I'm going to use my amazing psychic powers to predict that the issue of Venezuela won't die off, even though Hugo Chavez did.
So I pose a challenge to the Venezuela-is-the-example-of-socialism-I-wanna-discuss-not-all-the-others crowd.
Did Venezuela become a terribly horrific murderous bankrupt state
because they enacted gun control? Or was the gun control enacted
because of the spike in violence? Which came first? If the state is bankrupt and so are the people, were the gun controls even enforceable?
Did other countries enact gun control and then have no spike in violence? I'm going to answer that one for you to keep you honest: Yes, they did. I've pointed out several examples and none were challenged. So those are facts.
So it wasn't the liberal/left policy of gun control which is the source of the problem, then.
Did Venezuela become a terribly horrific murderous bankrupt state because it raised the minimum wage?
Let's take a look. Venezuela in the middle of a hyper-inflation period raised their minimum wages. Did that solution solve the problem of hyper-inflation? Was hyper-inflation a separate problem?
If raising the minimum wage causes hyper-inflation, why are your examples of Chile and South Korea and most other liberal countries not the same, why is there no hyper-inflation there, why is unemployment down and why are their economies booming? Could it be because hyper-inflation is not caused by minimum wages?
So, gun control didn't cause the violence, but it was a response to it. And the gun control was not effective, because the state lacked the resources to enforce it because it was corrupt and bankrupt. And it was not a solution to the main problem, which was unemployment, starvation, and mismanagement, and political suppression, and corruption. Whoops, I gave away the game here.
Look at virtually any policy enacted by Venezuela which was not the state simply snatching property from private owners, like
the police in the United States are able to do. Which well-known liberals in the United States oppose, and which policies were enacted by "tough-on-crime" conservatives. Some statist/communist nations in history have done that. This is not the policy of most socialist countries. If you wish, let's leave none of them out.
Compare literally all the countries that currently exist, or have ever existed, which have socialist policies, versus the communist ones which simply took people's property and businesses. Is that the rule, or the exception? Is communism the same as liberalism or socialism?
Perhaps in right wing fantasyland, but in the real world, there's a difference between the "people"-controlled "democracy" of North Korea and the people-controlled democracy in South Korea. And only one of them actually enacts policies which help the worker.
For a conservative to win this argument, they have to claim that the socialist nations of Chile and South Korea, and Canada, and Norway, and the United Kingdom, are great because of capitalism, and a lack of socialism. Capitalism exists in all of those places. So does socialism. It also exists in China. It also exists in North Korea. It also exists in Zimbabwe. Capitalism exists in those places, and by itself, or with state support, addressed zero societal problems.
But which policies cause one nation to fail and another to succeed?
If it was socialist policies, as my opponents persist in assuming, then why are so many nations on earth mixed economies with both socialist and capitalist ideas? Why are so many nations with slightly more socialist policies doing so much better than the United States, the "greatest country on Earth" self-described but not proven?
Why does Norway beat the United States on starting wages, availability of medical care, affordability of medical care, voting rights / suffrage,
voter turnout, (
cite), welfare, education, and have relatively the same
economic freedom (75 versus 70), and practically the same economic growth (
2.2 versus
2.4%).
My citations for those last few were from the ultra-conservative Heritage foundation, a conservative think tank. This is basically a hostile witness. The same conservatives who argue that the United States is so much better off under libertarian (Kansan policies)or supply-side centralized planned (Chinese policies) note that there's fundamentally
no difference between the economic freedoms of the United States and those of Norway, and fundamentally
no appreciable difference in growth.
One country gives you more than double the starting wages of the other. One country guarantees you can see a doctor. One country makes seeing that doctor cost about 1/10th of what it would in the United States. One country's unemployment rate is lower than the other, even after the United States recovered and reached "full employment". One country didn't achieve this through xenophobic border policies. I emigrated to this country and I'll be able to vote in three years automatically. The only thing they insisted of me was that I had a job or was married to a Norwegian citizen, pretty much just like the United States. No giant massive wall was built, no ports were closed. Guns are controlled here. Violence is controlled here. Poverty is controlled here. People live longer, and are happier, and think their country is moving in the right direction.
If you can have all the same things as you do in the United States, but better, and more of them, and more freedom, and more economic freedom, and more citizen participation in your government, and fewer dead soldiers, and fewer mass murders, and fewer murders, would you not be insane to oppose such policies?
There's no reason why the United States cannot do all those things. The US sits on oil and coal, has a booming software sector, pharmaceuticals, Hollywood, you name an industry and we have it, you name a natural resource other than some rare earth metals and we have it, you name a type of scientific research or kind of education degree, and we have it.
There's nothing holding the US back. No excuse why we cannot do better as a nation. None at all. None whatsoever.
