About a year ago I was talking to an old girlfriend about how people don't see the irony of socialism as a principle of government. Then I said I was libertarian. Her: "I don't understand how you could have ever liked me. You know I'm basically a communist, right?" Me: "uhh...no. I didn't know that." Giving her a look I simply said, "But you work for Apple..." It took her a few months but she finally got back to me about it and thought it was kinda funny. lol, I died.
Is the "that's not real socialism" crowd any different than the "that's not real capitalism" crowd? I've seen plenty of people criticize capitalism & the response is that's not real capitalism that's cronyism.
@@coder_117unfortunately, capitalism is such a loaded word. 😶 Many socialists believe that anyone who owns "capital" (aka the means of production, including the money used to set up a business) is doomed to be greedy and exploitive, even if the "capital" was acquired in an honest manner. I personally prefer using the words "free market" or "voluntary transactions," and point out that other forms of economic systems (be it socialism, fascism, communism, etc) require the legalized violent physical force of centralized power (aka governments) to operate.
All civilizations distribute blessings unequally, because civilization requires a diversity of jobs to function. Not all jobs are equally demanding; thus, all civilizations have a socioeconomic hierarchy as a result. A socioeconomic hierarchy is a universally recognized trait of civilization. Marxist nations have socioeconomic hierarchies that make those in free market economies look relatively flat. No one has found a way to run a civilization that distributes blessing equally, likely never will, and doing so is not necessary or beneficial.
A socioeconomic hierarchy is Not civilized. A civilized society must at minimum value every individual's best interests, never special interests, not the majority, not those who can do more complex or choose to do more demanding tasks.
Blessings need not be distributed equally but rights and opportunity must be in order to have reciprocity, which is the prerequisite for civilization never yet achieved at scale.
I had a relative who lived on a commune for a time. He left because he was tired of working his butt off to keep it running while many of the others refused to do anything but write poetry and pursue intellectual interests. They felt that they were contributing by enlightening themselves and others. He disagreed. From his account the community fell apart when the physical labor force left. The sad part is that to this day he thinks that the key to making it work would have been to force everyone to share the physical work load more equally. All while enjoying a retirement earned by working for 40+ years for a major manufacturer and being wise with his earnings.
Yes, it would have worked just like it worked in China during the cultural revolution and great leap forward, and in the USSR during the many purges of Stalin
"...the key... [is] to force everyone...", and he doesn't see a problem with this?! Who's going to do the forcing? Who controls the enforcers? THAT is why socialism and communism doesn't work. There will ALWAYS be the "haves" and "have nots".
Force. That is the key word in all of this. You have to use force to try to make Socialism work, which is what causes it to fail. Questioner to a young Socialist: What if someone doesn't want to go along with all of this that you're proposing? Young Socialist: We'll have to make them do it. Questioner: Ah... yep, just as I thought.
I had a dear friend who lived in one of those socialist communities you mentioned. He grew up on a family farm, did landscaping, was very mechanically gifted and a basic jack of all trades. He desperately wanted to live in a community of people who supported each other’s needs while living peacefully and happily with each other. He left after six months in extreme disappointment and physical exhaustion. He was constantly doing the tasks other people were assigned because he was more experienced than they, their back hurt, they didn’t like pulling weeds as much as he did, one man frequently used the excuse that he didn’t sleep all night because he was traumatized as someone cooked meat for dinner and he was forced to smell it. Those few who worked became resentful and started hiding food so they’d have enough to eat to keep working. When people who received without working discovered he was taking a larger portion, they accused him of being greedy and stealing from them. He took his dog and left, the community collapsed.
That type of guy is referred to as "Pavel" in which they work tirelessly day and night for the community and party in hopes they would take care of him too, remember the horse is George Orwell's "Animal Farm"? That's also Pavel
In my experience a lot of social people always assume that everyone is a good human like them, and can do things. They underestimate that some people are just parasites feasting on others.
Imagine someone in Russia under Stalin or in China under Mao saying, "But this isn't real socialism - real socialism has never been tried." They would have been dealt with quickly and rather harshly.
Yes Staline was one of the bigger oppressor of socialists and marxists in history, he had persécuté all the historics revolutionnaries, because real socialism goes against his dictatorship like regime. And for Mao else the label of his party there is nothing communist with him , workers have left the communist party when we was rumine it, and the révolution was made without the workers, it is just an alliance between bourgeois and farmers at the benefit of the firsts. Maoism is in fact the bonapartist empire without the democratic revolution before. If workers are exploited by prviligied elites, it is not socialism, it is again socialism.
