DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Socialism - another hot button Fox/Right wing false narrative.

Wow, Nazi Germany was most definitely not capitalist.

You're dead wrong on that one. You do know what the real name of the Nazi party was right? Tell it to me.

I'd also take capitalism over being starved and dependent upon the government any day of the week. When you're dependent, you are weak and subservient.

Nationalsozialism. Do you know what their policy points were, or do you just need to read a name of everything to know about it?

"Microsoft is my favorite mattress company. No one makes a softer bed!"

You comment on my post with videos. I don't comment on yours.

Oh please, your replies when I watched your videos weren't any better than when I stopped watching your videos.

Right. I don't comment on any videos you post. That's the difference.

Again, I'm asking you why you want me to watch your videos all the time and never watch anyone else's videos?

The name of the Nazi party was actually The National Socialist German Workers' Party. Its like you don't understand the differences between Capitalism vs Socialism vs Fascism.

Because you made a reply to my post (w/ a video) without understanding the context of the quote. I don't flippantly comment on your posts with videos without understanding the context of it.

I just don't watch and/or comment. It's simple, really.

You don't understand that fascism is a continuation of capitalism. The party privatized most of their public resources, stripped the social safety net, and eliminated all socialists and communists in the nation. How is that socialist?

Sorry for discussing things on a message board. I've also seen the video before you posted it. You're not the first person to know who Rogan is.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. I posted the video to illustrate that much of my thoughts aligned with what Pinker was saying. I wasn't trying to introduce some new concept or think these are some brand new individuals no one has ever heard of. But okay.

But you quickly assumed that I never saw the video or took it out of context and neither of which are true.

I watched Rogan podcast shortly after it dropped, because I thought his book, "Better Angles of our Nature" was interesting.

I said you didn't know the context of the quote and you should go back and watch to video to see what the narrative was surrounding said quote. I hope you did.

The quote has to do with the opinion that, and this is from Rogan and not Pinker, that Capitalism inherently breeds competition, innovation, and the desire human beings innately possess to be successful and to differentiate from the rest of the pack, so to speak. Without the motivation to set yourself apart (additional wealth, resources, etc), it limits, if not eliminates, people's drive to participate in the ongoing change/improvement in our society for a overall better quality of life.... because there is no incentive. The general argument that surround that particular quote is our innate desire to be successful drives the innovation that led to the iphone. Other technological advances can also fall into this category but Rogan specifically referenced the iphone in that instance because people incorrectly whine about capitalism on twitter, instagram, facebook, etc using their device to do so. Thus, the irony.

Pinker's general stance is that capitalism is by far the most proven and successful system there is for the masses. However, the extreme right take suggesting next to zero goverment involvement is wrong and that capitalism needs to have certain social safety nets and programs where the market has not established a true/correct value because no one really owns it. His expample on enviroment and treating the sick, unlucky, elderly, etc. were good examples of that. Conversely, even distribution of wealth and resources with significant goverment intervention and control from the far-left POV is equally ridiculous. I agree with his opinion. And I also uderstand Rogan's point with his quote. It was ironic....and funny as well. That's why I posted it.

Carry on.

lol

I never said the quote was from Pinker, because it's not. I responded with a comic of an idiot because Rogan said it.

The idea that capital wealth is the only motivation that makes people work hard and make technological breakthroughs is rather erroneous. There are a number of examples to use, but one would the drug industry market, and I'm using this because we have been talking about it constantly on here. If you look at the people who create life changing medicine, new chemo treatments, very few than them, less than 5%, work in the private industry, with the majority of them working at public institutions. So who are the people behind medical companies? What do they create? And what is competition getting them?

Well, for the most part drug companies are managed by people in the financial sector, who may have a degree in chemistry, although it's hardly a prereq for the position. Most of them try to secure rights or contracts to new medicines being created in the university sphere, as they don't have the infrastructure to manufacture drugs, or distribution networks. In many times, the drug company can get a patent for the drug. They can then retain their patent over decades by making small changes to the patent that "doesn't make the drug worse" according to congress. So, companies are able to make small changes to how their drugs are delivered or something, and retain their patent. When we speak about competition in capitalism, we're talking specifically about the competition to get more money, not to create efficiency. Creating more efficient methods is a great way to create more profit. However, as we see with drug companies this is not the best way to create profit. The best way to create profit is by increasing prices on drugs as they're inelastic products, as either people need them to survive (like insulin, or epipens) or they're addictive enough (opioids). Famous examples of this would be guys like Shkreli or companies like Mylan. While there was a time, where most companies created the largest of profits by technological breakthroughs like during the industrial revolution, most companies now profit the most through the financial sector, which is one of the reasons why we moved from the gold standard and a reason why university is billed as extremely important to making 6+ figures, for most kids.

Historically though, if you want to look at the top 3 scientists, and I assume we are, since we're talking about iphones, the world has seen since the industrial revolution, Stephen Hawkings, Albert Einstein, and Tesla, all of them were avowed socialists who used their minds to benefit humankind instead of trying to maximize their profit.

