Posted on 11/03/2015 1:58:51 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
We've been a fed a myth about heroic individuals -- and that allows the 1 percent to prosper at everyone's expense.
Americans have been deceived by the notion that individual desires preempt the needs of society; by the Ayn-Rand/Reagan/Thatcher aversion to government regulation; by the distorted image of 'freedom' as winner-take-all capitalism; by the assurance that the benefits of greed will spread downwards to everyone.
Our current capitalist-driven inequalities will only be rectified when people realize that a strong community makes successful individuals, not the other way around.
These are a few of the ways we would benefit with a social democracy:
1. The Super-Rich Wouldn't Make Our Decisions for Us
Decisions about higher education should be made by all of us, with public tax dollars allocated in a democratic fashion. But our tax dollars have gone away. The Reagan-era "government is the problem" attitude led to dramatic tax cuts and a resulting decline in government funding for public universities. Instead of paying for all the societal benefits heaped upon them, billionaires keep getting richer-just 14 individuals making more than the entire federal education budget two years in a row.
As a result, as noted by Larry Wittner, "campus administrators, faced with declining income, are increasingly inclined to accept funding from wealthy individuals and corporations that are reshaping higher education to serve their interests." The Koch brothers have spent millions funding universities and stipulating the kind of education that should be provided.
We're left with philanthropy instead of democracy. The philanthropists, not we the people, are beginning to make these vital decisions. Said Charles Koch: "I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington."
Education is not the only area where we're losing control. Bill Gates' contribution of $2 billion toward alternative energy solutions is admirable, but energy decisions should be made by society as a whole, with tax money, through our (well-chosen) representatives, and with the complementary support of private investors. Gates himself admits, "DARPA money is very well spent, and the basic-science money is very well spent. The government....should get about four times as much money as they do."
2. We Wouldn't Spend So Much Money on Security for Rich People
Nationally, we spend over $1 trillion per year on defense. Not just the half-trillion Pentagon budget, but another half-trillion for veterans affairs, homeland security, "contingency operations," and a variety of other miscellaneous military 'necessities.'
But that's not enough for the relative few at the top of our outrageously unequal society. The richest Americans build private fortresses to protect themselves from the rest of us, as they scoff at the notion of a 1950s-like progressive tax structure that would provide infrastructure funding for all of us.
3. We Wouldn't Give All the Credit for a Tech Product to One Person
In the extreme capitalist mind, Steve Jobs started with boxes of silicon and wires in a garage and fashioned the first iPhone. The reality is explained by Mariana Mazzucato: "Everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system-all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA."
That's true of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and every pharmaceutical CEO. They may be brilliant leaders, and they certainly deserve compensation for their roles, but the main accomplishment of each was to assemble the parts provided by years of public research.
4. Public Sentiment Would Prevail Over the Demands of Lobbyists
Society's needs are often ignored in our individual-oriented capitalist system. Over 90 percent favor laws on clean air and water, but Congress has proposed to weaken them. Over 90 percent want background checks for gun purchases, but the NRA constantly bullies over 200 million Americans.
5. Our Jobs Wouldn't Be Held Hostage in Tax Havens
The great majority of Americans-including many millionaires-want to end overseas tax loopholes for corporations. But Fortune 500 companies ignore the rights of the public. They owe more than $600 billion in taxes on their tax haven hoardings.
That's a job for all 8 million unemployed Americans, at the nation's median salary of $36,000. For two years.
But our greedy super-capitalist system allows much of society to be deprived of opportunities to work.
A Social Democracy
Social-oriented economic systems are not incompatible with small business entrepreneurship. In a social democracy, similar to those in Scandinavian countries, with elements of both capitalism and socialism intact, the worst abuses of a winner-take-all corporate-ruled system are avoided. The result is a land of opportunity. As Harvey J. Kaye put it, with supporting references to Thomas Paine, FDR, Martin Luther King, and Bernie Sanders, "Social democracy is 100 percent American."
