Agent Steel wrote:Ok I mean my definitions are that far off from those but they're somewhat different.
I mean if we're starting off with different ideas about what socialism is then it will be hard to have a conversation.
Let's just start with this:
1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
I mean that's pretty close to my definition but not exactly. It's close enough though.
Tell me why you don't like this theory? Let's start with that.
I have a lot of objections to this but for starters:
1. Single point of failure, as I am sure @Rancid appreciates networks which are designed around a client-server model are less robust to disaster and general screw ups than peer-to-peer networks. Socialism wants to be an all encompasing monopoly over everything while capitalism is by definition distributed authority. If Dear Leader has a fit and decides Ukrainians don't get food this year then millions die. Dear Leader then is a single point of failure which can bring down the whole system. On the other hand, if Joe the greengrocer, one amongst thousands of food distributors, decides he hates ukrainians so bad that he will deny them access to food, no one will notice as any one of thousands of other greengrocers will fill the void.
2. You can't get there from where we are without gargantuan thefts. Like it or not, theft is a violation of the compact of civilisation.
3. It is slavery. When a political structure has total control over what you have, what you can say, where you go and think then you are defacto the slave of that structure. Why would anyone
want to be a slave?
4. There is no benefit in it that might offset its vast and appalling problems.
Will that do for starters?
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I just thought of another one:
5. Socialists are horrible,
horrible, people. I
don't meant they are horrible
because they are socialists I mean they are horrible people
in their characters quite separately from the odiousness of their beliefs. Given that under the jackboots of socialism the socialists will be the overclass controlling everything then they really need to be saintly people for that situation to be even remotely tolerable. As it is none of them are, just the opposite.