Even guys like Pinker and Gates understands that capitalism left alone is extremely dangerous and wish to have some social safety nets. I posted a video last week where Gates said he wanted to raise the estate tax back up to 50%. As for the masses, capitalism is certainly the best thing for the top 25% of all people. America has enjoyed its highest levels of economic success, when America bought America and could keep its wealth within their neighborhood. Now we see America competing in a global economy under capitalism, and life is still amazing because we are well within the top 25% of the world's economy. But what about the people below us living in capitalist societies that mainly make our goods? Do you think life is amazing for them? It is easy to believe that capitalism is the best for us, because capitalism does a great job at segregating the rich from the poor. If we look around the US, all we see is richness. But what about places like Mexico, Indonesia, Guatemala and China where they make our goods?

Socialists want to be pets.

Socialism = Venezuela

Capitalism = Kansas.

Here I thought you said the furries on your games hated Canada.

Capitalism dates back at least as far as Babylon. It's the Babylonian system.

It works fine for the most part as long as there's checks and balances put in place to protect the people in regards to healthcare, wages and education.

No system is perfect. To claim that drug companies and insurance companies should make insane profits on the backs of the sick and dying isn't a defense of capitalism. It's an attack on your fellow Americans. To claim that students trying to get an education should pay ridiculous interest rates to line the pockets of bankers isn't defending capitalism, it's attacking our nations youth.

At some point there has to be a balance that serves the people while still allowing business to flourish. But that just makes one side scream socialism when you stand up for the citizens.

You are ridiculous. I used to consider you intelligent. Now you are just another Vambo/40.

Get back to your crate, your master is coming with your food.

And you're Jussie's white twin.

jc

Anyone absurd enough to think that policies and or programs designed to benefit all people, by providing a service or necessity to all people that otherwise may not be attainable on an individual basis by all people, is too stupid to reason with no matter what argument is presented.

Socialism, Capitalism, Communism... they are all labels. Good ideas being labeled to scare people and keep them from considering them. How dumb is that on any level?

Boy you are really stepping up your game...

#WEAKSAUCE

Vambo, is that you?

And it's not even wine thirty yet.

Day drinking?

It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

Ohhhh touched a nerve did I? lol

Well... you do have a pattern of getting pugnacious when you're lubed up-


Usually, it's a bit later in the day.

I have zero alcohol in me. Trying to get the taxes taken care of. Have to go back to the CPA's office and its annoying me.

Not that I remember? Directed at me or someone else.

As far as I am concerned Britain and other countries in Europe are all capitalist societies. Most / all have more government help for the poor, needy and sick. That doesn't make the socialists or communists .... look at quality of life and those countries always top the USA. . . . Scale may make some difference but Germany is a huge land mass - large population and they make it work .... and they are still capitalists.

If you and others want to say that's socialism ... have at it.

And no doubt we'll get a "well why don't you move there then ..." comment from some dumb schtick who can't debate the facts.

Well, that explains it.
I'd be pissy too.

According to some we must be the only democracy in the world. And the only reason why is because we refuse to offer healthcare and a reasonably priced education to our citizens.

It's been really weird seeing that parallel drawn as an Australian.

We're on of those dystopian Nazi nations with strong gun control, health care for all, affordable education and a growing emphasis on going green etc.

Hopefully one of these days we'll get damn corporations to pay their friggin' taxes and really make ya'll hate us.

Australia’s Gun Laws Are Not a Model for America

But the Australian model won’t work in the United States. Here’s why: We Australians have a profoundly different relationship with weapons. Americans love guns. We’re scared of them.

This difference explains why a conservative prime minister was able to confiscate some 650,000 privately owned firearms and ban semiautomatic weapons without a single reported act of violence.

That wasn’t all. Twenty-eight-day waiting times were introduced for firearm purchases. All gun buyers were required to have a genuine reason to qualify for a license (self-protection didn’t count). A national gun registry was created.

Australians, on the whole, were happy to give up their guns and accept the new restrictions. They understood that semiautomatic guns, which reload themselves each time fired, increase exponentially the lethality of a firearm.

No mass gun rights movement existed to articulate an opposing view. The sport-shooting organizations, which might have fought the changes, were apolitical. The elected representatives of rural communities where guns were most common were co-opted by the government’s urban-dominated leadership.

You have 4 free articles remaining.

Subscribe to The Times
When explaining how Australia accomplished such a big change so quickly, analysts and commentators home in on the traumatic effect of what is known as the Port Arthur Massacre, in which 35 people were shot dead in and near a historic township in Tasmania. “It took one massacre,” a headline in The Guardian said on the 20th anniversary of the deaths.

Deeper reasons explain why worse mass killings in the United States don’t trigger similar changes in gun laws.

Australians’ and Americans’ different relationship with firearms stems from the role that armed struggle played in their histories. In Australia, we didn’t have one.

We never had a revolution. We never fought foreign troops on our soil. There was no antipodean civil war. From the moment the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 in what is now Sydney, security was provided by the British Army.

The indigenous population was displaced by force of arms, disease and appropriation of land, crimes for which many Australians still feel guilty. Prosperity, universal health care and unemployment benefits helped suppress crime. The few race riots that took place didn’t involve shooting.

