Soda for Food StampsFollow

I'm sorry, but that's just ... wrong. Socialism is for government control of wealth with the assumption that it will do a better job with it than the free market. Fascism is a method of socialism that uses regulation and control of industry to accomplish this. Communism is a method of socialism which eliminates the private ownership entirely and just gives all industry to the state. All of them sell their actions to the public on the argument that they'll do a better job distributing the wealth than a free market will.

Why the hell do you think the ***** made such a big deal about bankers and the rich (scapegoating the Jews along the way)? They appealed to the working class and unemployed by claiming they could make their lives better by seizing the property of those rich people and using it to make their lives better (the working class and unemployed that is). They promised jobs. They promised better pay. They promised to force those companies to do the right thing. Sound familiar?



You're equating "fascist" with "authoritarian" though. That's not what it means. You cannot have a fascist communism (not in absolute terms at least). Fascism uses government control over privately owned industries, while communism simply seizes those industries and controls them directly. There is no direct overlap in methodology, but the goals are the same (government control of industry). Obviously, any system can have elements of both (and most do in fact). Which is yet another reason why slinging around labels and insisting "we're socialists, not fascist" is silly.




Don't feel like getting into a pointless semantic argument over this.



You're kidding, right? You're repeating a pretty nutty conspiracy theory that has about zero grounds in reality.



Um... Not even sure how to respond to this. Tinfoil hat time maybe?



Um... Those are completely different things. Great projection you've got going on though!



Huh? There have always been a large number of "rich white guys" investing in social movements (and political parties, and governments, etc, etc, etc...). That hasn't changed. Hitler was no different, so let's stop pretending that this was some special unique aspect of his rise to power. And let's not forget the point I made earlier about the gap between what those seeking power want to do and what those giving them power want them to do. The danger of socialism in all forms is that once you give someone that power, you're basically just hoping he uses it to do what you want him to do, and not something else entirely.



No. Now you're confusing fascism with a non-democratic system. It's not about how many people make up your government or how they come to power. It's about the degree to which the government controls industry. And I don't think North Korea is fascist. I think it's communist. Aren't most industries state owned there, and the state allocates work assignments and needs for the people? I could be wrong, I'm hardly an expert on their political system.

I just don't know how many times I can explain this to you. Socialism is about government control of industry. Period. Fascism and communism are two different methods to employ socialism. Something cannot be "fascist instead of socialist". If it's fascist, it's also socialist. If it's communist, it's also socialist. Remember, I'm not talking about the labels that people apply, but the actual concepts themselves. What defines socialism?



Uh... No. What a random statement. We weren't even talking about those.



Um.. As I've been trying to explain to you: It's both. It is socialism because it's the government controlling an industry (health in this case), and it's fascism specifically because the means of that control is to regulate existing private markets rather that seize direct control of the industry itself. If the government creates a ministry of health and employs all doctors itself and doles out medicine to the people directly, then it's communist. If it creates mandates which insurance companies must follow and more mandates that businesses must buy that insurance, and yet more mandates that everyone must participate in the industry, that is fascism.



Huh? You can't "consolidate wealth" to the many. It's consolidated by the few, always. What's done with it is a separate issue. All forms of socialism gain power by promising the many that they'll distribute that wealth in ways which benefit them (although the specific methods vary of course). There's what they do, and why they do it. And all have the same answer in that case. Fascism does not use the government to consolidate wealth into the hands of the few in order to make those few rich. Or more correctly, this isn't what fascism promises to the people who support it. That's why it's identical to socialism. You only call it fascism after the fact if they don't actually follow through on their promises and instead use that power and wealth to enrich and empower themselves and ***** over all the little people.

The problem is that this is indistinguishable ahead of time. That's why I keep saying that fascism *is* socialism. They are the same (certainly in modern terms especially). The citizens of Germany in the 1930s were just as certain that Hitler was going to usher in an era of prosperity, good jobs, good pay, good benefits, etc for all the people as anyone voting Labor in the UK does today. They did not imagine things would turn out the way they did. You're under the mistaken impression that they were somehow more foolish than you are.



As I said earlier, it's a matter of degrees. There's also a difference between "it's against the law to dump industrial waste in the river", and "the law requires that X% of your cars meet a certain mph requirement". There's a difference between a law which require certain amounts of worker safety and laws which pay people to make product A instead of product B, and then pay people to buy product A as well. Regulation becomes control at a certain point. When it ceases to be about how products are made, but actually which products are made and which are bought, that's more about control. And when those controls exist with the assumption that government can make better choices about what people really need than the free market can, then that's socialism.