Ronald Reagan once told a joke: "Two russians were having a chat. One asked the other "have we achieved full communism yet?", the other said "Ooooh, no, things are going to get a LOT worse..." "
@@jean-louispech4921 Stalin killed somewhere between 40M and 60M of his own countrymen, and Mao killed well over 100M. True communism/socialism is MUCH WORSE than that.
When anybody says "But that wasn't real socialism" or "Real socialism has never been tried", what they really mean is "They never put ME in charge of everything"
@@ScienceWatch2000-mh7cc True. In real Free Market Capitalism, the laws regulating the free market should prevent corporations from being able to establish cartels and monopolies to crush the smaller competition. But instead, we have politicians take money from corporate lobbyists to create laws that help corporations crush competition. Any attempt of Capitalism has so far always decended into Corporatism.
Politicians have the Peoples Power. True though... The other issue with free market Capitalism is the establishment of monopolies, the allowance of and perpetuation of entitlement, and the gross laziness of the average person thus enabling Exploitation and Alienation and Abuses of Power. Capitalism is a great idea (despite presumably being coined by French Socialists) but it doesn't take into account the dynamics between people and nuances of what people do with power. I am not content with "Let God Sort Them Out" as an answer. This is one primary reason as to why I never liked Anarchism or Deflective Attitudes...
Socialism is attractive to people who lack the motivation to make money and is seen as a way to spread wealth equally which to them means everyone being equally well taken care of. What they don’t realize is the reality of a society full of people being equally unmotivated to work hard enough to meet the most basic needs of the people will mean that everyone is equally destitute and that society will break down. Of course there is always an exception with socialist supporters, always an excuse.
That is because people that champion socialism are lazy and unmotivated but for some strange reason they think they’re entitled to the hard work and the money of people that work hard and are not lazy and motivated. I am convinced that if people that champion socialism were left to their own vices, they would simply starve to death. Socialism is a complete modern invention, because no other time in human history have the unmotivated in the lazy been able to survive until now. in medieval times they would’ve been conquered or they would’ve starved to death
Remember that when it says to each according to NEED that isn't WANT. The average person doesn't NEED a cell phone, internet access, tv, cable, a car, etc. They can get up early and walk or take public transportation to their no skill job. They can eat boiled potatoes for every meal. They can do their laundry by hand and hang it to dry. The list of needs is a lot lower than the idiot screaming for socialism is willing to accept and if they give you 30 seconds to explain it to them they suddenly no longer think socialism is good and want to continue the current American programs of stealing from the working class to provide for the worthless slave class.
Worth noting: The original Mayflower compact was a collective with communally owned farming land and with foodstuffs distributed on a basis of need regardless of individual production effort. This failed after one season. They had to bum off the neighbors (Native Americans) to avoid starvation.
Worth noting: 72 countries in the world have universal healthcare, and they haven't turned into starving dystopias. You guys look at one extreme, and think the answer is the other extreme. I don't advocate Communism, but I do advocate a country that looks after people and doesn't require us to spend every waking minute trying to survive.
@@kennethmacalpin7655 I lived in one of those countries with national health care. Even as an American citizen I was granted it. Amazing, right? Except it was absolute crap. After returning from that country, both my sister and I had to have operations to fix what their free medicine destroyed. And, no, it was not a third world country. It was the United Kingdom. Remember that social programs in a country does not mean that country operates on a socialist economy. The UK is capitalist. All of your arguments fall into irrelevance when reality kicks in.
@@josephnebeker7976 My point is that "Socialism doesn't work" is used as a Straw Man argument against less-ruthless forms of capitalism. "US" and "USSR" are not the only choices. Take Denmark. I'll say "I want a system like Denmark". Then you'll say "Denmark isn't socialist, it's capitalist". Well I don't care what you call it, that's what I want. By your own admission, you can have social programmes without being socialist. Maybe it's capitalist, that's fine, but it's a different form of capitalism to what America has.
