sense of the word though, roads are only moderately socialist. Most roads primarily service the public which would make them a consumer good, not a capital good. For example a dump truck is normally a capital good because it's used to produce other things while your personal car is a consumer good because it makes your life easier.

Under a fully socialist system all the dump trucks would be public property but everyone could still own their own car. Under a fully communist system both would be public property and no one could own either.

While roads do server both purposes there are usually many more personal vehicles than commercial vehicles using them making them more of a consumer good that a capital good. (IOW publicly funded roads are more communist than socialist :p)
 
JoeMorgue said:
It's why if you arguing for less government you're want to live in Somolia and if you argue for more government you want to live in 1984 regardless of the scale, context, scenario, or structure of what you are actually arguing for.
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The problem I have with most of the people arguing for less government is that they won't say how much less or refuse to provide any underlying for deciding how much government is acceptable.

If you ask "how much less government do you want" and the answer is always just "less" the real answer may as well be "none" which would indeed be comparable to a failed state like Somalia.

The answer is just a random menu of selected services they happen to approve or it's a little different but just as problematic.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Someone is conflating Private Property with Means of Production.
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All means of production are property, but not all property are means of production. All property is owned and/or controlled, and, with some exceptions (North Korea comes to mind) is either private or public.

The public/private distinction can be rendered meaningless for sufficient examples of socialism like North Korea, where while all property might be publicly titled, in reality it's under the control of a tyrannical, autocratic dictator, Kim Jong Un.

In fact, North Korea might be an example of the only actual socialist regime, according to the rigid definition, because it's pretty clear that all property is owned by the state, but it hasn't yet achieved Marx's vaunted classless state, because of the existence of a murderous dictator, and his privileged inner circle. They continue to exist with a spectacular standard of living at the expense of everyone else, in a class system.

And this is the fatal flaw of socialism (communism), the classless state never actually comes into existence because of human nature and how it abuses centralized power. In only exists in a superficial sense in that the overwhelming majority of its subjects are left destitute.
 
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