I.E. You feel it is necessary to steal from 1 person and give it to another.
If someone god forbid, keeps the fruits of the labour, then they are evil!
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I.E. You feel it is necessary to steal from 1 person and give it to another.
If someone god forbid, keeps the fruits of the labour, then they are evil!
Here are my cards down on the table - I'm actually going to define socialism as it makes sense to me: a socialist government provides a base layer of essential services to the entire population. These essential services are funded by taxes. Anyone wanting or needing more than simple, essential services will need to work to earn the money to pay for their additional wants or needs. A capitalism-based economy ensures there is sufficient incentive to encourage productivity so that people can buy stuff and pay for leisure and entertainment. These two things can and do co-exist, although mostly only in Western Europe. Gotta love those guys.
A hand-out system, on the other hand, is funded by voluntary donations and aims to provide goods and services to those unable to afford them. (Like a soup kitchen.) It is also known as a charity. They are notorious for spending as much of the money that goes to help the "needy" on adverts which beg people for money. Doesn't sound very efficient to me, but I'm sure our resident anti-slavery campaigner will be able to show me how voluntary taxation != charity.
Nihilanth
Well-Known Member
Yes, that would be nice. Won't ever happen though. For it to succeed every human must be equal and all of us know we are all different. Of course everyone is of equal human value but not blessed equally.
Socialism = government owned/controlled means of production.
Capitalism = private owned/controlled means of production.
That is it simplest form. Trying to give it a nice wrapping with fancy words doesn't detract from this.
Tax's are compulsory levies. So "voluntary taxation" is an oxymoron. Contradictory terms.
Charity on the other hand is not compulsory, although advocated.
You might believe in taxation or even enjoy paying taxes, thus you might think that because you feel this way it becomes the same thing as "charity". However can you stop paying taxes? No. Can you stop giving money to charity? Yes.
Thus it is easy to distinguish the difference between voluntary and coercive means.
Well done. Are you aware that these two things can and do co-exist? It's all down to what controls what. Basically, the government looks after social services and the private sector concentrates on luxuries.
Interestingly, I had a look at the Wikipedia article above, and followed a link to a page called "The Myth of the Scandinavian Model" (http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/510) Written in 2005, it aimed to show that Sweden's "socialist" economic model was a fail because Ireland started whuppin' Sweden's prosperous ass for 9 straight years starting in 1996.
This is a perfect example of hindsight being 20/20. With the global recession, Ireland is stagnating and all those high-priced ICT guys are having to go look for work elsewhere. Sweden, on the other hand, is still chugging along just fine...
Oh, and seeing as Ireland also has a government-funded health care system where everyone is entitled to free healthcare, this sounds more like an economic system fail rather than a healthcare system fail. However, it is true that this was only enacted in 2004, so the lesson may be that public health care is something only really rich countries can afford...
Really? And yet many working people feel they live quite well in the UK and have no objection to the tax they pay. Or are we talking about the whiny wealthy, for example greedy pigs like Bono, who moaned bitterly when the Irish government proposed making people like him pay tax?
There are undoubtedly things that have gone very wrong in the UK. Things are certainly topsy-turvy when people get rewarded for having too many children. This of course gets blamed on the Labour government by conservatives, but that's only because they're not in power and they need to make it look like the current government is doing something they would not do.
But the grants people get in South Africa are minuscule. And they don't make it easy to get it. It is fairly expensive due to the number of people getting them, however it cannot be called a disincentive to work.
Hahaha, another fallacy, a result is seemingly consistant with your theory, and thus your theory is true!
Have a look at what makes Scandinavian countries successful. Then decide if it is due to more socialism or less socialism. They were "more socialist" at one stage and it resulted in stagnation and weakening economy, and the further "capitalistic" they have come the more prosperous they have become. Yes they have kept some socialist or welfare programs...doesn't detract from the point that the more free-market they have become the more prosperous they have become.
