All the links I've ever read from you are theories, that ignore the facts of life about what motivates people. If you want to know what happens when socialism is put into practice read this book about the collapse of the USSR.

http://www.amazon.com/Lenins-Tomb-Last-Soviet-Empire/dp/0679751254

We know what happens on hippie communes. They do enough work to exist and get high. They don't develop any useful technology or produce wealth. Most get bored with this lifestyle or get sick of having so many lazy freeloaders. So where is this social experiment that show some brand of socialism works and is sustainable? Why aren't you starting a commune to show us how it should work on a small scale first?

How the hell does technology like clean energy, cures for cancer, living in space, etc... ever get developed unless people are highly motivated? Fear for one's family survival is a great motivator, you want to take this away and replace it with nothing. When I pressed Vasset to explain how people are motivated when the government guarantees your families survival no matter what, all he says is that you'll get a little bit nicer stuff.

So society needs a lot of trained, hardworking engineers, programmers, doctors, nurses, etc... in order to have good infrastructure, good products and services and health care. If my only skills in life are surfing and bagging groceries, I would drive a Chevy instead of a Buick, I would have a 3 bedroom house instead of a 4 bedroom house as a highly trained professional. The government guarantees my survival for myself and offspring regardless of how many I have. What option are people going to take?

This is why socialism as implemented is insanity.

Every socialist program like healthcare as a 'right', minimum wage, welfare payments, income tax is a reward for irresponsible behavior and a punishment for responsible behavior. So how can you claim socialism does anything but promote irresponsible behavior?

The free market can act as a reward for delivering good products and services to others and punishment for those that don't. The problem with the free market today is we have limited natural resource and an unlimited ability to consume them all through population increases. So unless this changes, any system will have pleanty of human misery and pleaty of human conflict.

The problem is that natural resources are allowed to be bought and sold to the highest bidder to be exploited and monopolized. Also that we don't have any controls on population growth except human misery. So life is a big competition for resources and to spread one's seed. This is the source of misery in the world. If you want to end human misery, you have to deal with these situations and stop pretending these are not the case.

I agree in part. But what their system fails to do is bring any real and lasting contentment. Getting high all the time can get old. Same with having everything you need to survive without really trying. Even if you could create a sustainable socialist system that provided for everyone's need would they really be content? The fact that hippie communes are a fringe element in society proves people really don't want this.

It's debatable which is more difficult. There's hard physical labor but it doesn't have the stress of trying to make payroll every week. Am I supposed to believe that all these hippies could easily and quickly become millionaires in the corporate world with no effort, but they are in the commune because they don't want to sell out? Purlease, Eloise.

I'm not a moralist. So I have no problems with people being lazy, a hippie or whatever. Obviously some people enjoy a hippie commune more, more power to them. But if they want the primitive life, why do they then expect high tech(i.e. expensive) health care as their human right? And if they're so peace-loving, why do they want to put a gun to people's heads to force them to pay for it?

No. I actually want a small place on this earth for you to have your version of utopia. I just don't want you to put a gun to people's heads to force it on them. If you want people to go along with you, I want you to convince them with evidence not violent threats. I don't want overpopulation to cause this continuous competition for resources. Is this too much to ask?

These could be motivators for some if they had adequate resources, some people will be unmotivated no matter what. But most people just struggle to pay the bills. Why? The competition for resources and overpopulation. So people struggling to win the competition for resources and to spread their seed have no time, energy or money for anything but survival.

You don't want to do anything to change this.

But as long as we have overpopulation and the competition for natural resources, it will be the dominant motivator.

Fear replaced with what? Having money to buy luxury items and leisure pursuits can be a good motivator. But most leftists want to tax people with income so much to pay for social programs that people can't enjoy these motivators either. So all we're left with is fear as the prime motivator. I want to replace this a the motivator as well, but there is only one way to do it.

I don't exactly agree with EXC's claims, however I do want to hear why it is rational for people who make more money to be taxed more than everyone else.  I thought equality is/was a goal?  How is it equal for a richer person to be paying 30% of their income while everyone else pays 15?  (numbers are for illustrative reasons only, of course)

OK, thanks.

But if you studied how these people got rich, you'll find a lot of them took advantage of limited natural resources(i.e. land) and oversupply of labor due to uncontrolled and unplanned births. So as resources become scarcer and overpopulation creates more competition for work, you actually have a situation that the super rich can take advantage of and make more money with not much effort or risk. The price of commodities goes up while labor costs go down, easy to make money. Their income is easy to hide from the tax man. Yachts are cheap to build with lots of cheap labor around thanks to your resistance to mandatory family planning.

