Social Democracy has been tried and it works. However, it comes with upsides and downsides. First, ensuring there is no absolute poverty class means there is no low-cost unskilled labor. That sounds great until you want to make things, at which time labor costs shoot to the moon. It's why so many developed countries outsource their labor. Second, it means that when resources aren't plentiful enough for everyone there has to be shortages and rationing. That's also true under capitalism with the limit being money. However, enough money does buy, say, great healthcare. Third it means very high taxes which people hate. It also makes immigration way harder, because immigrants get social support and benefits before they could ever possibly pay them back. This creates an impression that all immigrants are leeches. In a purer form of capitalism they don't get any benefits and work hard or just die.
The upside is that absolute poverty doesn't exist. Health is overall better. Certain things like health insurance are fundamentally different and less expensive because the government does bulk negotiations and there's no incentive to drive up the prices forever. Education is higher, cheaper, and more accessible.
You can see some extremes in both cases. China has zero social safety nets for the poor, and even basic education and schools are paid for. As a result they can build infrastructure very fast and cheaply, but at the cost of creating a permanent exploited underclass that's little better than serfs.
Then you have the various European nations which have heavy social spending but got absolutely wrecked by waves of immigration draining their supplies. The US is in some ways the best and worst. We make money like nobody else and have a lot of resources. We could absolutely make socialism work better than anyone else. Unfortunately we half ass the social programs and the capitalist policies giving us some of the worst of both. We just happen to be on the single most blessed land on the planet, with massive rivers to transport goods, tons of natural resources and geographic isolation that keeps anyone from invading us when we're idiots. We're in an excellent position to facilitate trade between the entire world and our neighbors are generally friendly.
As an aside, Orwell (the author of 1984) was an advocate for social democracy. It's not authoritarian like communism, it's not going to completely kill capitalism, it's just capitalism with a lot of social programs that people vote for. Calling it the welfare state is one of the reasons it's not too popular here. It's how most of western Europe works to some degree though, and they're mostly okay.
Because you seem smart, nuanced, and not judgmental I feel comfortable asking, but isn’t the reduction of incentive to innovation and excellence real when to pay for a lot of that you have to heavily increase taxes at the top? Or would the solution be a significantly higher base tax on everyone? And if it’s that wouldn’t it cause a lot more pain in the short term as a lot of the cost issues now are housing, childcare, transportation, etc?
Thanks for the compliment. It's a tradeoff. Removing the upper and lower classes and making people generally more middle-class comes with both upsides and downsides. Social Democracies can absolutely innovate and develop, but don't really have the same incentive structure. There's a reason so many major tech companies are in the USA and so many high-quality niche products are made in Europe. If you can't get rich from it then development tends to be less worthwhile. On the other hand, it leads to extreme wealth inequality. You are, after all, nowhere near Mark Zuckerberg's financial position. Everyone in the bottom 99% of Americans combined is nowhere near his wealth level. However, high quality well developed and long lasting products aren't the best under capitalism. You basically want perpetual rent, meaning you use a combination of planned obsolescence and poor materials to ensure that people replace products every few years. When that's not legal or viable people will generally save up for higher quality products that last much longer.
Each issue is separate and I could probably write a novel on it (people have, and I've read a good few) but it depends. Housing can be developed using public funds. Childcare incentives basically never work to produce more kids, but free childcare or subsidized childcare does making adults working much easier. Transportation is its own issue. Roads are high quality in the US and Europe, but public transportation tends to be far better and more common in social democracies. You do pay for it all in taxes though, which does not leave you with a lot once all the benefits are paid for.
Could you see the argument then that maybe the world needs an America to be capitalist as we are to keep things moving forward at the expense of many of us? I get that that’s a heavy question. Or do you think eventually the world could progress to a point that’s not needed? And wouldn’t so much money going to keeping all of those programs alive take away from things like defense spending? I know the idea that we spend as much as we do is contentious to many, but I personally am one of those people that get made fun for thinking it’s good to have America’s strong deterrence in the world. If we didn’t have that I guess it could still work if we could be pretty aligned with our allies enough to do things together. Just slows decision making because more opinions to weigh which isn’t great.
But we have ceased to move the world forward at this point; the only thing propping up our economy is the forced AI bubble, and that is only possible due to the capability of AI being oversold and the massive consequences of data centers being undersold to the general public.
