8 replies to this topic

[Shadow]

I figured since I didn't see a topic on this to make one. For the past few days there has been a huge event in the country of the military deciding to throw its weight around for people daring to speak out against its brutality, with things not looking good. All media has been blacked out, and news sites have their lips sealed over things.

Thought this video might be illuminating.

 

 

[TheRedStranger]

Been reading up on this on the BBC and various other sources. Thank you for bringing to back to the foreground of my attention.

 

I tell you, man, this is The United States in a few years.... Chuavismo Socialism carried on over into President Nicholas's policies and now they have gargantuan soup-kitchen-like lines for toilet paper and milk. The colllectivos minority selfishly support the goverment because they get benifits from the goverment and the wealth is plucked and spread so unevenly due to the unbalanced powers of the federal bureaucracy, then this economic nightmare happens (essentially Nicholas, who is a idealogical puppet of Hugo, won the vote on a narrow margin because he bought ballots with his pretensious welfare policies - sound familiar?) .

 

 It's funny how we find sympathy for this suffering student-body which is large group of conservative Catholics, yet here in America we hate on a straw-man idea of conservativism and Question-Beg it with pretensious dismissal. Yet when we see the real life consequences for our own liberal political belifes we decry this as crimes against humanity. It shows how inconsistant we are as thinkers here in the West. Our naturalistic assertions about the import humanity ( undermine humanitarianism and human rights in the first place. 

 

Truly we are fickle in our convictions, and thus we are unhelpful and dare I say harmful when it comes to these political realities (Obama happily took socialist reading material from Hugo once as gift and is socialist himself). I mean how many lives and hungry children will it take for us to shirk off this stale and backwards ideas of Dialectical Materialism and a secular Socialist Utopia?

 

They are in my prayers, Shadow. And if there is any thing I can do beyond that which you know of, then please tell me.   

[RedAuthar]

The truth is we Americans have a thing for the underdog or the victim.  Whomever we view as the victim is the one who we rally behind.  

[furrykef]

America probably is on its way down from its superpower status, and has been ever since 9/11. That said, we're not going the way of Venezuela or the Soviet Union. There are plenty of countries in Europe with socialist tendencies and they don't have bread lines, nor are they heading in that direction.

(Obama happily took socialist reading material from Hugo once as gift and is socialist himself)

I hate it when people try to infer something about a man's character by the books he reads (let alone merely accepts as a gift). If I read Mein Kampf, does it make me a Nazi? You yourself once told me to read some books written from a creationist point of view, if I recall correctly; would reading them mean I'm a creationist?

[TheRedStranger]

 "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."

-- Winston Churchill

 

 Remember Greece and all the economic issues of the European Union nowadays? How about Socialist Moldova (the poorest country in Europe)? How about The NAZI, PSOE, RFP, and  all the eastern-bloc nations that broke off from the U.S.S.R ? What’s the difference between socialist policies of Franco the Generalismo and socialist Maduro’s Chuavismo? Not yet with all to this extent. It takes time for these more developed and globally integrated countries to unravel in the public and undermine their stronger private sectors, and when they do... It’s nasty. And the historical documentation speaks clearly of its failures within Europe…and then we could go take a look at the wonderful Socialist Country outwards of that…like the socialist Juche ideals of North Korea, or the Castro’s Cuba, or Senator Salvador Allende of the UP's desired Chile, or Syria’s bloody Ba’ath party? Or maybe we should talk about the wonderful Mao Ze Dong who was so depserate encourage socialist industry that he encouraged all people to build steel-mills in their backyard.   You can guess how well that went.

 

 You are right. America will lose ground as a superpower due to our massive economic irresponsibility and downfall of industry on both the corporate level and individual level of the workers, for example the constant abuse of welfare like Food-Stamps (Buy food products, sell or trade products for drug money on the street), and the  procrustean and coldly unpersonal limitations of various things like on government-housing promotes a vicious cycle of fraud and social immobility draining our budget and wasting your tax-revenue.  For example the global currency is the American dollar, which we inflate all the time by making more of yet not backing it with anything substantially produced.  A growing number of us take more than we give and bureaucracy is strangling productive industry and entrepreneurs  that wish to produce with red-tape, impossible demands, and ridiculous taxation cutting at their heels.     

 

 You inferred. I implied. No, no, you are indeed right in that strict sense. But I am referring to it as a mere microcosm of his pandering and patronizing foreign policy. The fact that he even sat down with the “President for Life” to dialogue as such is rather saddening. Americans want their stance on such governments to be known straightforward - we want a Churchill and we got a Chamberland. He has ravaged Lady Liberty in both defict and ideal, by "spreading the wealth around." Benito Mussolini, the "Socialist Heritic" himself claimed that Fascism is "the wedding of state and corporate powers." And that's exactly what Obama's done along with his disjointed welfare policies which I have already spoken about in previous discussions (refering to the The Syria Thread).

 

"The republic will cease to exist when Government takes from those who are industrious and gives to those who refuse to work." -- Thomas Jefferson.

