Socialism: Yes or No?

bonkey

omnicorp wrote:

The French replaced the whole system when they installed the TGV.

No, they didn't. They built and/or replaced lines where the TGV would run (remembering that it doesn't run on the "whole system". Not only that, but even on the routes it does run, not every line was upgraded to TGV quality (as anyone who has done the Paris/Lyon run on a normal train can attest...and yes, I'm one of those people). In fact, the lines that were upgraded are only used by the TGV, so its more correctly viewed as a second network. (Although the TGV can, and does run at normal speeds on non-TGV track also)

The TGV is incredibly fast, comfortable and smooth.

You also missed expensive, as well as requiring suitable terrain to run on, and a number of other pertinent facts.

I have never heard of a French train crash.

There has never been a high-speed TFV crash resulting in fatalaties, but thats not the same thing. Also, remember that the TGV is not the entirety of French Rail.



jc

AngelofFire

Ive been on the Normal French Rail the SNCF many times and it is 10 times better than Iarnrod Eireann and British rail put together, Trains are consistent and always on time,and the Buffet is very nice.Privatisation is not the answer to the problems with our rail system which is like that of 3rd world country.

daveirl

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thejollyrodger

capitalism please

AngelofFire

What's the solution then? Throw more money at an inefficient structure?

Part of the problem is that too much money is thrown at an inefficent service. I think a long term plan to reform our rail system is needed.

Lennoxschips

Give Iarnrod Eireann a break, they are currently trying to catch up on 20 years of chronic underfunding. It doesn't happen overnight. They've relaid a lot of the tracks and installed new signalling in the last few years and new carriages are on the way.

shotamoose

arcadegame2004 wrote:

But the US system is not quite the system I am advocating. In the US, the kind of safety-net for the poor does not exist. Also, I think that the regulatory-environment is not sufficiently determined to ensure true competition in the Health-Insurance market. Private-bribery isn't even illegal in the US and as such, it is easy to see the potential for persons to keep mum about anti-competitive practices that may be contributing to the problems you mention. But that does not mean that my proposals - if implemented in a certain way - would not improve the cost per unit for Health-care and the speed of treatment on the currenct situation.

But it's not clear that your proposals would reduce costs:
-For a start, private insurers constitute an extra layer of bureacuracy in the health system, and the experience of other countries is that private insurance has higher administrative costs, partly due to fragmentation and lost economies of scale.
-There's the problem of competition. As you point out, Ireland has a duopoly at the moment, with plenty of opportunity for price-fixing. The complexities of health insurance and the hassle of moving from one provider to another also reduce the incentives for insurers to provide value for money. The government would have to heavily regulate the industry to prevent price-fixing and the other abuses rampant in the US system, and the costs of this monitoring and regulation would be passed onto the tax-payer. And forcing people to pay for a service is a pretty sure way of keeping prices high.
-What would private insurance cover? In other countries with private insurance, it often doesn't cover things like emergency care, high cost chronic care and incurable diseases. People with conditions such as diabetes or genetic disorders are unlikely to be fully covered and the state will have to pick up the tab for them too, a bill we would expect to increase as screening for hereditary conditions improves.

Overall, there's just no evidence that compulsory private insurance would be cheaper and/or result in a better service. On the quality side, OECD research has found that increasing the share of public spending in total health spending tends to reduce the number of lives lost to ill-health (see page 74 here).

T "real deal" J

Socialism doesn't work economically.

All forms of socialism have failed throughout history.

Socialism would mean middle classes would be ridiculously taxed to support this "free health and education that actually works".

Without private enterprise there is no incentive for people to work harder or for the intelligent to fulfill their potential. Socialism is horribly inefficient. Hard work is not rewarded, which is the essential invisible hand of capitalism.

Socialism throughout history usually brings with it alot of paranoia and persecution of people who express their own views.

People who yearn for socialism obviously have the depth of a glass of water and are about as historically aware as a mongolian plumber.

Lennoxschips

You could make all the same hollow comments about capitalism.

arcadegame2004

I don't deny that most Socialists mean well. But as their friend Karl Marx said "the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

daveirl

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sceptre

arcadegame2004 wrote:

But as their friend Karl Marx said "the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If he did he was quoting someone else. Boswell attributed it to Samuel Johnson in his seminal Life Of Johnson and that was published in 1775. And it's been attributed to sources at least five hundred years older. Could as easily attach it to people we all went to school with then

Redleslie2

sceptre wrote:

If he did he was quoting someone else. Boswell attributed it to Samuel Johnson in his seminal Life Of Johnson and that was published in 1775. And it's been attributed to sources at least five hundred years older. Could as easily attach it to people we all went to school with then

No it was said by Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy's socialist government. Dublin is in India. Churchill invented the mini skirt. Trains are made out of cheese.