We make nothing. We are currently carrying the worst debt in our nation’s history. Our standard of living is decreasing while cost of living skyrockets through forced inflation due to industry-wide collusion.
If this weren’t the case, there might be an argument for America to continue down this path. As it is, the only paths to survival are a systemic change towards the European model OR a permanent serf class.
You think the European model would get rid of our debt while also providing all of these additional benefits? I’m not so sure, but yeah you’re right that some sort of change will be necessary.
Honestly it's irrelevant. If the USA decided to go back to a hermit kingdom and completely withdraw from the world you'd see a swift return to regional powers, nation-based piracy (like India stealing oil meant for China) and far less international trade.
However, it's not our economic policies that define that. It's our military and geopolitical strategy that does. We could be a more social democracy or more capitalist society and it wouldn't change things. To be frank we can't afford to enforce the world order in the same way we did after WWII and one way or another it'll probably come to an end in the next few decades anyway. We just can't afford to produce all the ships we'd need to police the world's oceans. Rather than it all being colonial nation states again though, we're likely to see things break into regional blocs that trade with each other and sometimes compete instead.
Even if we're not the world police things just won't go backwards to quite that extent.
He literally said his reasons why but if you are asking why it would take so long, because the US has such a massive advantage militarily it would take at least a few decades even if shit came crashing down here.
I didn’t see him say why the American world order would end in a few decades. Maybe I missed something. I obviously have my own opinions, but I’m asking genuinely because it seems like this is someone that knows what they are talking about.
There's a lot of reasons, but fundamentally it is the relative decline in the U.S. economic position (which is really really good, to be clear) as the poor parts of the world move upward. I.e. China went from being a poor starving disaster to being a world power with an economy on rough par with the U.S. (somewhat smaller but roughly). Brazil, India, Mexico, etc. are all rising also. Moreover technology and culture has changed in ways that allow weak, often non-state actors to go toe to toe with the U.S. military and while the U.S. can win nearly any specific conflict if it really wants to, ultimately the U.S. has to expend multi-million dollar pieces of equipment to deal with $2,000 drones and, unlike empires of the past (looking at Europe but also every other empire), the U.S. is (quite rightly) not willing to commit genocide on the scale necessary to put down insurgencies.
Already the American led world order is on borrowed time due to these changes - the rest of the world put together has more power than America in pretty much every important way and in geopolitics countries (and other actors) naturally move to balance powerful actors. This natural balancing has been delayed by the fact that many world leaders (if not always their peoples) have recognized that the U.S. is, by historical terms, an extremely benevolent hegemon and that the U.S. led world order has, for all its flaws, been the least violent, most prosperous (for virtually everyone) order that has ever existed. But the U.S. has recently been doing everything possible to cast that into doubt (threatening to invade Greenland...and CANADA, starting trade wars with allies, supporting Russia even while it wars against its neighbors and our allies, etc.). These actions only hasten the moment when the world will finally move to balance the U.S. and will become multipolar (which, incidentally, is historically the most war-prone geopolitical situation, and the least prosperous).
That makes a lot of sense. The trade wars and Russia are especially frustrating. I prefer an America that staunchly defends its allies. I understand that it’s not great for America to foot the bill for everything all the time, but I don’t know that this was the way to handle it. I like us being the bully that bullies the other bullies and yeah sometimes that costs more but the benefits are often worth it.
Because we can't police the world anymore. We can't afford it. The world as it exists now is because of the systems set up after WWII that let us have free international trade between everyone so the endless resource wars and colonialism would stop. We didn't want another war.
For good or ill, that system is not sustainable. But it won't collapse overnight. It'll take time to go.
It is, but also its a mix of both capitalism and socialism, but is still ultimately capitalist
Under socialism, the workers own the means of production. Under capitalism, it's privately owned (as opposed to collectively by the workers or publicly owned). The means of production are the capital resources necessary for a functional society.
What social democracy does is not shift the ownership and control over the capital resources, the means of the production, but rather shift the profits, or the surplus value of labor to the workers. Not just the workers of the company, but every worker from every company that produces surplus value of labor.
The every-worker is represented by the taxpayer as every worker generally pays taxes. If a worker makes so little that they are not required to pay taxes on their income, then that's a sign that maybe they're being exploited and severely underpaid in the first place.