Australia’s founding fathers, attempting to unify six colonies, didn’t mention guns in the Constitution. They weren’t worried about government oppression.

Over time, Australians came to view firearms with suspicion. Most Australians have never held one. Recreational shooting is regarded as a fringe sport. Unlike many Americans, who might proudly show off their latest pistol or rifle, Australians who own and enjoy using firearms, like me, try to be discreet.

After working in the same office for almost a decade, I’ve never admitted to colleagues that I enjoy hunting, although I’m always happy to discuss my last beach vacation. My preteen children don’t know that I own a small-caliber hunting rifle. Only a few close friends have seen it.

I am legally obliged to store the rifle in a gun safe. Bullets must be kept in a separate compartment. A police officer visited my home to ensure that the safe was bolted into my garage’s brick wall. I gave a vague answer when a neighbor asked why there was a patrol car in the driveway.

This ingrown cultural hostility toward firearms explains why there was no fear and only isolated anger at the government, even among owners, when it took away people’s guns in 1996. In the United States, even if the political opposition could be overcome, such widespread appropriation of private property and limits on personal liberties would most likely be met with fierce, even physical, resistance.

Australian political leaders are rightly proud of our tight gun laws, which have also reduced criminal homicides and suicides. But it is unfair to grieving and distressed Americans to pretend that the Australian solution to mass shootings can be carried out in the United States. A homegrown plan is needed.

www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/opinion/australias-gun-laws-america.html

The System Down Under

Australian Health Care

As Senator Rand Paul pointed out in a recent oped, the new bill would divert subsidies toward already wealthy insurance companies. “Federal subsidies given to insurance companies is crony capitalism at its worst and will inevitably lead to bigger and bigger taxpayer bailouts until government creeps into every nook and cranny of health care,” he wrote.

In these respects, the bill is actually a step toward the Australian ‘universal’ health system, which is a mixture of public and private hospitals, with public hospitals providing “free” or subsidised primary and specialist care, and the private system operating alongside for those able to afford insurance. The Australian government also subsidizes insurance companies to the tune of billions through an individual rebate for health insurance.

Some pregnant women are discharged too early because the hospital needs to put someone else on their bed.

Even with a government-controlled system paid for through hefty taxes, however, about 50 percent of Australians feel the need to shell out extra for private hospital insurance, suggesting that the public system has downsides.

In Australia’s government-managed system, for example, you can’t choose your doctor – you have to take the first one allocated to you, even though you may prefer someone else. You can’t choose the time and place of treatment, and there is little flexibility since appointments are generally based on the hospital’s schedule with little regard to your own.

Because governments necessarily have limited resources, not every health need can be funded. For example, some pregnant women are discharged too early after giving birth because the hospital needs to put someone else on their bed.

Consider, also, the plight of those seeking elective surgery. These patients can suffer on waiting lists for months (with two percent of patients waiting for over a year) before they are able to get much-needed medical treatment. The median wait time in 2015 was 37 days, even though many ‘elective’ procedures are pretty important – like gallstone removal, heart bypass surgery, neurosurgery and knee, hip, and shoulder replacements.

Expensive and Insufficient

My own experience is illustrative. In 2013, I was losing weight and discharging blood. Since my illness was categorised by a bureaucrat as not life threatening, I was unable to get an immediate appointment with a public hospital.

Government health care will do just barely enough to keep you alive.

I was placed in Category 2, meaning that I would have to wait up to 90 days. If I had carried private health insurance at the time, I would have been scheduled for a colonoscopy within days and could have been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis sooner. Conditions like this one can be serious if they go untreated for several weeks, and situations like mine are common.

Government health care will do just barely enough to keep you alive – it won't help improve general quality of life. If you don’t ration resources through the market system, it ends up being rationed through arbitrary rules set by lawmakers.

Socialized health care in Australia has driven costs up, too. Each year on April 1, the insurance companies increase premiums above the rate of inflation. Some policies can increase by hundreds of dollars without any increase in the level of benefits paid out.

Meanwhile, cost of living pressures for consumers continue to mount – most notably due to a tax increase in the Medicare Levy Surcharge. Barring massive increases in immigration to counteract the effects of an aging population entering retirement and dropping out of the tax revenue pool, there are likely to be further tax increases.

Even comprehensive insurance does not guarantee there won’t be significant out-of-pocket expenses.
Not that being able to afford private health insurance is a panacea. Health care costs are so high in Australia, that even having relatively comprehensive insurance does not guarantee there won’t be significant out-of-pocket expenses after a stay in the hospital. This is because of the gap between what insurance companies pay, and what some doctors charge.

https://fee.org/articles/australias-universal-health-care-system-a-cautionary-tale/

roflmao ... well that's a very balanced and neutral perspective I must say.

Jez - where do you find this trollop? Did you google "most negative and unfair review of Australian healthcare"

The entire free world has social healthcare and still some in America are using fear tactics and negative labels as excuses why we can't do it.

Mock what you don't understand.

Those are Australians talking about Australia. Just like BDU did.