(09-12-2020 08:38 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote: The economic definition of socialism you provide leaves out the most important part, which is the social/government ownership of industry.
But the question is, how do they gain such control? They typically start with massive redistribution, and take over when the rightful owners (as defined under capitalism) pull up stakes and leave because it's no longer worthwhile to continue. Either that or the secret police seize it. True socialist countries are big on secret police. They have to be, their system doesn't work without them.
Look at Venezuela. It's popular on the left to say that the problem wasn't socialism, it was too great a dependence on low-quality oil. But how did it get that way? They used to have a vibrant and multi-faceted economy, but when they started going socialistic everybody who could get out left. Oil was the only thing that couldn't leave, because you kind of have to dig your wells where the oil is. So they ended up dependent on oil.
Quote:But to answer your question, I do think a drift towards true socialism would be concerning.
Well, at least I'm glad you admit that.
Quote:But we aren’t seeing anything close to the movement towards mass nationalization of multiple industries, government playing a central planning role, or a total loss of capitalist markets. I see movements towards programs more similar to what we see in the socially democratic nations you reference, which leverage capitalism.
Well, let's see, under Obama we had massive intrusion of government into the banking, health care, and automotive industries. Those are three pretty significant industries.
I don't see movements toward social democracy, and I think it is a cruel lie to suggest that. The tax increases on the "wealthy" and corporations that democrats are proposing do not exist in social democracies. OK, I know Sweden has a top personal income tax rate of 60% or thereabouts (includes provincial taxes, which vary from year to year. But the middle class pays 55%, and the bottom rate is 35%. They just have high tax rates, not a redistributive tax system. And their corporate rate is only 22%, so you make your money and accumulate wealth in your corporation.
The European social democracies do not have sharply "progressive" tax systems, nor do they have high corporate taxes. Their average top individual and corporate rates are less than ours. They do have a more comprehensive safety net, which I support, but at the same time they offer a more tax-efficient environment for capital investment. They do it with "regressive" consumption taxes, which I support. I would much prefer social democracy to what democrats are proposing, and I can guarantee that most of those "wealthy" people and corporations do too. What will tell the tale is how they respond.
We can still compete because we have incredible natural advantages--that huge breadbasket that stretches from the east coast to the Rockies and from the Gulf to Canada, transversed by half the miles of inland navigable waterways in the world, pretty much guarantees that we won't starve. But if we made ourselves more competitive in the areas of tax and vocational education and infrastructure, we could blow their doors off.
Quote:Unfortunately, any proposal which even somewhat relies on the government to play a role has been incorrectly labeled as socialist, which has started to water down and distort the true meaning of that word.
The problem with "somewhat relies on government" is that government inherently does not want "somewhat controls" but rather total control. The battle between liberty and total government control is as old as humanity, and every inch you give government becomes a mile that they take. I do not trust government, and the more powerful it becomes, the less I trust it.
Quote:As to intellectual breadth, I generally don’t think Rice as a university, publicly engages in ways that overtly make it a liberal in its politics. If we compare Rice to its academic peers, I think we would find that it was more centrist/apolitical, and not the flaming bastion of liberal wonkiness that some posters think it is. And I do believe that the majority of the political influence on campus is driven by students, and not admin/professors (Rice has always been very supportive of allowing students to run the show).
Being more centrist than Harvard or Berkeley is hardly grounds for celebration. I'd prefer to see Rice as the outlier, the one strong academic voice for freedom and liberty. Stanford has Hoover Institution, which sorta does that, but Hoover is hardly indicative of Stanford as a whole.`
Quote:Rice is notorious for having a really diverse student body, both racially and across the socioeconomic spectrum (unless something has changed in the last few years), and I think that would go a long way to having a breadth of intellectual diversity. How that intellectual diversity is actively fostered on campus, is another question. And whether or not people feel comfortable speaking their mind, and challenging ideas, is not something I have a good feel for (I never took a class where politics was part of the discussion).
I don't see any reason why racial and socioeconomic diversity cannot be matched by intellectual diversity. I don't think Rice or Hillsdale has enough intellectual diversity for my taste. Maybe a combination of some Rice and some Hillsdale would have that.
My belief is that the only approach that has been offered to poor and disadvantaged persons, be they racial minorities or otherwise, is the welfare plantation which IMO does more harm that good. I would like to see a racially, socioeconomically, and intellectually diverse Rice which took a leadership role in advancing other models to help the poor and disadvantaged of all races. We've spent 50+ years throwing trillions at a war on poverty that has left us with just as many poor people, as a percent of population, as we had 50 years ago. True, our poor live better than most anybody elses's, but they did 50 years ago, too. If we had thrown those same trillions (and it could have been much less) at vocational education and school choice and enterprise zones and Bismarck universal private health care and a subsistence-level universal basic income (UBI) along the lines of Milton Friedman's negative income tax or the Boortz-Linder prebate/prefund, I daresay our the current poorest of our society would be far better off. And if we had adopted a consumption tax, balanced budget, and lower, flatter, and broader income taxes (like Europe, unlike democrat proposals) we would have a healthier overall economy.
