Comments by "Wandering Existence" (@WanderingExistence) on "SHOCK: Bill Burr DEFENDS Socialism (Rant) | The Kyle Kulinski Show" video.
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@Choosewisely-hb9nj As a veteran, shouldn't you know that this country was kick started based on a list of "crying" grievances called the 🇺🇸Declaration of Independence? 🇺🇸 I have a copy hanging up right behind me- I'm a leftist that likes the Declaration Of Independence and Constitution🇺🇸; what's funny is that I don't think you could cope with the fact that I don't align with the identity politics you think I should have 🤡
I hope you know that people crying about change led to the revolutionary war and thus American independence from Britain, as well as civil rights and labor rights. But I'm sure you'd rather be working 10 hours a day 6 days a week, on low wages, with no benefits, much more hazardous work conditions and no workers' compensation.... American socialists fought for those labor rights.
"Cry babies like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams had to go grieve to the king, they should just shut up and be loyalists- don't try to improve the country because it's already as good as it can get, the Protestant Church of England says so (Gods will)" 🤮🤮🤮 That's what you'd sound like if you got transported back to 1776
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The employer-employee relationship is that actually a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract. Like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at least capitalism needs safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class.
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@superdog797 That's not just one setup of capitalism, it's all capitalism. Private land enclosure started to really pop up during the first half of the 1500s in England, as the Protestant Reformation started. King Henry VIII seized Catholic estates and village Commons and violently turned them into private plots to be sold off. You can go back 500 years, 100 years before John Locke, and the government is still the reason why capitalism exists 🤦🏼 You keep saying it's "antithetical to capitalism".... Yeah, real world capitalism is not a platonic form. It's almost like there was a philosopher who talked about how capitalism created antithetical situations in which it contradicted itself and would break down 🤔🤔🤔
You literally just think socialism is government.... Which is the most low watt understanding of the term. Socialism just means workers control of the means of production, so anarchists who organize their economy through trade unions are considered anarcho socialists (anarcho-syndicalists to be specific, like Noam Chomsky). George Orwell was NOT a big fan of big brother and he was a democratic socialist. There are many types of socialists that believe in freedom.
To summarize, basically, you don't understand definitions and you don't understand that platonic forms don't necessarily exist in the real world..... So basically just another discussion with a right wing libertarian :/ Say something that's not NPC dialogue, plz.
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@superdog797 The employer-employee relationship is that actually a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract. Like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at least capitalism needs safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class.
So to answer your question, yes capitalism is better at creating economic growth because it is based on incentivizing the maximization of profit, and reinvesting that profit to create more profit at all costs.... Even if that means commodifying humans, buying out the government, and spraying negative externalities all over the globe. Renting people as objects and shifting costs onto innocent living beings through industrial pollution are not morally righteous. People who support democratic socialism want a human happiness index to be a more important number than GDP. You can still compound wealth in socialism, you just do it more ethically by treating people as human beings and not commodities be rented by the hour as if they were machines.
You say socialism doesn't work, but personally, I've been interested in a grassroots movement called the Next System Project. They have devised a way to keep production local for key anchor institutions and contract service to cooperatives. They have helped multiple cities struggling with job loss due to factory closures build back their communities, in the US and UK. In addition, trade unions, collectives, public banks, credit unions, community land trusts, CSA's, and many other democratically controlled institutions can work together to create democratic networks outside the market to create an economy that doesn't reduce people, their governments, and the environment to a monetary value. I think this can be a viable strategy to give people the autonomy over their work. I believe economic democracy is the only way people who work for the economy will have the economy work for them, their families, and the planet too. You can look up the channel the Laura Flanders show, she has a great intro slogan; "where the people who say it can't be done, take a backseat to the people who are actually doing it".
I think my "favorites" folder on my channel is public, you can see a 50-second video on what a democratic economy looks like (also notice the two high level finance lectures in my playlists, from MIT and Yale... I understand economics fairly well).
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@superdog797 It's really not propaganda, the term "human capital" is a neoliberal phrase use by capitalist economists... This isn't socialist theory, this is Reagan/ Thatcher type neoliberal economists. If you look at the neoliberal economics of it, literally just understanding time preference, which is what rent, interest, and yes, also wages are. I can make all the similarities of human capital to normal capital; healthcare is maintenance, housing is storage, food is fuel, education is an investment in more productive parts. So a big problem is, since wages are suppressed by globalism, and real wages in the US are the same as 50 years ago, but the inflation rate of healthcare education and housing have all far exceeded averaged CPI inflation numbers.
We have costs that are rising exponentially, but real wages that haven't gone up in 50 years... If you have a rental house that's more expensive to maintain then you receive in rental payments, you won't be able to afford to keep that property for long. When it is human capital, that would be someone going bankrupt due to medical bills or just very ill because they can't afford the medication or procedure. Personally, I'm functionally disabled due to my PTSD, I used to be able to hold down a job but now I can't... So that's medical bills with no income other than occasionally selling stocks and bonds. Normally we just throw out an old piece of equipment, but we can't do that with human beings. 60% of Americans struggle with making ends meet.