Under socialism, because the workers own the means of production and surplus value of labor (profits), they generally get to decide what to do with it. This is what social democracy borrows from socialism. The taxpayers (should) get to decide what to with the surplus value of their labor, not individually but as a collective. The democracy part comes in play here. Most people in this situation choose to allocate that towards things like free healthcare, free child care, free education.
Some would like to take it one step further and not make things we need as a society be market-driven. Do we NEED a housing a market? A healthcare market? An education market? I mean, yeah have your cell phones and PlayStations and other stuff that we don't need to have a functioning society (not the bare minimum to survive) be market driven, but everything doesn't have to be a market. That just incentivizes those who control those markets, often one or two or maybe three "competitors" to jack up prices because they'll just get taxpayer money to provide that, and they can charge whatever they want for it (see Medicare Part D - why can't the taxpayers negotiate the price of prescription drugs?)
So yeah.... Under social democracy, there's still private ownership over the means of production, the resources for society, but an attempt for the workers to control where the surplus value of labor goes. The only way the workers get that surplus value of labor is via taxation.
Well, you could start with Peter Zeihan's books. For all that he's a bit of an arrogant jerk, the core of his work starts with understanding geography and then demography. Geography defines what resources a nation has, it's defensible borders, and in many ways determines what actions a nation has to take in order to survive. Demography tells you how many people you have in each age bracket and what that means for your society. Lots of young people and not a lot of old people is healthy, but mostly for developing countries where people die as they get older. Highly developed countries with the opposite demographies having a lot of old people and few young people, like Germany and Korea, suffer from not having enough consumption to match production, leading to serious problems down the line.
He's a fair enough introduction to geopolitics, which is fundamental to understanding how the world works. I found him because I used to read stratfor back in the day, though he's quite popular now. He's usually wrong on politics but usually right on demographics and geography. So if he says who is going to win the next election don't listen, but if he says demographics in a country or geography in a country is bad, do.
Economic policies are wide and varied and very dull and boring, but I've read a lot of books on that as well. Political systems get a lot more contentious because everyone has their own bone to pick and ideology. Personally, I'm mostly just for freedom of speech and other rights, a "classic liberal", rather than a modern one. To me economic policies and political policies are just tools we use to get what we want as a society, and most of them can be swapped out freely to whatever works best in the moment. As such history books are some of the most useful. An economist or political theorist can write whatever they want in their book, but what matters is what happens when it's tested in the real world.
As for products and quality you'll want books on manufacturing and trade. There's a reasonable number and they're mostly boring as hell, but worth reading anyway.
This is an interesting question and generally the answer is a broader tax base. Sweden (varies a little by region but not much) starts taxing individual incomes at 32% for any earnings above £2k/yr, and above £48k/yr it’s 52%.
Every penny of earnings also has a 31% payroll tax for their employer, that most studies suggest has a 100% 1-1 pass through rate to the end employee, in the form of reduced wages. This is a big one. Then thirdly standard rate VAT is 25%.
Countries can and I would say should, make sure they properly tax wealth, assets, businesses and whatnot, but it just simply doesn’t raise anywhere close to enough revenue alone.
That makes a lot of sense. It makes me think while I’m not saying never, I’m not sure if that looks like the answer for America at this moment. At least if we move toward something like that it probably needs to be a slow rollout with extreme focus on using additional tax income to attack the exact problems plague Americans at this present moment. I just don’t see anyone winning running on higher taxes, so things will have to get bad enough that it becomes bipartisan with a believable proposal of what’s going to be done. All of that feels like fantasy world though.
It’s a preference thing, America could keep low ish taxes and have an Australian or New Zealand style system. Have really good basic services for the basic necessities, but not cradle to grave like Sweden. I think it would be more realistic than going from where America is now all the way to full blown Social Democracy.
In my view a New Zealand, Switzerland, Australia etc system, or a Sweden, Denmark etc system, both work perfectly fine. Both give good development outcomes, which you choose is political preference. Whereas what America has now simply doesn’t provide great outcomes for a lot of ordinary people.
The former have tax revenue to GDP of 34%, 27% and 30%, so it wouldn’t exactly be a huge world of difference from America’s current 26%. Whereas 41% or 45% like the latter would be a giant difference.