[quote][quote]People who praise socialism do so because the government intervenes to provide economic outcomes that the free market would not produce.[/quote]

So you can't buy health insurance in America? Wow sh*tty third world stuff if you ask me.[/quote]

Um... The operating assumption for implementing socialized medicine is that not everyone would be able to obtain health care if the government didn't act. Was that actually something you didn't understand?


[quote]What kind of government. In my country (a democracy) if it breaches its trust of power, it doesn't get elected again. I guess ya in North Korea you would be right, but then again the government isn't very socialist, I mean those people starve by the thousands a day.[/quote]

You're assuming that socialism always produces good outcomes. You do this to such an extent that when it fails to produce good outcomes (or even produces really horrible ones), you just change the name and say "that's not socialism!". Um... yes, it is. Communism is a form of socialism. WTF? That's not to say that people can't starve to death in countries with completely free markets, but the sheer denial you're showing is funny as hell. You're playing word games to make it appear as though the ideology you espouse cannot possibly fail. That's really really bizarre.

It is "working with" them to defeat that competing interest. Seriously? You started with "No! They never worked together to prevent a free market from being adopted!" to "well, they voted together to defeat the free market advocates, but that's not the same as working with them". Whatever you want to call it, it's exactly what I was talking about. Both groups were opposed to free markets. So to try to say that one was opposed while the other was for free markets is patently false.



Then you haven't absorbed what you learned very well. My knowledge of Germany is from a couple classes, a few books on the subject, and various conversations (and related research) about it. Yet I apparently have a better grasp of the relative positions and actions of the communists and fascists in Germany at the time than you do. I mean, you didn't even seem to be aware of what I said when I first said it. Now you're acknowledging that my statement was correct, but it didn't mean they were really working together. Look. I never said they were buddies or anything, just that the communists voted for the ***** in order to ensure that a socialist party gained power. They did this because they believed that if socialist policies were adopted in Germany that it would be a step in the direction they wanted to go, and perhaps later they could win over more power in the future and enact a more complete communist system.

Are you saying that's wrong? Because I'm pretty sure that's correct.

Like I stated in the post after it I mention adjusting for cost of living and it was 5 years ago. My mistake in the first post. The point still stands SSDI is what goes off years work/amount paid in as I get about $600 more then what the current SSI on SSDI. I was turn down for SSDI on my first attempt and given SSI after I appealed that ruling I got full SSDI and they took what I had received in SSI out of my settlement.

Like I stated in the post after it I mention adjusting for cost of living and it was 5 years ago. My mistake in the first post. The point still stands SSDI is what goes off years work/amount paid in as I get about $600 more then what the current SSI on SSDI. I was turn down for SSDI on my first attempt and given SSI after I appealed that ruling I got full SSDI and they took what I had received in SSI out of my settlement.

No one gives a fuck. You can stop posting about it now. Was your disability related to not understanding when you have nothing left to offer in a conversation?

Cliff provided useless facts. When does gbaji provide facts?

You need to watch Cheers again as an adult. The "facts" were intentionally crazy examples of **** know it all guys at bars make up.

Who said anything about being evil. I said my countries government is run by the people, not every country in the world experiences that, and not every country in the world that doesn't has power hungry government who eats up all the money. It also isn't concrete along the lines of Capitalism or Communism. That is why I asked you which type of government. Here in Socialist Canada we elect our government based on their positions of spending our collective money, and plans to maintain the programs we have bought in the past.

I can understand your worry though as an American, considering your government doesn't really control its money supply. It is macro managed by a group of savvy banks who sit on the Fed.

Paranoia is fun though isn't it.

I'll take your word for it. I'm really not up to watching Cheers again.

I think it's his irrelevant votes are bullets that pushed him over.

Apparently we vote based on which brown people we want dead.

If by "voting against Obama" you mean that I voted for the **** party because I would rather they be in power than Obama, then yes, I would be "working with the *****". Do you understand that the communists supported and voted for Hitler? They did this because while they viewed the ***** as rivals to their own socialist agenda, both groups were socialist. So they set aside their differences out of a sense of solidarity. Didn't end out well for the communists, but that was what they did and why they did it.

It's funny to see gbaji chastising somebody for toeing the party line.

You make the mistake of equating democracy with liberalism. While democracy is a key component to liberalism, not all democracy results in liberalism. Which is precisely where socialism goes wrong. It's a method of using the democratic process to provide people with benefits at the expense of liberty. Democracy by itself just means that we use a system of voting to make decisions. It's not innately good or bad. What a society chooses to do with it matters a lot more.