You also have a lot of people like doctors that got rich off the welfare system and government contracting. We have people like Ross Perot that got filthy rich off medicare for seniors. The government guarantees their income no matter what price they charge, so they never have a need to keep their costs low. But no one got rich by implementing clean energy solutions or curing cancer, right?

Your socialism is about wealth redistribution, unfortunately it is from the working middle class to the super rich that can work the system and those irresponsible about developing a job skill and family planning. It's the working middle class that gets squeezed. They have no time energy or money for anything except trying to stay out of poverty. Their taxes are taken from their employer and merchant, so they have no opportunity to hide it.

EXC, you can drop the act bro, you're starting to scare us

Your arguments almost make it sound like you believe that!

Double post

Darn it.. how'd that happen..?

But... but Freedom Ships!

...

or is it Freedom Space Ships now?
 

That brings me no small amount of pleasure

Really? Are you sure about that?

Zerg? pff... cheap knock offs...

The original "Zerg"

Oh? Whats his motivator?

...

and while we're at it, whats mine, again?

I agree. You don't like seeing these people with yachts while the poor struggle to pay the bills. You want them to give up these luxuries with even higher taxes. I always said there is greedy rich and greedy poor. Your system transfers wealth from those that produce wealth to those that don't, both rich and poor. I want to do the opposite.

For working professional that don't milk the welfare system, yes it makes it harder to enjoy luxuries when they're just trying to pay the bills after taxes are taken out. If you keep jacking up the rates eventually they become unavailable to anyone but political cronies and people that cheat on their taxes. Even in the USSR where the government tried to take all the wealth, there was an underground economy that enabled people to get rich, usually criminals.

Australia is not yet your socialist utopia right? What are the top tax rates? And isn't it still easy to get out of paying them? You're always saying how the super rich cheat on their taxes, maybe this is how they can afford yachts. Plus you can still get rich in Australia by exploiting natural resources too, right?

Now you're talking about corrupt people in governments as though libertarians in government would be immune. Heh.

As for the American Revolution, remember what the colonists wanted? Nothing tangible at all - they wanted a voice in the government. If Britain was socialist (in the way other have brought up and you strawman), they'd already be in the government.

In some cases, but the bottom line was ending up was more money and more economic security. Sure their were some unsavory things done to make money. Some people were content with just a small farm or business instead of poverty in other places.

But you want me to pay for the health care of the hippies and surfer bums. Just because they live or exist geographically close to me, but they are still another society.

Not as long as we have stubborn people like yourself. Face it we pay money to police, prisions, schools, welfare, etc... to maintain the status quo. Not to solve any problems like crime, proverty, overpopulation, etc.

Yes. Have you read the Hedonistic Imperative? This is what I want. There are no technological barriers only political ones.

Your 'voice' is your decision not to buy their products if they suck. Your 'voice' is not to work for them if the conditions suck. If I don't like goverment services, what are my options? A man with a gun comes and forces me to pay for myself and others. You call this freedom?

The Native Americans. Or any indigenous peoples before the invention of capital and/or currency. Check mate.

The problem is, once capital and money replace the system of mutual reciprocity, there is no going back. This is basic economics. Money is just so damned superior in getting what one wants. Instead of using arbitrary values assigned to goods -- meaning I have to have a specific good to get the other good I want -- all I have to possess is money to get whatever I want. So, no "experiment" would work in our current society. Why? Because we know that outside our experimental community, there's money and a system for getting it that works for the most part. That fact alone will probably drive us to abandon our little experiment, because after all, we are slaves to convenience, and money is pretty damned convenient to get what we want. Past civilizations did without it (and did a pretty bang-up job of it if you ever look at the MesoAmerican cultures for example), but civilizations have a way of ingraining themselves into their constituents, making such a radical experiment like living with mutual reciprocity impossible. Imagine asking a stranger, "I'll give you 3 back rubs if you do the dishes" There's so many (awkward) questions after this that have to be worked out, and this is for one of 1,000s of real tasks and needs we have in each day.

Socialism does not work. I was born behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe in the 70's. I remember the 80s as a  kid, before I left for the West, so all your ideological enthusiasts of Socialism - take time to read please...