@@kennethmacalpin7655 Then you completely missed the point. Countries with social programs like free national healthcare are almost always not socialist governments or economies. Because of this they are not socialist nations. What do I mean by this? Free healthcare is not free. It is paid for by taxes. The people pay money to the government, and the government puts it in programs they call social programs. Not socialist programs, but SOCIAL PROGRAMS. Think about Social Security in the United States of America. It's not a socialist program. Workers have their money garnished from their paychecks to be put into their social security program. If socialism comes into this at all, it is when government officials steal that money from the coffers of social security which actually belong to us. If a government steals your money, you can be damn sure they're probably socialists. However, when it comes to free healthcaredoctors and other employees are paid regardless how well or poorly they do their job. This is a huge reason the United States of America has not gone to a nationally universal free healthcare system.
I worked for a former College Professor who was a Sociologist. Every semester he gave the very same opening assignment: Create the Monopoly game to where all the money is redistributed, and nobody is allowed to be so rich that they own the vast majority of property. Same result year after year after year...yes, it can easily be done; however, the end result is, "It's boring." You remove the reward of capitalism and basically, you're left with nothing that anyone wants to play. There is no purpose, there is no reward for working harder, there is no mountain to climb, there isn't a means by which to get ahead. And in reality, everyone except the 1% who run the country are equally poor.
Bruh this sounds dumb. Of course the game will be Boring af if thats the case, because the game builds up on this private property. Thats all this game is about. Life is more than owning private Capital
@@noobixx8588Most historians and soft science experts would argue your statement historically and definitively inaccurate. Even religion is strongly rooted in wealth, humanity since civilization started beyond basic agriculture has been about $ or its Era appropriate analog. Everything else simply orbits around that trapped in its gravity.
@@joshbull623During the years of crisis of the COVID pandemic, the top 1% who owned the world made 1,000,000 USD for each dollar made by the bottom 70%. Doesn't that sound awfully like "everyone except the 1% who run the world is equally poor"?
@@DesignFIawthat´s totally normal and it´s called Pareto Principle or 80/20, and also in nature it´s mostly more, like 90/10 or even more. Like 99% of mass in our solar system is the sun. 90% of all river water is in 1-2 biggest rivers. 90% of all wealth is held by 10% of people. That´s how it always has been and always will be. Even if there will rise new socialist governments. It´s every time the same. People are greedy and people are oportunistic. If you have the power to rule 100 milion of people, because you are the one of 1% who rules in socialist country, you will give yourself and your family much more money than to other people. Every one socialist country is much more corrupted that that capitalists. Every one.
@@DesignFIaw I understand your point, but have you ever lived or worked overseas? They answer isn’t socialism. Power corrupts whether capitalist or socialist. You’d be exchanging one corrupt hierarchy with another. The answer is decentralizing power. If you notice, the 1% push for increasing the power of the federal government and international authorities ... which makes bribery and blackmail easier. The Founding Fathers sought to limit federal power and divide it among three branches with checks and balances for a reason. The gradual erosion of those protections by politicians and the 1%, which now the politicians are largely a subset of the 1%, is the problem ... exacerbated by their corruption of academia and the media.
My step mother was raised and served in the USSR. She was in charge of a hospital and an infectious disease specialist. She is brilliant and was a top scientist for years. She had to manage an apartment building to make enough money to live. Her family was located in Siberia and they were issued a motorcycle for their sole family vehicle. If your food rations weren’t enough, which they never were, and you decided to grow a garden to make up the gap, you could only get away with growing a certain small amount before the government would come in and confiscate it. People were regularly “disappeared” and sent off to gulags and everyone just moved on with life like they never existed. The scary thing is, even now, 34 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she is still indoctrinated into believing it was a viable system of governance. Whole wards of her hospital were full of patients left to die because they simply didn’t have medicine. Entire families were vanished to a gulag. Dozens of villages had every scrap of food taken so often they resorted to eating sawdust and eventually their own children. The absolute poverty caused by socialism cannot be overstated.
" Entire families were vanished to a gulag." To remember that your step mother has to be over 100 yo, so, I believe either you didn't understand her or just made it up for the dramatic effect.
@@justjoking5841A fellow Siberian that made it past his/her 90s would be an extremely rare case. I'm not suggesting it's at all impossible but very very unlikely. On the other hand if she told those stories 20 years ago... So, yeah, I might have gone too personal here. But the premise itself is pretty much cartoonish - post-war USSR was not like that. "Food rations" and "eventual eating of own children"... Jesus, it's only one step away from the brown bears with balalaikas. I stand corrected, this is on par with that.
