On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 7:23 PM, Blaze Spinnaker <[email protected]>wrote:
There are levels of socialism which increasingly make more sense. > When people talk about "socialism," there's a huge spectrum of possibilities concerning what is intended. One one side you have the old style authoritarianism that was Soviet communism. On the other you have intelligent programs undertaken in the Netherlands and Switzerland (bastions of capitalism) as well as the Scandinavian countries. Branding all of these approaches as "socialism" and expecting people to be cowed into silence is obscurantist. It works for a subset of the US population who react reflexively and viscerally to anything that is different from what they were inculcated to believe. But for anyone who cares about thinking through things, it's clear that a more nuanced approach, which looks at the specific details of specific programs, rather than lurching upon hearing certain keywords, is what is needed for intelligent economic policy. > How that socialism is implemented is up for debate, but higher levels of > automation are clearly making more and more people irrelevant economically. > And this is bad for capitalism. It means there is less disposable income in circulation. It is ironic that capitalism must occasionally be saved from (Austrian school) capitalists. Eric