Now since you cannot prove why healthcare is fundementally different than any other good (Your subjective opinion about it being "essential" or "too important to fail" doesn't change the fundemental economic reality)
the reality is if you advocate the mixed economy and actually believe it to be the answer, you are saying both socialist and capitalist theories/ideas are BOTH incorrect. You have no fundemental understanding of economics.
"From a true premise, only true conclusions can follow"
If capitalism is good for one good/service then it is good for the rest of them. If socialism is good for one good/service then it is good for the rest.
You remain logically inconsistant at EVERY turn.
PS: You guys do realise that the US is regarded as roughly the 8th most "capitalistic" country in the world, Denmark is currently 9th and by this time next year will probably take the US's 8th spot.
DreamKing
Honorary Master
You need to prove that your premise is true first.
You cannot use scientific inference in the social sciences, which is what economics is about.
If it is not humanly possible to falsify a theory then it is true. I could give you hundreds of stats and historical data that show how freedom and capitalism have helped raise our standards of living over the centuries but it doesn't prove the theory. Sure it lends credibility to my argument but it doesn't prove the theory.
As for proving my premise, it is logically self-evident, in same way it is logically self-evident that 1 + 1 = 2. Your theory is not.
EchoZA
Expert Member
Charity begins at home! Clothe yourself before clothing your brother!
Rubbish. Are you a creationist?
You go off and study up on some logic. I'm going to drive home on the road my taxes helped pay for and maintain.
Athiest-evolutionist actually.
Science is united by its use of logic and deductive reasoning. It remains objective and formally governed by the principle that an argument based on true premises cannot yield a false conclusion.
It is, of course, possible to derive true conclusions from false premises. To give a simple example, we may say that pigs are birds, birds cannot fly, and hence pigs cannot fly. However, positivists in the economics profession have asserted that such derivations are the most common and useful method of inference employed by the natural sciences. In this, they are entirely wrong.
In the dispute between the once-supreme caloric theory, and the nascent kinetic theory, both sides claimed to have the correct explanation for the phenomenon of heat. The caloric theory claimed heat and combustion were caused by the emanation of a substance known as "caloric" from hot bodies. The kinetic theory claimed that there was a mechanical equivalence of heat and work, so that both are simply different forms of each other — later labeled "energy" by Thomas Young in 1807.
In this particular case, we are faced with the typical situation in the natural sciences: we cannot directly establish the truth of our premises. However, we may deductively infer the consequences following from either theory.
If either of these theories yields conclusions that can be shown to be false, then they are themselves falsified. This follows since from a true premise, only true conclusions can follow. Hence, if a conclusion following from a premise is shown to be false, the premise itself must be false as well and hence can be discarded.
The caloric theory was decisively rejected by Count Benjamin Rumford in 1798. He demonstrated via the friction induced by boring a hole in a cannon that one could heat water for hours and hours, just as long as the hole is bored.
What we have seen here is that we have been able to rule out one proposition by demonstrating its conclusions to be false.
It should be clear to the reader now that to explain the scientific method of inference as a way of producing knowledge from false premises is patently absurd. The entire point of the scientific method is to rule out premises that are contradicted by observations. It has never meant beginning with premises you know to be false and absurd, tracing out whatever implications you can draw from there, and, when circumstantially finding congruence with your "predictions" and observed data, asserting the result of your machinations as "scientific knowledge."
The reader should now be able to note just how shaky and peculiar the methodological stance of positivist, or rather "positive," economics actually is. In Friedman's essay, "The Methodology of Positive Economics," he defends deriving consequences from clearly false premises with regard to the study of human action. He aptly states that hypotheses are not required to be "realistic" in their assumptions.
From Mises.org http://mises.org/daily/4061 "Why Friedman Misunderstood Physics and Mises Was Right about Economics"
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Mmm. You're just bashing me over the head with X implies Y. I know that.
What you haven't done is prove that "X" - being something which is good for one thing - implies "Y" - being something which is a) "X" and b) "X" applied to everything:
However, if I used your logic, I could claim that socialism is good for everything because look at what a good job it does making sure the public transport system runs at 3am in Western Europe...