@@anton7354 Not going to be an apologist - the USSR did some horrifying stuff that makes the Suffering of the Natives of the Americas and the Holocaust look Tame. But truly... using the suffering of others to justify creating a psychosomatic victim complex just to get attention... I'd almost want to be offended too.
Exactly the point of why capitalism is best operated at the highest risk possible. Don't regulate people/businesses. "Oh but how do we separate out the snake oil sales men!?" Ok, a law doesn't prevent a snake oil sales men. It just allows the people to call it out and force the government to take action under a set of punishments. You still have a great risk of buying it and hope the government does something. Only, you still have to pay the government to do something. So you're double paying for nothing and, in fact are paying the government to marry the snake oil sales men.... So why even push regulations in the first place??? It only hurts in the end twice as much.
yea, good thing under capitalism you aren't forced to work or starve to death... oh wait. If you look up how much food and housing we need for everyone, then you will see that we have more than enough, yet people still starve and die from exposure. Since the beginning of time we have been able to produce more than enough for ourselves, yet even when industrialization is at its highest we still pretend we are not a post scarcity society. What we need to do is to work for the sake of people rather than for the benefit of the top 10%. It doesn't matter if that means democratically electing business leaders, banning or putting harsh taxes on generational wealth, or whatever, as long as wealth is getting evened out. We should be more focused on stabilizing society, eliminating extreme poverty, decreasing the suicide rate, wasteful consumerism, and less so on putting an extra camera on the iphone 16.
@@unsilencedderp9411 This is nonsense. Capitalism doesn't force you to do anything, that's the whole point. You can choose to work or starve to death, as it is and will always be with every system. The only difference is that with Capitalism you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor, while in Socialism they'll automatically steal it from you to feed the leeches of society. The only reason we have "more than enough" is because those who produce goods are motivated by the rewards made possible by Capitalism. Remove the motivation and watch how quickly your country will starve. "What we need to do is to work for the sake of people rather than for the benefit of the top 10%." - How do you figure? We're already paying taxes, which is supposed to go to helping out those in need, yet, it actually goes to the top 0.1%. More Socialism would clearly just make it even worse, since then those in power wouldn't even need to pretend to help the people. "We should be more focused on stabilizing society, eliminating extreme poverty" - I wonder, how much of your disposable income do you give to "extremely poor" people? Isn't it part of "wasteful consumerism" that you own a device on which you can write this? Wouldn't it be better - according to your logic - to sell everything you own and give the money to the poor? Or do you just want others to hand over their wealth, like every Socialist?
@@unsilencedderp9411 You will never get rid of or motivate the lazy and unwilling to participate in free market capitalism and do for themselves. Modern society in the US at least, has created an entitlement mentality and everything is a right, now. Right to this, right to that but, without having to contribute anything to earn it. You didn't see this so much in the past because, there was no safety net or bleeding hearts that would prop up people who wouldn't work. The ones who had that mentality, didn't last long or resorted to a short lived crime life.
@@unsilencedderp9411poverty will always exist. It’s an undeniable fact. It will always be the less fortunate. People work hard and get payed for it but there is never enough room for everybody
I had a teacher that used to tell me about the how's and whys of his resistance to, and eventual escape from, the Communist takeover of Hungary. True accounts of someone who lived through it. No whiny pipsqueak defending socialism could ever hold the same gravitas as an old, and respected, teacher reminiscing about watching soldiers seize control of his people.
Certainly the case. But what about someone on the streets about to die of hunger, a disease he can't afford to cure, simple exposure. Your teacher has first hand experience of the failure of socialist ideology. So too does the homeless.
Do one on "why nuclear is the only viable energy source" cleanest, safest, most reliable source of energy. Or you can do one on "why over regulation is not protecting us but preventing progress".
What about cheapest? How are we gonna expect the whole continent of Africa and a lot of Asia and South America to ever implanent it? Thats around half of earth that is too poor for nuclear energy.
@@MrMinigunman101 no, i mean it is quite literally impossible for a 3rd world country to implement nuclear energy without significant outside investment, which unless you're Egypt or control a major trade center of the world is impossible to get. The profit incentive is already there but how can you profit off of something you can't even afford?
The real socialism had never been and will never be tried because it is impossible to do so. You can't have a stateless society as humans progress, you need structure, you need social classes, you need laws and orders, a society without state is anarchy. The ideology is kinda doomed from the start.
