Posted on 02/08/2016 9:03:04 AM PST by Signalman
They prate about the common good when that is the very last thing they want.
I’ll check it out when not on my phone.
Karl Marx was not an economist. He was a librarian at the Library of London.
Marxism has nothing to do with economics, it is a political system that is designed to remove as much money as possible from the populace in order to enrich government employees.
Leave it to the Democrats to embrace a political system which has killed 147 million people in the last 115 years. Why one would believe in a system which was made up of whole cloth by a librarian in the 1840s is beyond me.
Back in the early 1980s I had an Econ professor who looked almost identical to that guy. He was a communist, hippie fool too. I STILL hate the guy.
yeah, right... 
I went to a bread store in Leningrad in 1973.
First, you stood in line to see what they had to sell so you could get a chit to buy it. There was only a couple of dark, heavy choices.
Then you stood in line to pay for it. Finally, you stood in line to turn in your receipt to get your loaf.
The GUM department store nearby had one floor devoted to stockings.
Many tables covered with piles of socks. Just a few styles and colors available.
ZooMass. Right. A segregated dorm (for blacks), a student center named after an America-hating black commie, they don't bother to expel damage-causing sports-loving students after mini "riots", still ripoff the less savvy students with negative PIRG check-offs on bills, and I don't know what else.
That’s pretty much what they all say, Democrat and Republican. And they all have their experts that will back them up.
Marxism was developed as a response to the monarchies of Europe. Oddly enough, the two system’s attributes are nearly identical: Central control of the populace in order to enrich the controlling elite.
No difference.
If you wish to be poor, vote for socialism. It is a guaranteed result: guaranteed by a long history of impoverishment of the masses for the gain of the elite.
I took an AP course in high school, European History, and although my teacher didn’t go for the hippie look, he had a massive Che flag hanging on the wall and had no argument for supporting a communist executioner that murdered working peasants among others admitting his psychopathic love for blood in addition to calling for a nuclear holocaust on America. If I have time in the future to sit down at my desktop, I would like to launch a full scale broadside against these absurd economic claims. Obammunism promised a “green economy” with 5 million new “green jobs” and a fleet of 1 million chevy volts on the road but of course when these socialist boondoggles never pan out at the expense of American taxpayers and businesses..they’re never held accountable and the next Marxist idiot tells us they’ll plan a better economy and promise “free” stuff.
Dang. Bad enough for a college to have a commie econ professor, but to inflict someone like that on high school kids is child abuse.
To borrow a few words from Jim Morrison;
“Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god
Wandering, wandering in hopeless night.
Out here in the perimeter,,,,,,,, there are no stars,
Out here, we is stoned.
Immaculate.”
Without faith in God there is only faith in man. The godless socialist distrusts Man (or themselves) and therefore places their faith in Government or a collection of men.
Pure capitalism is the truest expression of human nature ever. Voluntary transactions and “caveat emptor” are being replaced with conformity and victims.
Socialism attempts to remove any and all potential crisis from peoples lives in order to keep them from searching for the Divine. It attempts to literally brainwash people into believing that they are not individuals capable of making personal decisions but are part of any number of “Groups” that make up the whole of society. The Soviets made sure their populace had sufficient supplies of vodka while they stood in line for bread. American “Progressives” are trying their best to keep people stoned and distracted with an endless stream of “entertainment”.
The argument against Socialism is very simple and I have yet to hear a conservative politician effectively make the argument.
Who do you trust?
Do you trust yourself (whether you have faith in God or not)? or do you trust the Government?
It’s insane that Democrats in America are even considering a self proclaimed socialist as their candidate but I would not be surprised to see the MSM get behind Sanders as this thing plays out.
“Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god”
Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union – Scott Shane
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994, 324 pp.
Chapter 3: What Price Socialism? An Economy Without Information
Pp. 77-78
My informal survey suggested that some of the longest lines in Moscow were for shoes. At first I assumed that the inefficient Soviet economy simply did not produce enough shoes, and for that reason, even in the capital, people were forced to line up for hours to buy them. Defitsit, shortage, was a workhorse of colloquial Soviet speech. The adjectival form, defitsitny, had become a term of praise, since everything desirable was in short supply: Look at this pottery I found – it’s very defitsitny. So they needed to make more shoes, I figured. Then I looked up the statistics.
I was wrong. The Soviet Union was the largest producer of shoes in the world. It was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year – twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.
The problem with shoes, it turned out, was not an absolute shortage. It was a far more subtle malfunction. The comfort, the fit, the design, and the size mix of Soviet shoes were so out of sync with what people needed and wanted that they were willing to stand in line for hours to buy the occasional pair, usually imported, that they liked.
At the root of the dysfunction was the state’s control of information. Prices are information – the information producers need in order to know what and how much to produce. In a market for product as varied in material and design as footwear, shifting prices are like sensors taped to the skin of a patient in a medical experiment; they provide a constant flow of information about consumer needs and preferences. When the state controlled prices, it deprived producers of information about demand.
The shoe factory boss churned out shoes to meet the Plan, a production quota set by bureaucrats who reported to Moscow’s hulking Gosplan, the State Planning Committee. The shoes were priced according to arcane formulae by another gos-institution (for gosudarstvo, state), Goskomtsen, the State Price Committee. The shoes were distributed by another beefy bureaucracy, Gossnab, the State Supply Committee. If the shoe factory boss was smart, the might produce 10 percent over plan, wind himself a bonus, and be named a Hero of Socialist Labor. But as far as the consumer was concerned, the factory manager operated in the dark, without any information from the market, without feedback.
Indeed, the factory’s real customer was the state, not the consumer. The state purchased all the shoe factory’s production, good, bad, or indifferent. The consumer’s choices were not allowed to enter into the matter. So, driven by the tireless efforts of the shoe factory hero and those like him, gross national product might rise and the Politburo might express satisfaction at the obvious economic progress. But on the street the picture looked less triumphant: many stores had bins of clunky shoes sitting around unbought, while down the street hundreds of people sacrificed their mornings waiting for imports.
The vague impression in the West that the Soviet economy was merely an enfeebled version of a Western economy was inaccurate. It was a different beast altogether. It was dreadfully inefficient, stubbornly resistant to change, but capable of huge feats of production. The statistical yearbooks, with their selective but impressive tables of “Comparison with Leading Capitalist Countries,†proved as much.
The shoes Soviet industry produced might end up in a landfill, but comrade, it could produce shoes.
Not only do I trust myself, I own myself,
which should be a no-brainer, but is a curiously
controversial notion among a certain set.
It’s true. Median income would soar by more than $22,000 under Sanders. Unfortunately, that would only cover one cup of coffee under the inflation we’ll see with a second consecutive socialist in power, but the income numbers will rise.
I used to always ask my liberal ex-girlfriend a simple question when things got heated.
“What do you OWN?”
In other words, what do you know to be true?
This, I found to be a real problem for Liberals. They have been conditioned to reject virtually all truth claims.
I don’t know. Even the Soviets didn’t reject the facts, just put a different spin on them. Like they say, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. I doubt liberals are any more fact-averse than the rest of us.
Well, for liberals, opinions are just as valid as so-called facts.
a lot of thought in your posting. I can tell you care.
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