You were graciously allocated 1kg of sugar a month per family, 3kg of meat (or so), etc. You were given coupons for those items which were needed to "buy" them in stores (money was useless in this case). So of course you had a huge black market where people who didn't need sugar traded their sugar coupons with vegetarians who didn't need meet coupons etc. When "the word got out" that there was going to be a sugar delivery (or beef or pork delivery) to a store, people would line up from 3am or so, before opening, in front of the store so they would get enough meat to feed their families during that given month. Often they had to do that in the bitter freezing January temperatures. As the centrally-planned economy ran itself to shambles, limits (by coupons) were also extended to other basic items like RICE, oil, candy, gasoline  etc.

Fruit that most of us today in The West take for granted like bananas, oranges and kiwis was only available on the black market and was not supplied by the socialist government. I remember that when someone's father returned from a "foreign holiday" - most likely from other socialist paradises like Bulgaria, and brought some bananas (which Bulgarians easily smuggled from Turkey), that kid was treated like a god in school for having a banana for lunch.

Health care. Free, publicly available. Great, right? Wrong. The quality of state health care was appalling. If you needed an x-ray or treatment for a condition that was not life-threatening, you had to sign up for a waiting list. Often weeks or even months passed before your turn came, and by then of course, your condition could've dramatically worsened. I remember my mother going to the dentist, and the quality of the work was so poor that the fillings kept falling out after a few months. The waiting lists were long, because there weren't enough medical centers to meet the needs. Demand by far exceeded supply. This of course again created grounds for the culture of bribes and corruption. After all, who cares about corruption when the well-being of your child is at stake.

I know that socialism does not mean communism - but it often leads to it, because in order to have socialism, private investors need to be eliminated. The only way to eliminate them is by force, because people will always want to innovate and invest by nature. So you use coercion to stifle private investment and entrepreneurship. That means no challenging viewpoints must be allowed the public domain because this might start a social unrest. So we have restriction in freedom of press and censorship. Beginnings of totalitarianism.

I remember how workplaces ran, from my parents' stories. Because everyone was on government- fixed wages, and there was no drive to be competitive (there was no competition - the government was producing everything) people often sat around doing nothing. As long as the government targets at factories were met by manufacturing poor quality output, that was enough. There was no incentive to innovate, no rewards for merit, for hard work. People stole from the state as much as they could, by clocking in additional hours that they supposedly spent "working", people nicked stuff from factories to take home so they could trade them for coupons for meat later, in simple terms NO ONE GAVE A DAMN. Office jobs were often not much more than filling out useless paperwork that the government demanded, and producing fictitious reports of how well everyone was doing.

Yeah life was a real peach.

Now I know that a lot of you western-born, heart-bleeding, well-intentioned (bless!), socialists are squirming in your seats just dying to yell ... "But that wasn't REAL socialism!" Hate to burst your bubble - it was exactly that. It's like Christians saying today that the Crusaders and Inquisitionists weren't REAL Christians.

What I also think is missing in this debate is balance. Denmark, Sweden and Germany (and other often quoted) are not socialist countries! They are capitalist countries with a few socialist elements, implemented and well harnessed. Denmark does NOT have a centrally planned economy. I could move to Denmark tomorrow and start my own private business within a day! Just because it has high taxes does not make it socialist.

As some libertarians here said, libertarianism is not anarchy. We don't denounce the need for a police force, taxes and an army. Even public health care is fine as long as there is also a co-existing private sector, so that people have a CHOICE, and such a private sector will keep the quality of the public one in check.

Ok, I've had my say. Thank you for reading.

I was born just on the edge of the "Iron Curtain" (Yugoslavia) and I often get this story from especially Russian folk. Let me just dismantle your assumption that you were born in "socialism" before we go any further. Please keep in mind that I am not advocating socialism here, just going with the definition of socialism: power to the people.

Transformation of a society from any form of autocracy to democracy is no different than the transformation from autocracy to socialism. In some cases implementing democracy is a not-very-good attempt at reaching some sort of socialism. The transformation involves first and foremost a popular movement that can threaten the autocracy in a meaningful way, while following four essential components of a democratic socialist society: 1) education 2) education 3) education 4) health care. In USSR this transformation never happened. People were from one day to the next told: "Workers own the means of production from this day forth. If any workers try to actually organize, we will fuck you so hard, you will wish Nazis won the war."

You were not born in socialism or communism, but in capitalism. You can call it single corporation monopoly position on all things human. One corporation. One leadership. One hierarchy. If you're not a part of the monopoly, you're shit out of luck. That's as far from socialism as you can possibly get.

This sounds much like the situation in the capitalist Russia today, as well as in the US. Poor? Shit out of luck.