Only the perpetual bleating of the conservative movement that such policies will end employment as we know it, and the 1/3rd of the nation that believes them and shows up to vote.
It always baffles me how in one breath conservatives say there's nothing America can't do, and how great we are, but deny any and all attempts to make things better, and ignore all comparisons to the multitudes of other countries that beat us.
We don't have to invent the solutions, they're not theoretical. They're already in practice in dozens of nations across the world. We can copy off of our smarter fellow-students of humanity, and there's no one who would even be upset.
If you somehow believe the United States can't do, for no apparent reason, then look at liberal US states and see how much better they do, and how they generally contribute more to the US federal budget than they withdraw from it, and how the conservative
Red states are constantly taking without chipping in as much, because they believe in having all the benefits of a mixed economy, but demand to pay none of the applicable taxes. Those same taxes we'd pay under the booming economy of the Clinton era, by the way, which proved they did nothing to stifle economic growth. Demand creates growth, cutting taxes for billionaires does not.
So my proofs are clear. Socialist ideas of governing mixed economies work. Repeatedly. They exist in the United States to a limited degree and in every advanced nation, every single one of them. The ones which take care of their people the least, like China, are supply-side nightmares, or corrupt and mismanaged statist communist dictatorships like Venezuela.
Socialism is a blend of capitalism and the welfare of the people. It's what should be the political center, and in most countries on Earth, it is. Only in the United States is that seen as far left.
That's because we, in the United States, live in the Fox News bubble, and listen to conservative talk radio, and read conservative newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, and read websites funded by conservative think tanks. Constantly pushing right-wing supply-side propaganda onto gullible people.
You want proof it doesn't do what it is advertised to do, look at how the economy has either shrunk significantly or grown at an anemic rate, ever since taxes were slashed post-Clinton, and the minimum wage has remained mostly stagnant for decades. Reagan, Bush, and Bush Jr all kept the wage down as low as possible. The economy recovered under Democratically controlled congresses, all of which did not last, but were then replaced by Republican controlled ones, and then wages and growth became stagnant again.
Look at the record. When conservatives get everything they want, like Kansas, the economy and the state both suffer. When they depress wages, the economy stagnates right along with it.
https://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/chart1
Government source: History of the federal minimum wage.
When did the economy boom? When did it bust?
http://bebusinessed.com/history/history-of-minimum-wage/
When was the minimum wage worth the most? Before Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, and Bush. Under Carter and Clinton, the minimum wage mostly kept pace with inflation. When did we suffer economic collapses? Under Nixon, Carter (Oil crisis), Reagan, Bush, and Bush. When did the economy recover? Under Clinton and Obama. Is it worth what it was worth in 1970? No, because Republicans block wage increases and mismanage the economy so prices rise faster than wages do. That's what causes anemic growth. Because having all that supply means nothing when there is no demand.
Supply =/= Demand.
Lower taxes =/= Demand.
Stagnant wages =/= Demand.
And as has been demonstrated by Clinton and the Democrats in Congress in 2006, and under Obama, higher wages =/= Lack of Demand.
And has been demonstrated by Australia, UK, Norway, and many other mixed economies in the first world, higher wages =/= Lack of Growth, or Lack of Employment.
Liberal and socialist policies do not cause economic disasters, they fix them.
But, if you put one complete and total buffoon in total control of a country, like in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, then the country is a disaster area. Idiocracy is not the same as liberalism or socialism. Just take a look at Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, none of these countries are liberal, yet they're all run by right-wing idiots.
Having one idiot in charge of everything is a
dictatorship. It's neither liberal nor conservative. It's neither capitalism nor socialism, despite whatever policies they put in practice, because what overshadows their policies on wages would be their policies on shooting all the dissidents and stealing all the private property owned by "rebels". And no matter what label you put on the idiot, right or left wing, it always fails because government by
undemocratically elected idiot is how you destroy a country.
There's almost no difference between a left-wing communist totalitarian, and a right-wing fascist totalitarian. Saying they represent either the right or the left is a red herring. They represent one person, themselves, and they're all idiots.
If you put one idiot in charge of a hydroelectric dam, it won't work. I know this is a startling revelation. I want to talk about the 1,000s of hydroelectric dams that
do work.
If your only argument is to talk about the one dam that failed because it was a wholly owned private entity controlled by one lunatic, regardless of their political position, the reason why it failed was because they were both an idiot and an extremist, and had no idea how to manage anything.
That's a problem that exists on all political spectrums. It's also the extreme minority example.
Let's talk about states governed by mainstream conservatives. Kansas is one of those. The United States is governed by a conservative legislature. Most states are governed by a conservative Governor. Most state legislatures are conservative. The ones controlled by liberals do better.
That's the discussion we're having. We're not going to debate how socialist Hitler really was, take your Godwins outside.