[furrykef]

You really need to cut it out with that black text. Some of us can't see it without highlighting it. ^^;

[TheRedStranger]

 

"[...]for example the constant abuse of welfare like Food-Stamps (Buy food products, sell or trade products for drug money on the street), and the procrustean and coldly unpersonal limitations of various things like on government-housing promotes a vicious cycle of fraud and social immobility draining our budget and wasting your tax-revenue."

I have two problems with this statement: 1. (Citation?), and 2. You are lumping the majority of those on welfare as abusers of the system; many today are now on foodstamps because of the economic meltdown in '08 manufactured by unregulated investment banks making bad investments intentionally, who were by the way bailed out. Most of the people who were lower middle class are now poor and actually work minimum wage jobs, but still need help to get by.

Remember Greece and all the economic issues of the European Union nowadays? How about Socialist Moldova (the poorest country in Europe)? How about The NAZI, PSOE, RFP, and all the eastern-bloc nations that broke off from the U.S.S.R ? What’s the difference between socialist policies of Franco the Generalismo and socialist Maduro’s Chuavismo?

Look at Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, France to name a few... those are also far left-leaning socialist countries with cradle to the grave societies that are creditor nations and have kept Europe afloat. Greece had more issues going against their economy than only that they are overtly socialistic; that is an oversimplification of the issue.

http://online.wsj.co...0632493510.html




They shouldn't have been. It's like buying your kid a toy when he's doing something wrong. And was it really caused en toto by bad spending in the banks, and why did the banks spend this way? Are you implying by "unregulated" that the goverment should decide to become involved on how groups spend their money, because many attribute such actions as a cause to the bad choices due to some Clinton Era policies. The fiscal behaviors have awarded through that bail-out. Did anyone learn a lesson from this, or did the goverment just enable them?

This also does not dismiss the massivly faulty track-record I have given as well for the failures of the Welfare State, for every questionable nation you mention I can probably name two certainly negative examples. If you like let's explore these aformentioned nations more in depth then and see if they are as you say they are....But let's leave this for a thread more on topic to respect the plights and focus our thoughts on issues undergoing the Venezuelans.

Oh...and whatever happend to charity, philanthropy? It really helped out during the Depression. It helps when people help people a lot more than big government helping people, there is no red tape between you and a helping hand.

As for citations, My information comes by way of personal interviews with people who work in and for the United States welfare system, from my time as an off and on Journalist, one source being a lady by the name of Vonda Stewart. Also this has been commonly discussed and debated in the news lately, especially my local news WKYTV (You can look it up on the sight). The sad truth is that in my interviews and research I hear more of an unchecked abuse of the system than anything uplifting. Those who wish to become dependent from such are put in arbitrary income-brackets, pretty much cementing them in a defacto caste with an utter lack of social mobility, which is the driving force that uplifts an economy to progress. Once they break that barrier forward as individuals, the rug is unfairly yanked from under them. There is no transition or assistance into becoming better producers rather than worse consumers.

I personally would rather see specific welfare as an investment into a person's economic progress rather than sandboxing them in an arbitrary income-bracket and leaving them unaccountable with that money. This would be much like a student-loan and grants where groups like Vocational Rehab support these individuals into integrating successfully as producers into the free-market. Look at it as an anti-socialist welfare. A welfare where there is more accountability and more mobility. The Social-Safety net has become a Social Safety-Web. There should be a great deal of accountability (same as a college with its grades). Socialism as we know it just makes people dependent on the government, where welfare should be the government investing in their productive independence. Ironically as it going in America this just creates a class-divide and class-envy, as with the case of Greece’s economic problems. Once a wind of market instability blows upon the shaky foundations of these goverment's socialist policies there is dramatic collapse and people are left in economic disillusion. However, the more competition and market-savy minds we have, the more fertile ground for heated and organic innovation for such problems arise.

Also note that nations like Norway have a strong, strong free-market and Norway in paticular is not a member of the EU. For example Norway was able to scrape through the 2008 recession by tapping into its oil and gas-fueled sovereign wealth fund which is currently valued at more than 2.4 trillion kroner ($400 billion!). Norway is the world's third largest exporter of natural gas and the sixth largest exporter of oil, and while oil production has been falling in recent years, natural gas production still continues to rise. Oil and gas from many North Sea platforms pump the small country and its scant population of only 4.8 million people (that is about the size of North Carolina population-wise with a crazy amount of abundant wealth, making it one of the world's richest nations despite it's tiny population. Also note that during the 1920’s and 1930’s Norway’s income tax became outrageous, some of the highest in the world, and welfare was lavish, and some say horribly wasteful. Socialism plays no part in it's economic sucess, and the nation is actually more centrist than liberal in it's fiscal policies. Also think of this... once that unrenewable resource inevitably dries out...do you think that welfare will be stable? Will the goverment as a whole fair well, given light of another current heated situation? And let's ponder how rigid these polices are and how much they encourage a shift towards people becoming more productive in the Free Market rather than dependent on goverment subsidies .

Welfare should be a hand-up, not a hand-out.

[TheRedStranger]

You really need to cut it out with that black text. Some of us can't see it without highlighting it. ^^;

 

I'm sorry Kef. I tried to keep that from happening, but everytime...something comes up. Pehaps I'm ingorant of something important format-wise.

[furrykef]

Long post is looooong.