Nadene Goldfoot  |
Socialist Party Icon of USA
Workers of the World-Unite (Where have I heard that one before?) |
The United States has been a capitalistic country from its beginning. "
Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. .Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate from the Democratic party, offers us a socialist society to replace our capitalistic one. He comes to us from the Independent Party and has held these views for the past 35 years since being elected to an office.
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Bernie Sanders, going from Brooklyn, NY to Vermont in New England
Time out on a kibbutz in Israel and honeymooned in Russia |
Why is what he offers called socialism? What do these 8 platforms have in common?
1. Free college for all. Taxpayers would have to shell out $70 billion dollars for this.
2. No private health insurance-only one single-payer for healthcare. Cost to us: $14 trillion dollars.
3. Higher taxes-spreading of wealth-taking from rich, giving to poor; expansion of social security benefits
4. Blames failure of captalism and investors on Greed of wealthy
5. Higher minimum wage in 4 years to $15 per hour
6. Higher estate taxes on wealthy: inherit more than $3.5 million dollars
7. Ending free-trade which Trump also agrees with.
8. Reverse Supreme Court decisions about allowing freedom of speech, 1st amendment restrictions
9. No plans to pay down the $19 trillion we owe to China to run our country in the manner we are accustomed to; only offers of needing more money to give to the massive society we have today. The people who will suffer will only be the wealthy ones who had the most imagination and guts to make their money in the first place. They are being punished for their achievements.
Sanders wants to copy Sweden's Socialism.
Socialism is a different way of viewing our financial and social systems by using social ownership and democratic control as the means of production. It includes political ideologies, theories and movements to get these established. This means our lives would not be centered around profit in business. Enterprises would be socially owned by groups. Profits would go to the society at large in the form of a social divident or directly to the workforce of each firm.
Such ideas started in the late 1700s out of concern for social problems associated with capitalism. The theories they came up with are state socialism versus libertarian socialism. Democratic socialism is used by those who consider themselves democratic and highlights its advocates' high value for the democratic processes.
Karl Marx in the late 19th century came in the world seeing technological development had more power than the economic dynamics of capitalism. Socialism became the opposition to capitalism. He advocated for this idea with social ownership as the means of production.
By the 1920's social democracy and communism were the 2 dominant political tendencies inside the international socialist movement. The 20th century saw socialism emerging as the most influential secular political-economic worldview.
The Soviet Union was born as the world's first nominally socialist state. This turned into a dictatorship. Today, some socialists have also adopted other causes besides their economy such as environmentalism, feminism and liberalism.
Socialists include: general criticisms of the social effects of private ownership and control of capital (money). They say capitalism causes:
1. poverty
2. low wages
3. unemployment
4. economic and social inequality
5. lack of economic security
Solution
1. Collective control over production, distribution and exchange agreement that outcome of this collective control in a society based upon social justice:
a. social equality
b. economic protection of people
c. satisfying life
Most people compliant to Socialism believe that history is progressive and creates positive change on the condition that humans work to achieve such change. Notice the word; change, change, change. They are advocating a change in how we have operated.
This can also be called Communism.
One must ask oneself, why has the USA been so successful all these 240 years since 1776? It's been that the poor and inconsequential people from other lands can come here and make a name for themselves. They have not been followers but leaders. They have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and have risen in society. For all people want of an equal society, all earning the same amount of money and being given the same amount of education, we are not robots. We come to this world as a unique person with our own talents, not like everyone else. We either take to our education as it stands or we don't. We either prefer cake or pie, and some prefer both. Some people like blondes, others like brunettes.
Face it, straight socialism that has hit England, Sweden, Denmark and Norway and other states have great problems. Swedes pay 55% of their income to taxes to cover all the freebies offered in their country. Entrepreneurs are treated like pariahs in Sweden, so it's not a country if you want to start up a new business, though that has gone up by 25% since laws have eased up a bit. "Ikea founder, Ingvar Kamprad, told Forbes magazine that the Swedish tax bureaucrats would frequently accuse him of using people and "only wanting profits". " The state subsidizes Swedes to live in optimal conditions and to provide little work - and if they are put into labor, it's in a public enterprise run by the government, to help reduce the official share of unemployed people."
Sweden is not a utopia. They have gotten away with horrid civil rights. Luckily, this did not happen in 1870 when my grandmother was born in Lumsheden. This is horrible! 62,000 Swedes were forcibly sterilized by the Swedish government over a 40 year period, until 1974, by government researchers who judged families as being "racially inferior". These sterilizations included both the parents and their children. During this time period, a Swedish Television documentary revealed that Sweden lobotomized at least 500 "undesirables", in some cases without the consent of their families, and that lobotomizations may have numbered up to 4,500 people. These practices predated and surpassed the era of Nazi Germany. This is not saying that Socialism allows this, but how the people are now thinking. Has their religious values gone down the drain with the innovations of socialism? What were their religious values in the first place that have been set aside? This would never go over in Minnesota or Iowa with the Swedish descendants. Maybe that's why the Swedish government has taken in so many refugees from the Middle East today. They feel guilty.