Certainly situation is better today? I haven't bothered to look, but the situation back then sounds a bit like the US system today - 48 to 90 thousand dead per year due to lack of health care, depending on how you count, cost of countless billions in potential profit from lack of preventive care, resulting in a either generally weary, scared and timid population, or radicalized and angry - although I think former is usually worse. It doesn't matter how sick you are - you don't even get to wait in a line if you don't pay the whole thing yourself. Very similar to USSR capitalist monopoly on health care from back then, yes?

By the way, free health care is functioning just fine in Denmark for the past several decades. We don't consider it "socialist", but it is. People fought for that shit and in my book that's definition of exercise of power. Of course, there are limitations to what it can do and a lot of it is financed on the backs of african farmers, but the system is half the price and an infinite times the effect than the US system (not even going to "liberal" Russia for reference), no matter how many more brown people they strap into plows or how big their "market" is.

An even better social healthcare system is in Bolivia. I was like get the fuck out of here, but it's true. They don't kill brown people for their health care - most of them are actually brown!

Socialism by no means leads to Communism. In Denmark we have a high level of socialism cooperating with a certain form of capitalism. There certainly is a chance that we will become USSR, but that was capitalism in it's purest form - not communism.

There certainly was drive to compete. The two primary capitalist societies, US and USSR, were competing tooth and nail to kill as many brown people as they could. That was capitalism in it's zenit: two corporate systems fighting it out, glory of the free market (no regulations on the number of brown people you can kill) glistering on their muscular bodies, like that dude from Twilight. It just so happens that the flatter company structure won over the hierarchical one. Reasons were many and irelevant to this discussion - it wasn't socialism or communism vs capitalism, it was just capitalism.

Filling out fictitious reports? Welcome to our marketing departmet! Fictitious book keeping? USSR emulating most of US today - the ENRON way! They even killed the same brown people.

Now they call themselves liberal in the new USSR, businessmen. The guy running the show is former KGB. They off journalists who dare lift their heads, much like what US bombs accomplish in the middle east - "collateral, you should have told us you were in the TV station". You have to be out of your fucking mind not to see the writing on the wall.

Oh, I was waiting for that argument. I am not western born and certainly am no socialist, communist or heart bleeding. When I was 14 I stacked windows of my basement full with corpses of my neighbours to stop shrapnel and bullets, but I wasn't too busy to notice that the same scum that ran our "communist" paradise were now turning capitalist, bascally doing the same shit they did before it became a "democracy". And what was that? "It's the free market now, everyone can have a share of the spoils. If any of you actually tries to get any of the spoils, we will fuck you so hard, you will wish communists were back". Same power, same money, same factories, same weapons, more dead, we just call it democracy now.

You call it socialism because people call it socialism. It's the fight between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and you are arguing against Windows 7. That is a sucky analogy, but suffice it to say - they are the same in all that matters, but you think that there's this radical effin difference, cause they told you Windows 7 is open source. My god, man.

Well, we agree here it seams. With the exception that Denmark really, really, really is a high level planned economy - just like any capitalist society; maybe not the way you think, but certainly the way capitalists think. Let me give you a couple of examples.

During 50es Denmark imported foreign work force, today we use them to scare the wits out of our own population. No one in their right mind back then would consider the argument that we had enough work to sustain 5% growth of work force, let alone 10% or more. Everyone knew we had a 15-year plan for these people and it wasn't milk and honey at the end of the road for them or the broader Danish public.

Today we are killing brown people - that is a long term economic strategy and a thoroughly thought out plan. You think anyone in Denmark with a single brain cell thinks we are doing it "to improve Iraqi and Afghani democracy"? Let me clear that up for you: no. It's a 17 or so year plan, an investment we expect to bring itself back ten fold.

Now, we can have these kinds of investments, or some other kind. It's really up to the level of social organization of socially educated individuals to change our direction, or in case of lack of those, up to the "free market" to kill more people of all pretty colors.

Let me give you an example of common sense education I am talking about. How many brown people do you think we have to kill to maintain growth at 5%, if today that takes 5000 dead brown people(ok, yea, that number is taken out of my ass, but it's far lower than what we actually accomplish)? Doubling time for 5% is roughtly 13 years. We have to double the amount of dead brown people by 2023. Then we have to quadruple the number by 2035. If we kill 5k a year today, that's 20k a year in 2035 and just over 163 billion (9 zeros after that) a year by the year 2205. Of course, there is no way in hell to sustain growth of this kind, no matter whether we are talking about killing brown people or growth of economy.