AngelofFire

I agree, but 9/10 times reform = redundancies and the Labour party usually freak out at the first hint of them.

Do you have anything based on past evidence to support that claim?

Zombrex

T real deal J wrote:

All forms of socialism have failed throughout history.

Hold on a minute. What "form" of socialism are you talking about? What do you mean by "socialism." You are living in a social democracy right now. Your education system, your health care, your roads are socialist in nature (owned by the state, run by the state, for the people).

Do you mean all forms of "communism"?

T real deal J wrote:

Socialism would mean middle classes would be ridiculously taxed to support this "free health and education that actually works".

The problems with our health care are due to bad management, not lack of money. In a true capitalist system you wouldn't have a health care system (look at American).

T real deal J wrote:

Without private enterprise there is no incentive for people to work harder or for the intelligent to fulfill their potential. Socialism is horribly inefficient. Hard work is not rewarded, which is the essential invisible hand of capitalism.

Hate to break it to you, but "hard work" is not rewarded in capitalism either. It is the most ridiculous myth ever the successful people in a capitalist system are the ones that work harder than everyone else. Everyone who has had a stupid inefficent boss know that is not true. The mine worker works 100 times harder than the mine owner but gets paid 100 times less.

Money makes more money. Hard work has very little to do with it. The "American Dream Syndrom" is very damaging ("work hard and you will be rewarded in a capitalist system") because it is a myth that justifies things like private health care (i.e. if you can't afford it it is because you don't work hard enough, your fault)

T real deal J wrote:

Socialism throughout history usually brings with it alot of paranoia and persecution of people who express their own views.

Authoritarism requires persecution, whether it be capitalist or communist. Careful not to confuse socialism with authoritarism. Like I said before, you are right now living in a social democracy.

daveirl

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omnicorp

You only have to look at a homeless person on the street,
A person dying in an overcrowded, underfunded hospital,
And then see people like Bono and David Beckham in their mansions,
To know that Capitalism doesn't work.

Oh, and stop talking about trains.

AngelofFire

Reform of public service involves the cutting back on staff and the service itself, therefore in effect it doesn`t work.Reform should mean cutting back on administration by getting rid of certain managerial staff, but the government are too reluctant and want to keep their friends in the public service in cushy jobs. The SDS now has more management staff than workers, yet instead of cutting back on management the workers are being given the boot, thats hardly a forward thinking reform strategy.


Labour are right to oppose mundane cosmetic measures like redundancies for ordinary workers when it is not feasible.

omnicorp

Well at least the Irish Labour party aren't like the New Labour Party in Britain.

Tony Blair, A Socialist?
Yeah, and I've got a good reputation on Boards.ie(!)

sliabh

AngelofFire wrote:

Reform of public service involves the cutting back on staff and the service itself, therefore in effect it doesn`t work.

It usually means a whole load of things. Typically re-organisition of work practices, changing incentive models and it can involve redundancies. From my experience of public and private sector companies all of these can result in improvements in service.

But it's too damn hard (and this has been recognised by the various reviews of the civil service) to remove people from public sector roles. It's pretty much a job for life and I have seen the consequences. I was in a government office for a project recently where one guy read the paper for half the day, a Database Administrator I worked with couldn't even read a basic SQL query, and I could go on (training wasn't a problem, he just wasn't held accountable in his cushy number)

There is a lot of fat in public sector companies which is often why when the time comes to improve things redundancies will always feature as part of an overall plan.

arcadegame2004

Reform of public service involves the cutting back on staff and the service itself, therefore in effect it doesn`t work.Reform should mean cutting back on administration by getting rid of certain managerial staff, but the government are too reluctant and want to keep their friends in the public service in cushy jobs. The SDS now has more management staff than workers, yet instead of cutting back on management the workers are being given the boot, thats hardly a forward thinking reform strategy.

Instances where cutting back in staff can be necessary include ending the situation where several staff are doing basically the same job. Such wasteful duplication of resources encourages poor productivity.

SkepticOne

Social democracy is what I'd probably go for. There needs to be some measure of equality of opportunity for society to thrive.

AngelofFire

Instances where cutting back in staff can be necessary include ending the situation where several staff are doing basically the same job. Such wasteful duplication of resources encourages poor productivity.