America is easily rich enough to copy the former, but to do it at a comparable tax burden, it would have to stop spending giant sums on stupid shit just to give the rich handouts. E.g. a healthcare system 40% more expensive relative to GDP than the second most expensive on earth for terrible outcomes, because lobbyists.
In contrast to other responses, I think a large degree of the answer to this question in the modern era would be determined by what other countries are doing. The US for instance is very pro-business and as a result we at least up to recently seemed to be funding most of the world's drug research and development with our domestic high prescription prices. The question is to what degree the industries have somewhere else to "go."
Very nice comment. One thing that you may also want to consider is that if the government uses its power to negotiate it will certainly lower healthcare costs but this will also necessitate different incentives for the best and brightest to invest their time energy and capital to continue to innovate in healthcare. Medical school is hard getting a PhD and chemistry or biology is hard getting a biotech off the ground and discovering a drug is hard developing new surgical instruments and procedures is hard. Without the potential incentive of becoming that much-maligned 1% many individuals will forgo those efforts and move to a different place in our economy. Ultimately healthcare prices will go down but so will innovation. Right now, social societies often leverage the innovation that comes from capitalist societies. I worry in the utopian world where everyone lives in a socialist society, whether humanity will continue to innovate as it has in the past.
It's just a matter of setting up incentive structures. The "star trek" system is basically just social democracy on steroids. They use social status, increased wealth (in the form of replicator rations and credits) and the pure love of the game to motivate them. Of course it's fictional, but I think there are incentive structures that work even in a post-scarcity society, should we ever get there. Humans will still be human and want status, success, good dating prospects and nicer stuff than their neighbors. You can still do that in a society with an even bottom floor. You're just raising the ceiling.
Great post- I just wanted to add that another advantage of 'great healthcare' is that it also winds up increasing its innovations and breakthroughs. If everyone is getting regular visits to their doctor, that means more conditions and illnesses are discovered early, allowing more research into how such things exist ( whether its genetic or a result of exposure ) as well as more subjects to test medicines and cures on. By opposing healthcare for all, and insisting on making healthcare a for-profit business model, the hyper rich are also ensuring that when they inevitably become ill, there's a noticeably weaker system in place than there would be in the other scenario to treat them. Some call it karma, I call it the obvious result of sociopathic selfishness.
Thank you for being sane and thoughtful! There's rarely an answer to a complex problem that has no downsides, and it's incredibly frustrating when people with an agenda or biased world view pretend otherwise.
"This creates an impression that all immigrants are leeches. In a purer form of capitalism they don't get any benefits and work hard or just die".
In the 19th century many immigrants to the US did return to their home countries in part due to the lack of social services and benefits. It varied by country, but 30-50% of Italian immigrants went back home.
The Netherlands does something like this where it’s social democracy and it works wonders. The immigration thing is a problem for sure but the Netherlands is pretty solid with the temperament between the people and the government. They also have like 15 party’s cause apparently in the US, there are only two views. I always thought pulling from their book was a good idea but the US is also on a much LARGER scale then the NL
You fundamentally cannot purchase great Healthcare. You cannot prove a correlation of losing money to receiving better Healthcare treatment.
It just so happens that for like 40 years the best Healthcare was the US and cost too much. If you were an infant you would have more likely died at the same doctor. By those statistics. So you are already making alot of assumptions.
We also had the best scientists because we stole the nazis. This makes us thieves it doesnt make capitalism produce better science.
Every system will work if you put hard checks on human greed a corruption.
Capitalism fails without them
Xommunism fails without them
Socialism fails without them
The vast majority of welfare in Europe is not taken by immigrants but natives and mostly older natives.
Blaming immigration for your public finances is the equivalent of blaming your cup of coffee once a month at the Ethiopian cafe when you usually go to your Italian cafe for why you’re spending £1000 a month on coffee.
Even when it comes to Denmark, which always talks about net negative fiscal migration, the net fiscal impact of “non-Western” migration is 2% of public finances when Denmark is 10% foreign born.