As a socialist, cooperatives are not the end-all be all of socialist ideas... Its one piece. In the 1600s you had private businesses on land enclosures but the system was still mainly feudalism. Let's also remember there were a lot of violent beheadings in the French revolution that capitalists conducted to end feudalism... Do you want me accuse you that capitalists decapitate people on the regular? Don't act like radical systemic change doesn't often incur violence. Just because there were some capitalistic enterprises doesn't mean capitalists would be happy with feudal lords still ruling most of the land and resources- so a few co-ops on a capitalistic globe is no consolation. Serfdom is not legally recognized in a capitalist system, is that somehow so horrible because we don't give somebody the freedom to institute serfdom? No, because we moved to a system that believes in more freedom for individuals.... when you are allowed to own and control what you produce it. Going back to the old system that restricts you to taking the directives of a wealthy capital owner is like saying you want to go back to aristocracy instead of having a democratic vote, because a co-op literally gives you a democratic vote in your economy. Granted I think there is a place for small scale rentals and wage employment because some people don't want to own a house and don't want to be tasked with figuring out what the organization should do. But for the people who do to have a say in how they're government and economy is run, then they can have a vote- if they don't want to vote they don't have to.
To address your point on just letting them compete in the market; capitalists want to maximize profits, unfortunately easy ways to do that include (legally) not being socially and ecologically responsible. When there are companies that are keeping money that they can reinvest to make more profit off of being irresponsible and you have another firm spending money trying to be responsible they creates a huge difference in the amount of capital they can reinvest. The other thing is, cooperatives don't want to grow endlessly. They work for their members, when extra growth doesn't make their lives better why should they do it? More profit doesn't mean they'll be happier. And that's the main difference, you're evaluating two systems by two totally different sets of values. Socialism will never compound wealth at the same rates capitalism does, which has a negative effect on material standard of wealth, but on the flip side capitalism will never be socially accountable to the people who work for the economy. At a certain point, it's really just a choice to value people before profit✌️
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@Choosewisely-hb9nj Trump loves this land so much that he stole national security documents and commits fraud on the regular? 🤔 The top three things Trump loves the most, in order, are 1) Donald J Trump then its 2) Donald J Trump, and rounding out the top 3 is... Donald J Trump. Lol. The dude is so narcissistic He thought being the president made him dictator; Do you remember during lockdowns when Trump had to be reminded by his lawyers that he's NOT in complete control of the United States, he thought he could control governors like he's a dictator... Stand against federalism and the separation of powers is pretty anti-American. What a joke 🤡🤡🤡
Anyway, why I go with democratic socialism? Because its a system that believes in treating people like human beings (instead of as commodities) and securing freedom and equality for all. This is why people like George Orwell, Albert Einstein, and Martin Luther King Jr were all democratic socialists. Most all economic Buddhism is socialist, as well. This means addressing the various types of authoritarianism, like governmental, economic, racial, sexist, militarism, and ecological disaster. I'll end on a few quotes from Martin Luther King Jr;
“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”
– Speech to the Negro American Labor Council, 1961.
“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”
- Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967.
“The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”
–Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.
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@craiggles8454 The inequality aspect is on multiple fronts; first and foremost it's about power. Power to have a say in the institutions that run your life- This concept is called self-determination and it's the reason why we have political democracy. I believe economic democracy is merely an extension of such political rights to autonomy. The ability to determine working hours, conditions, benefits, and pay allow the workers of an organization to have more control over their lives than renting their days out to the authority of a capital owner. Employment is renting a human being by the hour or year, just like you might rent a tool from Home Depot or lease a car from the dealership.... Except, it's a human being.
From a democratic way of handling power stems different ways of spreading resources. I don't think inequality can ever be completely overcome, but I believe in narrowing the range in which inequality occurs, Because you're right Pareto distributions show up everywhere. Instead of having companies that have pay ratios of 100-1000X between the highest and lowest earners, cooperatives usually have bylaws that restrict the highest salary to be 10 to 30 times that of the lowest.
I will admit that capitalism will inevitably grow faster than socialism, capitalism by its very nature incentivizes maximizing profit and reinvesting/ compounding said profit to make more profits. Capitalism compounds wealth fast- unfortunately it does so by exploiting people by renting them, corrupts governments by buying them, and destroys the environment by polluting it. It's not just a few bad apples; exploitation, corruption, and pollution are inherent in the ways that markets push companies to maximize profits or else risk going out of business by being less competitive. Capitalism's wealth comes at a cost; those costs being, Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Ironic for Americans) In socialism you can still compound wealth but compounding wealth is seen as less of a priority than compounding improvements in other aspects of life.
I definitely agree that health insurance definitely should be nationalized. I'm also very much in favor of govt funded PreK-12, 2 year associates degree or trade school, and low/ no interest loans from a public bank for masters and PhDs. We need to make it easier to have a more educated society, especially with democracy.
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