I agree, i never said that it was always unnecessary. However the answer to a companies problems isnt always to single out ordinary workers for redundancies

T "real deal" J

Wicknight wrote:

Hold on a minute. What "form" of socialism are you talking about?

Castro's "socialist paradise". And all former and current communist states. Didn't Marx say communism is the preceeding step to socialism.

Wicknight wrote:

Do you mean all forms of "communism"?

Yes

Wicknight wrote:

The problems with our health care are due to bad management, not lack of money.

This is true here in Ireland. However did you ever think of why private health care will always be far superior than public health care? I'll explain>

Wicknight wrote:

Hate to break it to you, but "hard work" is not rewarded in capitalism either

Let me replace "hard work" with ingenuity, enterprise, efficiency and incentive. Private health care has these traits as profit is to be made. Public services are complacent and workers get lazy as their jobs are more secure. Our buses and trains > always late. "Hard work" was a sloppy term.

Wicknight wrote:

The mine worker works 100 times harder than the mine owner but gets paid 100 times less.

The mine worker's hard work is put to waste as he does not have the entrepeneur's vision. Capitalism accomodates human nature whilst socialism tries to take care of everybody. Stifling our instincts is counterproductive and like it or not only the strong survive.

Redleslie2

T "real deal" J, welcome to my ignore list, join the fascists, racists and other people who are too lazy to read threads before posting gibberish on them.

sceptre

T real deal J wrote:

Castro's "socialist paradise". And all former and current communist states. Didn't Marx say communism is the preceeding step to socialism.

If I remember rightly, he said precisely the opposite (but it's probably been a long while since I dusted off Marx (or Smith) so I may remember incorrectly). Now let's examine what that means. He said that socialism was a necessary step on the path to communism, in other words that you can't have communism without going through a socialist phase (of course he's using his definition of what socialism is, which may or may not tally with whatever you understand it to be). He may have said something about an anarchic phase on the way, though that may have just been something I took from playing too much Civ in the mid-90s. However, he didn't state that communism was a necessary conclusion to socialism (merely from his point of view a desirable one).

In other words, for Y to happen, X must happen first, but just because X happens, it doesn't mean that Y is bound to happen.

Meanwhile with regard to Castro's "socialist paradise" (has he ever called it this or was that just Monty Burns in the Simpsons?), you should know by now that putting the word "socialist" in the description of economic policy by a country's leader doesn't necessarily make it any more socialist than the German Democratic Republic was either of the first two parts of its name. If you're going to talk about socialism then talk about socialism rather than what some guy in a beard and a green hat (or a guy with a pointy nose and a nuclear power plant and a trillion dollar-bill) uses to describe something. Arguing by picking the most extreme example as a reason of why something is crap (and even failing to illustrate exactly why that extreme example hasn't worked) hardly lends credence to an argument. Irrespective of Cuba being a piss-poor example of why socialism is bad, you've a duty to consider why Castro went Marxist in the first place (long before he badly ran Cuba as his own personal playground) if you want to invoke the Cuban example as the involvement of Nixon with regard to Cuban sovereignty in early 1959 isn't irrelevant to the example (if you must use it). Meanwhile Cuba's no more socialist than North Korea is - the entire State's still run by the self-preserving oligarch rump of the communist party, intent on holding on to their own power at all costs (so much so that I'm surprised it hasn't been declared the People's Democratic Republic of Cuba) while fiddling the books and packing Bulgarian tobacco into their second most important export crop (no, not the sugar, I assume that's still the main export crop).

AngelofFire

The mine worker's hard work is put to waste as he does not have the entrepeneur's vision. Capitalism accomodates human nature whilst socialism tries to take care of everybody. Stifling our instincts is counterproductive and like it or not only the strong survive

Wow i have never come across such darwinist-thatcherite views in this forum before.Would you be a member of the freedom institute by any chance?.The use of the word "counterproductive" seems to imply that you that you beleive that society must be some economic machine and we are all in service to it, it should be the otherway around, we should live in a society where the economy is a servant of the people not the otherway around.

Socialist ideals can be more productive than capitalist ones,would we have experienced the celtic tiger without the free education act,what about the waste of human potential under the unchecked capitalist system.People who have the academic ability to become doctors are unable to do so because of their economic background?, you think that reflects a forward thinking productive society. Would we be the progressive society we are today without socialist ideals, like the 40 hour working week,sane working hours, better health and saftey standards and decent wages.

Your mine worker and entreprenure comparison is short sited and like many capitalist ideals it doesnt take into account the complexities of human society.Chances are the entrepeneure has had a better start in life than the mine worker,the fulfillment of that mine workers potential was denied because of his socio economic background, he could have been doctor."The great only appear great because we are on our knees", apply Jim Larkin`s quote to the position of the entrepreneure and the Mine worker.