There were very successful socialist societies. This was before widespread use of currency and centralized distribution was preferable to everyone bartering.
@@johndiss Sure, early agricultural societies used this method and success, but this was because the simplificty and the small scale of their society, in a tribe where most jobs were farming, hunting, simple tools making, arts and crafts making, it isn't hard to join in and contribute to the small society and distribute resources equally, but fast forward to modern day with higher living standards, where we have jobs like nuclear physicists, bankers, areospace engineers, and population of millions and millions and billions of people, we can't just go around giving a serving of free food to everyhome. Real communism is not achievable unless there is a glitch in time to spawn infinite delicious food, free large warm homes with swimming pool and endless other convenniences, the best we can do is implemented socialist-oriented policies into our society to curb certain spike of inequality, like workplace union laws, universal education and healthcare in certain countries with the right conditions.
@@luonggiaphat7946 Keep in mind that I'm not a proponent of socialism or communism, just making conversation. We know that kingdoms were distributing goods because of the invention of writing, which allowed them to organize and record exchanges. Leading a large (or a complicated) army is a matter organization - Sun Tzu. I think that with our technology or technology of the foreseeable future, we could organize a very efficient centralized distribution system. Hell, I think Amazon could do it given a few more data centers. Technically, I think it's absolutely feasible. The only fatal error I find it that people will act from self interest even if they want for nothing. The Hebrews were given manna from heaven to sustain them and they were commanded by their God to not collect it and save it. Still, their greed motivated them to defy God and profit from the free abundance. Just an illustrative story if you're not into that tradition. We would need to suppress that greed if we are to create a socialist utopia. It may be possible to negate the effects of greed at every turn, but people are seriously innovative.
You’re gonna have to tell me the disaster. Socialism took Russia, which was basically a pre-industrial state, and in the space of 30 years made it an industrial world superpower. Socialism took China from a preindustrial state, and in 40 years turned it into a world power. Socialism rebuilt Eastern Europe and central Europe from an ash heap to a mighty economic union in the space of 15 years. Socialism ended world hunger. Socialism brought medicine to where it had never been. Socialism took man into space. It’s said Socialism killed 100 million people over a century. Not only is this untrue, but it is demonstrable that 25 million people die per year under the capitalist system simply because it’s not profitable to take care of them. That’s from famine, deaths from unclean water, deaths from pollution, deaths from treatable disease. Capitalism i reality takes only four years to reach the myth of what Socialism never did in a century. Amazing what mankind can accomplish when we are focused on the good of society, rather than vainly enriching ourselves.
@@MortabluntYou seriously think Socialism "ended world hunger?" Mao is quoted as saying "When there is not enough food to eat people starve. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half may eat their fill." An estimated 45 million people died in "Mao's famine." So I guess I'm not fond of socialism's cure for world hunger. But then your answer to such statistics is it isn't true, which is convenient as it won't damage your socialist delusions.
My issue is that the successful capitalists are financing socalist politicians in both political parties, to the detriment of their newer capitalist competition.
The main problem with a (socialist) society whose govt centrally controls all the means of production and aims to distribute everything produced equaly is that (assuming that it could be done) you basically remove the biggest driving force of every economy, which is the human desire to improve each day by reaping the fruits of his labor using his own work, initiative, risk and ingenuity. If you're suddenly become a worker that is rewarded an x amount payment either in cash or goods, regardless of what you produce or how much you work, several things will happen, 3 of which: 1) You'll start wanting to work as less as possible in order to get your benefits without punishment 2) You'll start comparing yourself to others and ask why do you have to work more than other people if they're making the same as you and getting by managing to work less. 3) there is also the problem of "quality of work". How much does an engineer deserve to earn compared to a farmer? Why? How to keep people satisfied with that? (spoiler alert: you cant) The economy then enters a viscious downward spiral cycle where everyone will start to work less and less because the benefits are the same, and the result is that the GDP of the economy falls, in other words, the size of the cake to be sliced and distributed shrinks more and more, meaning that there is less and less for everybody. This will require an even more tyrannical government to monitor people and enforce they are doing their share of work, which is not only impractical but oppressive and extremely unmotivating for workers, which only adds further inneficiency to the system. You can think of any economy as the sum of all relations of production and exchange of value as a result of people's desire to improve himself day by day. Once the government renders that desire, the whole foundation of the economy falls. There are many other problems like for example price setting, a recurrent problem in the former USSR, but I will not get into that as I already typed in too much.