Paul Burchheit, Socialist Worker - 2011: The obscene wealth of the U.S. elite
March 2015: Four Reasons Young Americans Should Burn Their Student Loan Papers Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.
Selfishness? So the store owner is selfish but the robber is what?
Socialism is theft.
I wonder if the knucklehead ever read Adam Smith, Bastist, Sowell, W. Smith...to name a few...
I remember when we couldn’t call them socialists. I guess that’s no longer forbidden. Depressing.
Rand was born in Russia. Sanders was from NY.
I think it’s kind of a toss up.
This is a foolish, unsupported assertion. The entire article is based on a false premise. You need read no more after this untrue statement because all that follows has no foundation in fact or truth.
“Ten years ago, Front Page Magazine writer Danusha Goska went to heckle David Horowitz.
Then he said something about the minority cities of New Jersey that changed her whole way of thinking. “He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.”
“That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city,” she writes....”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260663/taking-fight-left-daniel-greenfield
The siren call of Something for Nothing. The oldest scam since the dawn of mankind, yet it still sells again and again.
It’s kind of odd that when a socialist talks about the wonders of socialism, you can’t find a single example of it actually being that way in the real world.
Socialism is the system of public ownership that immorally seizes by force and against the will of the private owners, private property. Socialism also immorally seizes the means of production by seizing the land, regiments labor, substitutes taxation for savings as a means of capital formation and replaces the entrepreneur for the bureaucrat. The socialist State decides what the labor the individual should perform, where it should be done and how much should be earned. This allows individuals to be paid for not working.
The power to make decisions will be taken away from the individual and concentrated in the hands of Big Government. Because the sinful nature of man will be concentrated into the few, they will make corrupt decisions that will eventually destroy America which they have so planned and controlled.
The guy obviously doesn't understand the 13th Amendment. "Selfishness" means: we each keep our own work products and rewards from taking risks, as well as give them charitably, in a VOLUNTARY manner.
Notice how people are termed "selfish" -- if they don't give the 'Rats their work products. Nice try, rats. They can't even live a life of honor, they're like screaming 3-year olds.
Well, has Salon come out of the closet with this? It is long past time for the Democrats to come out of that closet.
The best most complete after Adam Smith is Ludwig von Mises. The most succinct is Henry Hazlitt. The most unintelligible writing on the subject is Maynard Keynes.
The goal of Socialism is Communism.
Marx said it and so did Vladimir Lenin.
All the rest is dickering over the price of the prostitute.
as opposed to government take all socialism. in free market capitalism the individual has an chance to better his condition and the economic level of everyone in the society, even the homeless, is improved by that selfish striving. In socialism only a tiny caste of upper level bureaucrats and the rulers can improve themselves, essentially by theft, and everyone else is poor and has no hope of improving himself except by bribery and extortion. The more socialist a society the more corrupt it must be. When a bureaucrat who provides no goods or services directly must be placated in order to get anything done then there will be bribery and extortion. It must be. The cost of goods and services is very high and the availability of goods and services is very low.
the crux. Freedom = bad, to a socialist. Chains are good. Ya that should do wonders for creativity, invention and initiative. I can't believe we have come to the point of actually considering throwing it all away.
“.....In an article for Alternet in 2013, Paul Buchheit wrote that “McDonald’s employs 440,000 workers worldwide, most of them food servers making the median hourly wage of $9.10 an hour or less, for a maximum of about $18,200 per year.” That $9.10 per hour McDonald’s employee is being paid less than one-third of what she earns for her employer in a year. Now she is also having those meager wages stolen, as the Labor Department found in at least two recent cases in New York and Pennsylvania.
Wage theft is just one of a variety of weapons that private-sector businesses have deployed in order to cheat workers and maximize profits. Other tools include public policy instruments like so-called right to work laws that hamper union organizing; threats of deportation to keep unauthorized immigrant workers from asserting their rights; and lobbying to carve out loopholes in new worker-protection laws, among other devices.....
Russian workers in a socialistic society under uncle joe.
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