Young Voters Support Democratic Socialist Policies
46 replies, posted
For humans as they are now*
Oh my god no it hasn't. And even so it could be argued that capitalism has caused much more harm than those "socialist" countries. I guess it's a failure?
@Lolkork YOU ABSOLUTE CRETIN you (by the flagdog I assume) live in Sweden, one of the most socialist democratic nations atm. Move to the fucking US if you think that policies that help people shouldn't be available.
The ideology that Sweden's and other European countries' welfare states came from is social democracy, not democratic socialism. Why do you think the party that has basically ruled Sweden alone for most of the 20th century is called 'the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Sweden? Or the (former) main German left-wing party is called 'the Social Democratic Party of Germany'?
There are major, inherent issues with socialist economies*, which are independent of the state and timeframe those get implemented in, and certainly do not require any foreign meddling to surface... It ultimately leads to an inefficient, irrational system where the quality of life falls way behind of more or less comparable market economies (eg. Hungary and Austria between 1949-89) and it is nigh inevitable that the state simply goes bankrupt in the very end, unless it transitions to another economic model. I'll try to show two specific examples regarding its unavoidable failures:
People were outraged in the wake of financial institutions getting bailed out in 2008, under the pretense they were too big to fail. In a centrally planned economy, this happens every day, invisibly, because managers of state companies are not and cannot be incentivized effectively to improve their performance, or to even avoid bankruptcy. They'll keep receiving subsidies because there is no other option, no other actors on the market except for the state. Just as importantly, there is also no drive for innovation. Kornai (the author whose works I mentioned before) coined the term "soft budget constraint" for this phenomena. Indeed, the term has relevancy in market economies too (eg. bailout of Greece or the 2008 crisis), but it is a central feature of the socialist system. The system is then intrinsically self-destructive in the long run (I think Yegor Gaidar used these exact words for it).
Moving on, another major feature of the socialist system is the frequent, chronic shortages in every segment of the economy. These are not due to errors made by economic planners or badly set prices, but because of the nature of the socialist system: it produces a "shortage economy" (vs. surplus economy).
Since supply and price is pretty much fixed (both can reactively change, but only slowly and to a limit) in a socialist economy the variable that reacts to demand is time. Using a real life example, one would be able to buy a "new" car relatively easily in Hungary in the 80s, but it would take seven(!) years for it to be manufactured and delivered to him, because of all the people waiting for cars (in the GDR it was like 15 years on average). In a market economy, while prices would be likely higher, one could get a new car immediately or at least buy a used one for the same price, ultimately ending up in a better position. Once again, the only actor is the state, no one else can jump in to cater the existing demand. The above mentioned soft budget constraint only exacerbates this issue. Also as there is barely any innovation, whatever one ends up getting was already technologically outdated.
Paradoxically, in a socialist economy, the principal concern is not about not having enough money, but rather the fact that one simply cannot spend it. Queuing for basic essentials such as bread becomes commonplace, and getting something that was not produced in the country becomes a genuinely huge thing (getting a bag of oranges or any other tropical fruit in Hungary even in the 60s was a yearly(!) occurrence, despite the Comecon trade connections with Cuba). Things get real when people start buying goods they don't actually need, purely because they are available and they are in the hope that they can sell it later for something else. How can a monolithic, slow, centrally planned economy react to this? It can't, and the shortage just becomes more widespread.
Market failures can and will surface in market economies too (hell, even Adam Smith talked about this, and that wasn't exactly yesterday), but they can be dealt with, it takes appropriate regulation and timely intervention to do so (in other words, political will). This political will of course varies greatly between countries (the US is historically very rigid in this sense).
The above is just a small facet of the hard economic shortfalls of the system, there is also the societal aspect, etc. Nevertheless, the above ideas were highly influential for Chinese and Russian economists in the 80s and 90s, who led their countries through major reforms with varying success.
Ok, this turned out to be a bit longer than I set it out to be. And don't take it too personally, this is addressed to plenty others in this thread.
*NOT social democracies
As for "democratic socialist" countries, well in Lindblom's Politics And Markets, he pretty much reaches the conclusion that a socialist economy cannot be democratic. Those don't exist, plainly said.
I mean capitalism fails in many ways, but it has also produced the wealthiest countries in the world.
Someone brought up the Scandinavian countries earlier as a way to say that more socialism is a good thing, but they also kind of neglect to mention that the corporate tax rates are fairly low.
I wouldn’t want to live in the US, but this idea that capitalism is just all bad is kinda silly in my opinion. The Nordic model is basically strong unions while keeping the country easy for doing business in. And then tax private citizens a lot.
The Nordic model also has state ownership of a country's natural resources but good fucking luck ever getting that in America.
I mean of some of it, yeah. Obviously Norway is making mad bank off its oil, but here in Denmark the profits from that is quite a bit more modest. Still nice though. And also a bit hypocritical considering how green we like to present ourselves.
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