Not to mention that enacting and enforcing socialism does not make capitalism and hoarding of wealth go away. Government corruption is endemic in communist countries across every aspect of the society, so much everyone tries to become a member of government because the rules quite simply don't apply to them. Black markets dealing in foreign currency and luxury goods are rife because there is a demand for value and the valuable. These countries also suffer brain drain escaping to other countries, because hard workers and well educated people are discriminated against by the general populace.
So I am a wage worker. I work for an x amount of payment regardless or what I do or how much I produce, because my capitalist boss is interested in paying me less while making me do more work. Then several things happen: 1) I start wanting to work as less as possible by to get my wage without being fired 2) I start comparing myself to my boss and ask why they have so much more money, because there is no way they are working thousands of times more 3) there is also the problem of the quality of work. How much does a capitalists to earn if most of the work are done by my fellow wage workers? The economy then enters a vicious cycle where everyone starts to work less and less because the benefits are the same, and the result is that profits fall, in other words, the size of the cake to be sliced and distributed shrinks more and more, meaning that there is less for the investors or for everyone else. This will require an even more tyrannical corporate policies to monitor workers and force them to take more work, which not only eats the already reducing income but is oppressive and extremely unmotivating for workers, which only adds further inefficiency to the system.
@@SMT-ks8yp The whole point of Capitalism is that if you don't like your job, you can always get another one, or even start your own business, which is where the real money is anyway. You don't get to slack off if you want to make it big, though.
@@rap1df1r3 and if you don't like your government, you can always emigrate or even found your own country. Oh wait, you can't or it won't make things better. And to start a business. where will you find the money with your wage falling and prices rising? Where will you get the knowledge to not fail while being all alone if your boss wants more and more of your time? Aren't there a survivor bias in "start your business"?
I have lived in a Socialist country, Soviet Union and participated in the underground movement that destroyed it. Everyone was equally poor just like slaves on the plantations are poor. Equality: check. O wait, actually no, that's not true. There was a tiny tiny ruling elite, the upper echelon of the Communist Party, about few thousand strong, that controlled every last resource, every factory, all the land, police, armed forces and entire army of undercover KGB agents. Those people were the true elites if there ever was one. Not the 1% like in US, but 0.0001%. Much better! They had luxurious villas (we called them "safe houses", idk how they called them themselves) that officially didn't exist. I've seen one of those myself, it was hidden behind the trees, surrounded with high fences with the barbed wire on top, patrolled by armed guards with attack dogs 24/7 and if you waited long enough you could eventually see a black limousine going in or leaving. Soviet Union imported the best French vines during all of it's existence, and none of it ever reached the shops open for the general population. Are you kidding, you want to give the good stuff to the slaves? It all ended up in those villas. In the normal shops you were lucky if you could buy butter or watery sausages. On a normal day you couldn't, not for any money... which you didn't have anyway. Goes without saying nobody had any means of production just like Marx prescribed. To even think about that was a serious crime. What an ordinary citizen had was a tiny bug infested flat, usually kitchen and one small room, or kitchen and two small rooms if you had a bigger family. You couldn't own your flat though, it was a property of the state, just like the land it was built upon, and you were renting it from the state. Just like slaves on the American south had those tiny huts which were provided for them by the slaveowner. You had to work in Soviet Union, that was the law. Like a good little slave you had to work your whole life, you could not leave Soviet Union, which was one big slave plantation, until you died in there. If you didn't like this reality and tried to rebel against it, you'll end up in the prison camps in Siberia called _Gulag_ -- where they forced you to work on the mines, anyway. Yes there has been true Socialism, even long before Marx. All that Marx did was giving it a new name and ideological justification. Under the hood, nothing changed. You can see today how popular Socialism is among the American blacks. All the people who created BLM were hardcore Marxists. Shows you how desperately those people hate their freedom. They want to go back to slavery, where you are taken care of by the slaveowner, life is simple, no need to make hard decisions, everything's already decided for you. Ofc people want it... just give it a different name and some kind of ideological justification and you'll have millions signing up. It's hard to be free, that's the problem with mankind. Most of us prefer the safe life of a slave. Nobody wants to admit that thou, makes us look bad...