But who knows, maybe our economy will grow that fast - a big blue fantasy bubble of happyness. In a few hundred years our economy will be larger than the entire universe. Not only that, but 13 years after it will be twice the size of the universe, and 13 years after that four times the size of the entire universe. Ah, the truth of capitalism - it really is liberating in a way to know that it's all smoke, and then usually dagger.

Sure, I can live with that. As long as you don't forget what I've said: unless you have social 1) education 2) education 3) education and 4) health care, you got nothing. Whichever choice the stupid and scared man makes, a used condom will be hanging out of his ass the very next day. This goes for libertarians as well.

It's wastly more complex than that, as I hope I have hinted.

ÁwEsOmE

well i don't even know where to start so i'll keep this as short as possible

i don't see how anyone could be against libertarianism since libertarianism is the defense of individual liberty (and to my mind the only logically and morally consistent position if your an anti-theist)

my guess is alot of people here get their definitions and schooling on capitalism from that fathead michael moore by the looks of it, criticising a system they obviously know little about, what the US has now really isnt free-market capitalism, its a strange combination of socialism and corporatism in large sections of the economy

one of my biggest pet peeves of those who prefer big government is their taking of the moral high ground, they do so using immoral tactics, we can all agree that stealing money or property from someone is wrong, even if you wish to do good with what you've stolen, yet people seem quite alright with it when the government does it, when really there is no moral difference

as bastiat said: "The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else."

if we defend individual liberty, defend the Constitution, which btw is NOT a "living" document (that argument also seemed absurd to me, especially when coming from the mouths of atheists, seems similar to the argument theists use to wiggle their way around arguments, just interpret the constitution/bible in a way that allows you to do or rationalize whatever you want!), and defend free-market capitalism we wouldn't be having alot of the problems we are having right now (especially the economic and foreign policy problems)

I've already refuted that post, so I won't bother to again.

i just got here so i must be a different strain

In my opinion you have to be an idiot to be an anti-theist. In my book idiots are allowed to hold any position they wish and I will not even argue against it, so libertarianism is just fine in that context.

Which means that people look at the reality of things, rather then listen to fairy tales about some free-market paradise. Ideas have consequences and people are acutely aware of them - very healthy.

There are issues that are simply mathematically and rationally opposed individual liberty, both on social and corporate side. On the social side it just makes sense to take some costs with the collective bill - it simply is more efficient (and in the case of healthcare more humane) to do it this way, which is why people are alright with it. People in fact recognize the INCREASE in personal liberty, once these things are moved to the background, allowing them to focus on more relevant issues of actual decisionmaking. On the corporate side it's even more obvious: corporation is the definition of removal of individual liberties, since the corporate hierarchy is simply a fact.

You can not close your eyes to reality just because you would really really like to uphold the liberty principle. You must define that liberty principle, assume that some very bad people will imediately try to abuse it and then understand the consequences.

I don't think you understand just how deep shit we are in at the moment. The foreign policy has remained the same since the native Americans got the taste of it. The economy has never been in trouble, but IS the trouble - a constantly growing bubble based on war, corruption, extortion, violence, abuse and inasne consumption. US is acting the same way Nazi Germany did 1941 and I would consider any action against the foreign policy as legitimate resistance to fascism.

We are way past discussing ideals of personal liberty. The only real personal liberty is the right to choose to fight for something better. Unlike access to health care, living wages, good public schools and healthy food, no one can take the choice of fighting back from you and I think you should start thinking about how to exercise that choice.

I suppose the Ministry of Highways is a wealth distribution program as well?

Taking tax money to maintain roads, railways, and the like... so that people can get to their place of employement? Blasphemy! What about the people who walk? or bike? what about Superman? he clearly doesnt need roads! ... all this hippie-commu-fascist crap, makes me sick! Road maintenance is nothing more than a scam! they're coming to take my three-fiddey and use it to the betterment of society! BURN THEM AT THE STAKE! *grrrawble grrrawble grrrawble*

/sarcasm

Seriously... when you have a position that makes a sociopath look like the sane one... you might want to rethink it...

Libertarianism fails because people fail to govern themselves in an appropriate way. 

Out of all people, Atheists would be the first to complain that institutions control too much of society - the churches, with their dogmas and their speculations...

Ask yourself - do you need someone to tell you what's right and wrong?  What you should be doing with your life, your money?  That's all governments do from what I can gather.