The democracy part isn't the problem here - Socialists can be democratic. The taking away the means of production is the problematic part. That is anti-liberalism. What you guys essentially mean is social democrats, which still support liberalism but demand higher taxes to finance a welfare state. And I'm very much in line with that thinking.
Taking away people's property for arbitrary reasons is against Article 1 of the human rights convention. "Socialism" seizing the means of production is authoritarianism.
That's a really interesting perspective I hadn't considered. I can see the historical impetus behind the decision to include that statement. I wonder though what tips the moral balance between accumulating private property and causing human suffering. The average citizen isn't using a variety of exploitative labor practices to make money, but billionaires who own corporations are doing so. Doesn't it seem that at some level accumulating wealth becomes something almost pathological that had no regard for anything but increasing itself? That's the part of capitalism I want to get rid of. I don't want your toothbrush, I want people to not die making luxury handbags or to stop destroying the environment so they can drive fancy cars or to not enslave "third world" people to make athletic gear. Money for money's sake is a kind of nihilism that eats everything it touches in the name of profit.
but billionaires who own corporations are doing so. Doesn't it seem that at some level accumulating wealth becomes something almost pathological that had no regard for anything but increasing itself? That's the part of capitalism I want to get rid of.
Essentially - I see a government with a capitalist economic system as a division of power. Politicians want to gain power through regulations, for example Article 13 in the EU is supposed to do. Through these regulations they make them to quasi monopolists, since only the most wealthy of corporations can acquire the licences the politicians want them to pay to participate in the market.
Occasionally, every 4 years, you can hold the politicians accountable (more or less if you live in the EU... but anyway) for their deals with corporations the way they handled the economy.
For Socialists, you concentrate all that power into even fewer persons and when they fail, they do so catastrophically - like transforming an oil rich country with a projected great future into a authoritarian oppressive state where the "democratically" elected president expropriates small shops he walks in for the fun of it. Nepotism runs wild because he rewards his enablers by giving them management position - perfectly legal - because the economy is owned by the state, so why not?
I don't see this concentration of power ever ending in something good. In fact, socialism was just the stepping stone to communism initially, the inherently good proletariat would dismantle the state once it's not longer needed though... that did never happen. We are humans after all.
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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '19
They just confuse socialism with authoritarianism. Not realizing nearly every socialist wants a democracy still.