I gave you a like, but you are talking about corrupt officials, not a system of government. You can call it hop scotch if you like, but starving the population and eating gourmet is not a rule of socialism.
@@5400bowen Implementing socialism requires extreme government power and the use of violence to forcibly seize property. This alone makes it terrible but it gets worse! It also destroys economic motivation by punishing those who are most capable and rewarding the laziest individuals (generating more lazy individuals).
@@Gorpmeat what if socialism was the original system from the very beginning? No violent transition. Socialism is the natural state of affairs. Social creatures form societies to benefit the members. And socialism does not mandate disallowing private property. It merely believes society is more important than individuals. If the good of society requires private ownership and inequality, then socialism would adopt them. Socialism merely believes the good of society is more important than the good of individuals. How that good is achieved is not dictated by yours or anyone else’s opinion, and can be attained through trial and error. You assign peoples assumptions to political philosophies instead of defining them as concepts growing from the meaning of the words.
There's a book out there, 'California's Utopian Colonies' written by Robert Hine, that chronicles attempts at idealistic communities in the Golden State. All of them were variations of socialism, all of them failed. The ones that lasted the longest, sometimes decades, were religious, based around a strong charismatic leader that inspired the core members. They invariably collapsed when the leader died or was exposed as a fraud.
I remember Poland in the 80's Miserable place. People were miserable, the shops were empty, black market was rife. Today, beautiful country. Lots of development, clean, wealthy, a very desirable place to live. Socialists hate these examples, especially former socialists hell holes that embrace Western Freemarket capitalism. It's direct evidence against their crappy arguments and ideology.
Ludwig Von Mises demonstrated the other fatal flaw of socialism: Its inability to rationally calculate, ie without a market to set prices, socialism cannot know WHAT to produce and how MUCH of it to produce. That is why you have mass deprivation under socialism. Here is a recording of a lecture I attended in 1981: ua-cam.com/video/brUQpD18BKg/v-deo.html
@@havenbastion Under socialism, the State doesn't "distribute power". It keeps power to itself. It DICTATES prices. "freely set prices under socialism" is an oxymoron.
My brother had “Human Action” by von Mises when I was 7 in 1961. I read a bit of it later, but it was too vast for my young mind. But this “they cannot set value, therefore they cannot calculate the scale of production for goods and services without (ALWAYS phony) capitalists milking the populace for as much as they can” is the biggest fantasy I’ve ever heard. That’s like “ mom can’t figure out how much food to cook because a capitalist system hasn’t done the math for her”?!? What an obviously insane thought. “Uh, we have ten thousand citizens, how many pairs of shoes do we need?”. Really insane idea..
@@5400bowen "That’s like “ mom can’t figure out how much food to cook because a capitalist system hasn’t done the math for her”?!? What an obviously insane thought. “Uh, we have ten thousand citizens, how many pairs of shoes do we need?”. Really insane idea." That analogy makes no sense at all. An economy isn't "mom deciding what to cook". It's mom or whomever trying to decide WHAT food item to make, how MUCH of it to make, and what PRICE to charge. Socialism can't do that, because there's no way to calculate cost, no supply and demand. Neither can socialism determine what kind of shoes to make, how many shoes to produce or at what price to sell them.
Socialists clearly don't think through basic economics. The desire for socialism seems to stem from a desire of individuals to receive resources they don't own that they view as plentiful. I hear talk of 'universal income' without any consideration for the basics of production/consumption of products and services (i.e. generating and receiving 'value'). That paradigm also directly implies that forced labor *must* happen.
Honestly, I'd support an opt-in universal income program, as long as the recipients of it are not allowed to vote. And vice-versa. If you're not willing to engage properly with society to make a living, you should not get a say in how society is run.
@@tau-5794 Universal income programs take over all other areas of social services, so when you lose your job, you receive UBI. If you retire, you receive UBI. Disability - UBI. This reduces costs for all of these government departments. Don't you think all of these people have a right to vote? Even people who choose not to work are still participating in society. They're still consumers. Some may volunteer or create in other ways like music or art. Taking away rights never leads to anything positive.
This was the simplest, and best, refutation of the argument that "real socialism has never been tried" that I have ever seen. Just excellent. The inclusion of utopian communes was the real linchpin of this video.
