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Poll: Capitalism is out … and socialism is in (www.politico.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/upliftingnews@lemmy.world
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[–] 53 points 1 year ago (44 children)

Capitalism is not the opposite of socialism in fact the people in the picture advocate for nordic style socialism which is very much capitalism based just with strong safety nets.

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  • [+] 39 points 1 year ago (12 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Hopefully they will realize that the best America has ever been outside of racial and social issues is when FDR was president who was basically a social Democrat, although he preferred the term progressive and new nationalist. The decades after his economic reforms were the greatest time in American history, and then the Republicans got power again with Nixon and started to dismantle all of it, by the time Regan was in office, he killed organized labor and cut taxes on corporations leading to the current situation of hyper Inflationary debt based economics.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    This is exactly what needs to happen again. A bold progressive president who DGAF and builds some monumental new social programs and revives a strong welfare state, taking back the word "welfare" because it's A GOOD thing to not watch your citizens starve to death in the street, and we once knew this.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    It’s important to remember that the New Deal was a compromise between the Capitalists and the Labor Unions / Communists. There has to be a far left threat to Capital for the status quo to move to the left at all. That has been absent in the USA for decades (like you said, starting around Nixon time) which partially explains how far right the USA has moved with decline in labor’s share of profits, increasing wealth inequality and now all the way to fascist violence.

    You will never get a president that just enacts sane social policies without a strong left, and that means organizing and Labor Unions.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Then Republicans get back into power and revert all the progress...

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    As long as the wealthy can put the finger on the scale with control of media and funding propaganda, the pendulum won't stop swinging.

    One group does damage.
    The next does some changes that will take about 4-20 years to fix that damage, and do not try to fix everything, letting some damage stay.
    People are unhappy with the after-effects of the damage and switch again fooled by the propaganda, preventing further fixes from continuing.
    The destructive group claims any improvements as their actions, and any problems as caused by the fixing group, and do some more things to make things even worse.
    The damage eventually becomes patent again, so people switch once again.
    And repeat.

    And things slowly ratchet to worse and worse.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    It's important to remember that the New Deal was a compromise between the Capitalists and the Labor Unions / Communists. There has to be a far left threat to Capital for the status quo to move to the left at all. That has been absent in the USA for decades (like you said, starting around Nixon time) which partially explains how far right the USA has moved with decline in labor's share of profits, increasing wealth inequality and now all the way to fascist violence.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (27 children)

    Capitalism works best with strong rules in place to prevent psychopaths and sociopaths from expanding too large.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    But those rules inevitably fail because under capitalism wealth always consolidates under the psychopaths and sociopaths. Like, there’s no way to have capitalism and not have that happen. It’s part of the fundamental structure of private ownership of capital.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Limit the amount of capital that can be individually owned. Wealth cap. Sociopaths are going to sociopath, make it so they can't have more money than a government and there wouldn't be so many problems.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    It should just be a continuing, progressive income tax. No breaks, no loopholes, no tax evasion. The left is focusing on a single, arbitrary number and it's a bad idea.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I'd argue it's an idea that's easy enough to convince others to vote for. Anything with "tax" in it, has and will be weaponized. Realistically, a wealth cap may not be the best solution, but its the only one simple enough that propaganda has a hard time twisting. It's an easy sell to those with a 5th grade reading level.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Ok, institute a wealth cap and the people who have hit it will just bide their time until people get complacent, then start exerting power to roll it back. It happens with every reform and regulation that put limits on private ownership of capital. What we really need is to abolish private ownership entirely.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    The cap needsto be way, way lower. You don't need to to have more money than a government to buy a politician or buy media. And I think that small steps is all it takes for a class of the society to progressively take more and more power as they work to influence people and remove regulation.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    Fully agree. Capitalism with strong safety net and social oversight is a really good system.

    • Social safety net promotes risk taking for businesses, grows economy and balances society against extremes
    • Social oversight prevents entities from gaming the system. There has to be a human dungeon master behind every system as every system can be gamed and corrupted within the rules of it. So external oversight is needed.

    People like to hate on capitalism but capitalism + social oversight is really the best system.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    Hard disagree. Any system that allows private accumulation of capital will create a class of wealthy individuals who then use their wealth to dismantle checks and balances. It’s inevitable.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think that if you make enough things democratically controlled, and have a proper secret ballot, that you can prevent wealth accumulation from being able to subvert democratic will.

    It doesn't solve "tyranny of the majority", tho.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I've been wondering how the media could be regulated to not become a populist hellhole.

    If the government starts telling what the media can write and what it cannot, we are quickly in a very bad place.
    But at the same time, yellow press is a cancer. It seems that people all around prefer interesting newspapers over factual ones. Newspapers that add a bit of extra flavour to their articles sell a lot better than purely factual ones, because they are "less boring". And then that destroys democracy. I wonder how that should be avoided!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I agree regulating speech for this purpose is not a good fit, and more likely to be abused than useful.

    I think society has to really double-down on critical thinking skills, particularly around verifying sources and identifying bias, including your own cognitive biases that are inescapable. Of course, authoritarians of all stripes, but particularly religious ones, don't like this so frequently interfere with public education efforts along those lines. CFAR has problems, but their "core mission" of "explore and practice better ways of thinking" is a good one and some of their resources can be valuable.

    But, we also have to figure out how to provide spaces where people can let down their guard and escape the hostile environment AND get people (like myself) to use them (instead of doomscrolling, e.g.).

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  • [+] -8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    nah take your tankie nonsense back to your gulag

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Did you know that despite only having 4.5% of the world’s population, the USSR held 25% of the world’s prison population? Oh wait, no. Those statistics are for the USA right now.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    As much as a I despise the penal system of USA, USA has not killed 60 million of its own inhabitants.

    You are comparing grapes to grapefruits.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The global capitalist system kills 9 million people every year from starvation alone. Millions more from preventable disease. Capitalism is responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths than every socialist country combined.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    From the American point of view anything that even dares to suggest the possibility that there might be limitations to corporations' liberty to freely exploit and consume the population and their environment is communism, anarchy, heresy, and terrorism., and anathema to capitalism, democracy, and Freedom®(some limitations might apply).

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    I hope America tries a bit of socialism next because they clearly have the power to do so. The billionaires will not pack up and start leaving, I just don't see that ever happening. Especially when there are clear examples in California that is outcompeting every other state despite having higher taxes and more social programs.

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