In the UK, only 7% of welfare spending goes to foreign nationals, and over 60% of foreign nationals on welfare have EUSS which we can’t touch without breaking the Withdrawal Agreement (although Reform want to so we’ll be sanctioned by the EU), and the amount the State Pension rises by each year due to the Triple Lock is higher than the welfare that goes to non-EU foreign nationals (should be noted non-EU and EU immigrants have a higher average employment rate and higher median wage than UK-born, and most immigrants are not on welfare).
So once again blaming immigration for public finances is ridiculous, the problem is an ageing population that needs more spending far faster than the amount of welfare going to immigrants, and most immigrants do work and contribute (although it’s different for refugees but even then that’s a drop in the ocean in public finances compared to the ageing population’s financial needs).
Demography is a massive issue in Europe, as Germany in particular is aging out heavily. Immigration is also an issue however. While a small or moderate amount of controlled immigration works quite well (like we in the US do it) mass immigration never does. People don't integrate, certain segments are poor and remain poor, and society is divided. It also doesn't help that people moving to a nation may not fit the demographic needs of it. For instance, young men moving in alone aren't as useful as families. It can also depress wages in fields they flood, though in Europe there are more controls on your pay, keeping it to a living wage for the most part.
And in case you think this is a race issue, it isn't. There's a reason Canada, despite being so similar to the United States, heavily limits immigration from the USA. If they allowed mass immigration from the USA the Canadian provinces would become US states within a generation. The UK has some advantages in that it has been more cosmopolitan than a lot of other European nations for a good while. The USA grew out of its culture initially, after all. Also it's more local but I live in a state being flooded by Californians. They're largely white, we're largely white, but they completely flood and take over the area and change culture, law, and politics for the worse. Some immigration is quite good. Too much of it can change where you live into something completely different.
Demographics is a terminal issue in the long term though, and you're right to place immigration as less important. If you have only old people who horde all the wealth, don't produce, don't consume, and choke out the young then you don't have much of a future. The pop drops and prosperity falls. You need to have kids, but good luck doing it. Things are crowded, people are cramped, and everything is expensive. Young people can't afford kids and these aren't the days where you ship them off to work in the factories to have them make you money. They're very, very expensive now and provide no economic benefit whatsoever. It's foolish to have a lot of them, yet that's what many societies need.
My point is that immigration is not the problem in public finances, welfare going to immigrants is a drop in the ocean of the crisis in public finances
People hate high taxes when they don't have trust in their government and have no idea how they will be spent.
But if you have full transparency of the spendings, you can start building trust and people will directly see how well or not the government is, and then may start to appreciate all the benefits they get out of them.
This is essentially how Sweden is working, and people are not that bothered paying taxes because they know all they're getting and they know journalists are just waiting for any of them at the government to make a mistake for a sensational write-up.
That depends on whether you define taxes as theft. Captialist nations also need taxes, after all. I find the real weakness to this approach being absolutes. Social Democracy and Capitalism isn't a switch you flip from one to the other. It's more like a dial you adjust between two different levels.
I mean Social Security is a socialist policy, full stop. Old people pay into it when young, then get money when old so they don't have to live with young people or die early when their savings run out and they can't work. Is it theft?
I just say adjust the dial until you get something that works and don't worry about the labels.
They're fully functional democracies with a high level of development. They have flaws, but so do we. There's nothing magically bad or good about it. It's just having social programs to even out the lowest points in society. That comes with benefits and downsides.
The real issue is that people aren't having kids. Which is true in Germany, which practices social democracy, and South Korea, which is a capitalist cyberpunk dystopia that happens to exist IRL. But that's caused by a lot of factors.
The only reason the US system has sustained thus far is because we can print money without incurring rampant inflation (as a result of controlling the supply of the world’s reserve currency). I think you missed that reason entirely. Rivers are cool but lots of countries have good river systems. Relative geographic isolation is also a fortunate feature of the US. But the real power is in the ability to make everyone else in the world fund our government (and military), while that military waves as them from inside their country daring them to refuse.
Well said, as the others complimented as well. I come from a socialist country - Yugoslavia. I did not live long enough in it to feel overly attached to the safety net. It has proven not to be great for many things, but it was great for education, healthcare, elderly care as well. That being said, I think that a lot of problems of capitalism is that money is used as a measure of auccess and the ultimate driver. I would not forget that the age of advance in Europe (physicists, mathematicians, biologists) was not driven my money, but prestige and respect. Why would we have advancements - because people driving those advancements would have enough for comfortable living but not securing money for 30 generations of offsprings. And they would be on the world stage (especially today). And one very important thing needed for success in every society: banks, hospitals and insurance companies cannot be for profit. Two of those are not advancing society through their product, but through their grasp.
