Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Sorry Cheezy, I guess I'm so accustomed to Republicans screaming that ACA is communism that I've started to internalize the idea myself.
It's okay. It wears on all of us. I find myself defending liberal positions sometimes that I actually have no interest in.
To clarify a bit, while I completely understand that it's not socialist and therefore not what you would want from healthcare, would you consider it better (in the sense of "not quite as bad" rather than in any way good) or worse than the pre-ACA setup in America?
It is better, in that it tries to make the existing system better, and people paying less money for health insurance is a good thing.
It is worse, in that it forces more people into buying health care from these still-private companies.
How are you going make people to "have control over the forces that govern their lives"?
Democracy in all things, from your work to your apartment block, from your neighborhood to your courtroom and police barracks staffing. Where people are empowered, the ability of tyrants to rule over them is rendered inept. Where people participate, they begin to care. Where people care, things get better and stay better. Where things are better, people are happier.
How is it something "immediately possible"?
We can fix it now.
What are "social resource" and "productive resource"?
A social resource is something which can be shared communally, like health care and electricity. We all use them, we all have a right to access them when we need them. These things can be immediately reorganized for universal accessibility based upon necessity.
A productive resource is a resource that is produced. Here I refer to manufactured goods. These should also go to those who need them, but since organizing the distribution of society's produce on this basis is difficult and requires both time and a change in people's mindsets, it is easier in the meanwhile to distribute them based upon contribution to society.
What I mean by that is, one private property is abolished and workers exert direct control over their workplaces, wages will begin to more accurately reflect the contribution a worker makes to the production process, i.e., the wealth they receive in paychecks will correlate to the wealth that their labor has created for the company - and thus society. Presently it does not do this; wages in capitalism correlate to nothing but the capitalist's desire (or board of directors' desire) for a personal profit margin. The worker is at present exploited for far more wealth than he creates, and is not rewarded in kind. Once workers are able to control their own wages, this imbalance will equalize.
Edit: One problem seems to me quite apparent at this point. For society to progress you need some healthy degree of competition. How is that present in the system which distributes?
I don't agree. However, there will for a long time be some element of competition, as different firms try to produce a better product than another firm, or two groups compete for the same contract. But that will not last forever. We have created the idea of losers in order to justify our own personal greed. Greed is motivated primarily by insecurity, and it is permitted to continue because of private property. Where neither insecurity nor private property exist, it is both unnecessary to grab all you can for yourself before the next guy takes what would be yours, and it is impossible to accrue significantly more wealth than another person. And so we wind up working not against one another, but with one another. I think that will do far more to advance humanity, and we will do it far quicker, than when we waste so much time, energy, and resources competing against one another without purpose.