Well Judging by your views if you were alive during the 1913 lockout you probably would of condemned the strikers and supported William Martin Murphy and the employers.

pork99

AngelofFire wrote:

Wow i have never come across such darwinist-thatcherite views in this forum before.

What Darwinism tells us about human nature is often uncomfortable. It does not mean it's wrong though. Darwin's theories have been consistently proven to be right by subsequent scientific discoveries.

sceptre

I can sense syke's nose perking up at the mention of Darwinism so all I'll say is that people tend to misinterpret what Darwin actually meant, by omitting the chance aspect of a genetic mutation (which turns out to be an advantage) even when they're applying it to biology, let alone almost everyone who tries to fit a square peg into a round hole and apply it to socio-economics. I'm not a fan of laissez-faire, but it's still a better term to be using rather than pushing the notion that something's "natural" (like driving cars, drilling for oil and selling paper shares in insurance companies) by possibly misinterpreting the basis and reasoning behind modern evolutionary theory to do that.

Sand

I'd be interested in when you think tax and redistribution were 'invented'. Tax has been around since some of the first urban settlements. And before the growth of states as we know them now, redistribution was common but mostly done through religious channels.

But not in any recognisable form - you admit this with the redistribution - Bush believes in faith based charities instead of government programs - is that recognisable socialism? And I dont know the last time the government demanded I give them a chicken.

Though I agree with your sources summary that giving power to the state bureacracy is a recipe for disaster in far too many cases.

Hardly a small fix here and there.

A long long long fall from its initial concepts though. And its fading fast, European governments are meant to be socialist but the EU common market is breaking down national monopolies, breaking down protectionism and forcing the Germans and French to wake up to the realities of the world. The realities of how theyre going to pay the pension of Europes rapidly greying population. The reality that the ties that have traditionally bound societies together are weakening. The reality that socialist policies like the CAP are doing immense harm to developing economies around the world.

Just as there will always be markets, there will always be socialist policies, because that's what people want.

Well find out in the next few decades just how much theyre willing to pay for them, wont we? I mean whats the socialists secret plan for the aging "bump" thats due in the next while?

No. This graph shows the average rank of cognitive development test scores at various ages by socio-economic status of parents (from the British Cohort Study). It shows that children with low early scores but affluent backgrounds tend to overtake children with high early scores from poor backgrounds. So genetic inequalities do not seem to be as important as wealth, and if we want to create real equality of opportunity for every person - given the accidents of birth - we should be act accordingly.

I dont know if that graph proves that - it doesnt look at anything beyond economic background. So its saying its a factor but we get no idea of the weighting. Maybe its relatively minor? Care to provide a link to the actual source study as the link you provided is from some zapista fan site. As I said Ill bet on a smart poor person to pass an exam ahead of dumb rich person any day of the week.

That's a pretty laughable definition of equality of opportunity - hey, sorry you can't afford to go to college, it's just that some people are rich and some people are poor! You'll be a lot happier if you learn your place in the hierarchy!

Oh but a guy with an iq of 12 and a guy with an iq of 112 have equal opportunities? Lets say a poor but clever person wanted to go to college and there was no "free" (its not free ) 3rd level - what then? Get a job in supermacs? What about taking out a loan, working a part time job when in college and then paying back the loan when you get your exams and a good job?

Oh yeah, that might discourage the idiotic time wasters who spend the taxpayers money to get into college so they can continue on with their career in drinking? Like the guy I met who was getting langered in the pub before doing his exams? Money well spent there eh? He mightnt have been as quick to waste *our* money if he was liable to pay for it.

But then what would the students socialist parties do for members?

Sorry Sand, you've lost me there - is this supposed to make some kind of sense?

Ill break it down for ya - Youre arguing for a compassionate form of capitalism. Lets agree the market is the way the economy should be run as a general rule, but lets borrow policy from the USSR for certain "exceptions" like education and health. If you want to make health and education more accessible you could do it through the markets. Whats the fascination with a failed system?

Oh I see, you're just off on a rant. Yes, of course privately buses never crash and private hospitals would never sell organs. Meanwhile, back in reality ...

Well part two is that any time a private solution is mentioned we hear nothing but evil corrupt immorral capitalsim profits vs patient care etc etc, only the holy uncompromising saints of the state can save us. This is a justification for borrowing sections of a failed system And yet ..... in reality theyre human beings in a human system as well, and just as prone to failures. So scratch another common reason for socilaist policies.