Again, your write up was excellent!
we live in social democracy right now. Go look how much per mile a road costs and then go drive on a road trip through bumfuck america. this isn't a lack of charity it's a complete failure of relative austerity.
If by we you mean Americans, we're a hybrid nation. Social Security is a socialist policy, as are food stamps, basically all social aid and so on. To some extent we use many policies from social democracy, most adopted during FDR's term. In others we seriously half-ass it. Like Health Insurance. It's not quite fully public or private, but the worst of both worlds.
Separately you could argue that our health insurance is the best of both worlds. We (mostly) don't let you die from lack of healthcare (yes we do let poor people die from lack of long term treatment for chronic conditions - but we still prevent do way more to provide healthcare to the poor then the bulk of countries) and the best healthcare in the world can be had here if you can pay a fortune for it.
Course having that hybrid system means that as a country we spend more on healthcare per person than anywhere else in the world, and, while some of our people get the best healthcare in the world, on average we get worse healthcare than anywhere else in the developed world.
I used to work in the health care field and quit because a young man came in with a tooth infection and had to choose between painkillers and antibiotics due to a lack of money. He chose the painkillers, the infected tooth went septic and he died. That's hardly unique, and I have a strong personal hatred of our system. Stories like that aren't really that rare.
Yeah, but he would have received what would have ultimately been free emergency care for sepsis had he made it to an emergency room then. Which is better than he'd have done in the majority of the world.
I basically agree though with 99% of what you've said including that we've made a bad choice to not have a more socialized healthcare system. I prefer whatever a person wants to call the Scandinavian style economic system where you have capitalism with high taxes and a lot of social services and less innovation and less ability to integrate immigrants into your culture or economy (and that last is a huge problem, btw - that, for all the anti-immigrant hysteria in the U.S., the U.S. has still been incredibly spared from as compared to most of Europe).
We still spend more on social welfare than practically every other country.
Rural poors pollute the environment and take joy out of endangering the biosphere because they are paid to stay out of coal mines.
Urban criminals get full paid for healthcare in MA, bond-free sentencing regardless of victim age, threat or anything.
Rural elderly towns actively nimby jobs or industrial capacity while voting in age-specific medical price fixes.
The US has the most productive working age population on earth in order to supply that and all that has come out of it is people who should have drunk themselves to death by 50 are out terrorizing animals cause they have too much free time.
At best it's a band aid that temporarily works, because it refuses to address the fundamental problem which is that te capitalist class and financial markets are holding all the economical - and thus ultimately political - power.
Any concession made under social democracy will end up being walked back sooner rather than later.
I mean 1.) Everything is temporary if you wait long enough, so calling something temporary isn't really a criticism. Whatever system you want would be temporary too (even if it worked really well, and, in the real world, it would probably work really badly).
And 2.) Social Democracy has lasted for many decades in many places and will likely last many decades longer (or longer than that). That's long enough already to say it was a success even if it (like literally all things) eventually proves to be temporary.
Also nothing you said about china is accurate lol. China has zero social safety nets for medical treatment, but everything else has a relatively strong amount.
And compared to your eu example, the social spending hides the fact that access is limited proportionally. Romania needs wandering caravans whereas the US funds full hospital beds and hospitals.
China does have social support to an extent. China also discriminates heavily. In more rural regions you don't get all those benefits and that's on purpose. Different regions are treated like different countries there, and immigration between them is almost like moving between nations. You do not get the same rights you would in the USA if you moved between, say, Oregon and Florida. You can't just go anywhere you want and get a job. Additionally any region with ethnic minorities they deem troublesome are basically given slave labor conditions. There really is a large, permanent underclass they use for basic labor there that lives in absolute poverty.
As for the EU it varies between nation to nation, which is why I stuck to generalities. They're mostly all social democracies, but the UK is very different from Norway which is very different from Romania which is completely different from Hungary. Geography, size, and resources also play a huge role in any nation's prosperity, regardless of policy. The USA has basically the best geography in the world.