One noticeable socialistic problem has been healthcare in England. People who need surgery quickly have to wait for there is a long line ahead of them.
Scandinavia is made up of small countries. All the people up till about 20 years ago were Swedes, or Danes or Norwegians, probably all related to each other. We'll see how it goes with all the Arabs that have arrived as immigrants since Sweden opened its doors to them. Bernie Sanders is pushing for Sweden's massive welfare state with it's cradle-to-grave public aid, ultra-high taxation, and dishonest economic policies which he considers a success. Are you really ready to get off the highway and go down this dirt road?
This is the first thing I heard from the lips of a friend-member of the Democratic Party. Free education! I can visualize such classes. Here in the USA, a freshman in college will just be a senior of high school. I was a year ahead of myself in school and was the youngest student in college. I didn't take all my classes seriously and almost flunked out of English Comp because I didn't want to walk down a very long path to get to the classroom as I "already knew it all" from grade school!. If you put an investment of your own into school, you'll pay attention. How much will ALL the students gain out of a free education? He's offering free to all students; no special ones like those that earn high grades and deserve a free education. Then again, think of the teachers in the colleges. I taught in a community college and earned very little money. In fact, I earned more in the city's elementary school than in the college. Now they'll need more teachers and more schools. It doesn't end. More money to be spent from our taxes is the result.
Bernie spent a few months on kibbutz Sha'ar HaAmakim in 1963. A kibbutz is a socialistic invention of Russian Jews who came as immigrants to Palestine in the late 1800's early 1900's and lived together in order to protect each other and manage to raise their own food. He must not have had a terrific time living on one, but it was socialism as he found it then, probably as he enjoyed work in the cowshed. It was in November of 63 that John Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Baines Johnson became president, both Democrats. 1963 had Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to the 26th of June, and then Levi Eshkol. Both were with Mapai, the ""Workers' Party of the Land of Israel") which was a left-wing political party in Israel, and was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the modern-day Israeli Labor Party in 1968. Both were socialistic political parties.
Israel's 2 main political parties are still Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu which is a capitalistic ideology, and the Labor Party, led by Isaac Herzog, based on socialistic values and principles. It has been Likud which has offered the most physical protection for Israelis during these times of being attacked so much by the Palestinians-especially the Hamas terrorism. Israel is the 2nd largest state of start-up businesses, as expressed in the book called Start-Up Nation. It has socialism health for those that need something really cheap, and also offers a capitalistic side of healthcare as well. As new immigrants in 1980, my husband and I chose free health care and found out this meant a Russian doctor who didn't speak English and wore a chef's hat on his head. Friends of ours opted for another healthcare program where they had a doctor from the USA. Israel's socialism has evolved but Bernie Sanders' ideas have not.
Is the supermarket "WinCo's" a capitalistic or socialistic venture? It's owned by all the workers of the store. It's a worker-owned grocery chain that pays benefits, pensions, living wages, and has lower prices than Walmart, another huge chain. " Capitalism as an exclusive economic model will fail the people in whole and generally only benefit a few, says reader, Dominicus, no doubt a socialist. While both provide value, the real value at Walmart isn't the average worker, but the consumer who supports slave wages. 19 States now have passed legislation allowing what is referred to as a Public Benefit Corporation. I shop at both places.
Readers need to make a big study of the long term results of socialism in all the countries who have embraced it. The voters most interested in socialism are very young and haven't learned a thing about socialism. Some have stated that we have become a nation of give me, give me. It's not like when Kennedy, also a Democrat, was president in 1961 and he said, "Ask not what can your country do for you, but what can you do for your country." Even he was promoting capitalistic values, not socialism. As one of the rich elite Irish families that made it big time in the USA, I'm afraid today's Socialists would blame him for their woes, too. Instead of using the successful wealthy as heroes to try to emulate, they are now becoming the scapegoats of our economic problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425800/bernie-sanders-socialist-success-sweden
http://www.paoracle.com/SocialismWORKS!/?sw=Sweden
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/capitalism-and-socialism-in-the-israeli-economy/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_volunteerhttp://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2016/02/bernie-sanders-actions-about-israel-and.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_IsraelBook: Letters From Israel-by Nadene Goldfoot, amazon.com for orders-http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread964581/pg4Resource: http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/bernie-sanders-socialist-ideas-pushing/2016/02/08/id/713300/http://www.ushistory.org/documents/ask-not.htmhttp://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/12/chart-who-does-the-u-s-govt-owe-17-trillion-to/Book: Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor and Saul SingerUpdate 3/22/16: from 17 trillion to 19 trillion dollars we owe.