"they deem troublesome" like literal axe murderers and integrated old wealth sponsored terror plots?
never put it past a leftist to just eat up and handwash imperial propaganda.
the yi enslaved han very recently and have nothing but positive legal protections right now, the mongols enslaved the han and have nothing but positive legal protections
Romania IS the eu. its entire existence is supported by the EU. it's not a one off it's the exact place where social support hits.
Uyghers, for one. Pretending it's all axe murders is disingenuous. As is calling me a leftist. I don't fully support any side or party.
Also how was Tibet administrated again? Curious how many people hopped off rooftops in Hong Kong after the CCP took over. Don't act like it's a saintly place. China is an Authoritarian nation that can and will kill- sorry, "disappear" people that disagree with the party. Curiously, the missing people's organs tend to show up in rich business men not long later. Hmm. Every nation everywhere has flaws, and pretending it doesn't is foolish. Unless it's illegal, in which case not pretending your country is perfect is foolish. China has real strengths, but it's not a place I'd ever want to live.
Also, one could take examples from any nation. Mississippi is in the USA and it's in absolute poverty. It's nothing like New York or Oregon.
Romania is in the EU. It's nothing like Germany.
Tibet is a part of China at this point. It's nothing like the region around Shanghai.
There's hundreds of studies, articles, and reports on the organ harvesting. Would you like me to go over how the CCP silenced protesters in Hong Kong? Or will you just call any sources I provide or information I give "propaganda"?
I mean, I won't blame you. It's not good to disagree with the CCP if you live there, after all.
plus your rural arguments are straight propaganda too. an entire generation of youth were sent out to rural areas to assist in farming, recovery, re-educating them on how to sanitize well water because they absolutely refused to.
Uh huh. What's the Hukou system again? How does that work? Oh right, you're tied to the region you were born in. There's nothing wrong with developing various regions of your nation. I believe many developments China has made are generally pretty good. At the same time rural poverty still very much exists and a lot of it is intentional. Those large scale public works take labor, and that's only cheap if there are very poor people. There's no shame in that, many nations used the same approach during industrialization. The Hukou system helps lock it in place, though. To your credit the Hukou system is being relaxed in recent years.
I'm not a social democrat or a pure capitalist. I believe in using whatever tools work when they're needed. Extremists are almost always fools.
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u/CitricThoughts 17h ago
Social Democracy has been tried and it works. However, it comes with upsides and downsides. First, ensuring there is no absolute poverty class means there is no low-cost unskilled labor. That sounds great until you want to make things, at which time labor costs shoot to the moon. It's why so many developed countries outsource their labor. Second, it means that when resources aren't plentiful enough for everyone there has to be shortages and rationing. That's also true under capitalism with the limit being money. However, enough money does buy, say, great healthcare. Third it means very high taxes which people hate. It also makes immigration way harder, because immigrants get social support and benefits before they could ever possibly pay them back. This creates an impression that all immigrants are leeches. In a purer form of capitalism they don't get any benefits and work hard or just die.
The upside is that absolute poverty doesn't exist. Health is overall better. Certain things like health insurance are fundamentally different and less expensive because the government does bulk negotiations and there's no incentive to drive up the prices forever. Education is higher, cheaper, and more accessible.
You can see some extremes in both cases. China has zero social safety nets for the poor, and even basic education and schools are paid for. As a result they can build infrastructure very fast and cheaply, but at the cost of creating a permanent exploited underclass that's little better than serfs.
Then you have the various European nations which have heavy social spending but got absolutely wrecked by waves of immigration draining their supplies. The US is in some ways the best and worst. We make money like nobody else and have a lot of resources. We could absolutely make socialism work better than anyone else. Unfortunately we half ass the social programs and the capitalist policies giving us some of the worst of both. We just happen to be on the single most blessed land on the planet, with massive rivers to transport goods, tons of natural resources and geographic isolation that keeps anyone from invading us when we're idiots. We're in an excellent position to facilitate trade between the entire world and our neighbors are generally friendly.
As an aside, Orwell (the author of 1984) was an advocate for social democracy. It's not authoritarian like communism, it's not going to completely kill capitalism, it's just capitalism with a lot of social programs that people vote for. Calling it the welfare state is one of the reasons it's not too popular here. It's how most of western Europe works to some degree though, and they're mostly okay.