The Soviet Union called themselves "CCCP", The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" for a reason. They KNEW Communism was the extreme version of Socialism. In the early Americas, the Virginia Compact was inacted. It pooled the labor of all, and each member of the Compact would share in the bounty. That first year, the people taking part nearly starved to death because the people forgot to work with their fellows, and ended up rescued by the nearby Indian Tribe. The compact was abolished, private property was inacted by the Group, and.individual effort went towards families and their posterity. The end of the second year, the members of the original compact did so well, they invited the Indian Tribe to a meal. The beginnings of what we call today "Thanksgiving". Socialism has never worked, and never will, because some will never agree to share... You know, like Klaus Schwab.
I think women are the worst with sharing. They HATE sharing their bodies with ugly and short men. And that also impacts why communism or true socialism would never happen
What your average socialist means when they say "Real socialism hasn't been tried!" What they mean is that socialism with them in charge hasn't been tried.
What he is trying to say is that they think that they could have done a better job or they just "didn't understand how it should be done" and so they think that they are so much smarter and could have made the so called "Utopia a reality" when in reality they just can't admit that it does not work no matter who tries it.
@@ChannelFish279 ^ This mostly, plus a bit of the fact a lot of them know it won't work but still want to kick it off anyway out of envy or a lust for power.
2:22 Misleading information- there are still many good examples of successful and stable anarchist/libsoc communities: the autonomous Twin Oaks community has been going 1967, the NY Ganienkeh community established in the 70s that was literally TAKEN BACK by the Mohawks of that region. And that isn’t even mentioning the amount of autonomous communities around the world (e.g. the Zapatistas in Mexico established in ‘94 with a few hundred thousand, Rojava in Syria established 2013 with MILLIONS) 2:38 Well of course the owning class will be cracked down upon, they’ve been stealing wealth and hoarding property from the beginning! Socialists, whether statist or anarchist, believe in the prosperity and liberty of the many over the prosperity of the rich and suffering of the working class. Whether this does actually turn out well is up to whether or not the wills of the people, the ones supposed to be controlling the economy, are actually represented (but hey hey anarchists do believe in bottom up systems where all power actually belongs to the people rather than the “representatives”)
There is a very important part Marx left out of his original statement. Here is a much clearer version: _THE STATE WILL TAKE_ From each according to their ability, _THE STATE WILL GIVE_ To each according to their need. Much clearer.
@@rap1df1r3 One man kills another. It's a cold case and you have no money. How do you arrest the man and put him on trial with no cops, and without being called a murderer yourself?
@@rap1df1r3 There is more then one way to lose money, taxes are only one of them. A milita could work, but would lack training and direction without leadership. Here's a biger problem, what if the milita becomes a mob? then what? P.S. I just wanted to point out that I am not a Fascist, Communist/Marxist, National Socialist, Anarchist, or Socialist. I am a Christian first and foremost, and that's why I don't think man can be trusted.
@@rap1df1r3 And then what? What good would do you a private investigator if there is no jury to sentence the murderer? After all, the judicial body is part of the goverment.
I appreciate your insights to this topic. It really helps me in debates with social democrats and communists outright. Could you possibly make a short expanding on why the communes failed so horribly? I fully expect they failed because people left but in debates if I just say they failed because people left it would be a weak argument
At some point the population gets too large for all to participate at the council meetings. After that point it is no longer a social society with all participating in the planning. At that point you have chiefs and councils, They decide who gets what and when.
The settlement that gave us thankgiving tried it. The plan was that everyone would contribute to the community, and that everyone would get an equal share of the resources that were produced. It did not matter what you provided. So, there were a lot of families that had not produced enough for thier own survival, but they were provided an equal share out of the communities resources. It became obvious that they were going to starve long before spring came. So they asked the natives for help. The natives had some extra, but that was intended in case the winter was long. But the gave it anyways. They settlers revised their rules, everyone was to be responsible for producing their own resources. The following harvest, they had an excess of food, and decided to thank those that had risked survival do that the settlers could survive. So one of the lessons of thanksgiving is that socialism doesn't care if you survive, as long as you die with everyone else. At least you'll die equal.
By siezing the means of production and redistributing it, you are creating a government that has to manually control for every resource and service needed for society (at the minimum), this is an issue for one main reason. Economies are incredibly intricate ecosystems that often fluctuate based on a myriad of factors. Something seemingly as simple as a pencil has to have multiple proceeses and resources to make it mass produced. Now expand that to everything, and you see why it might be an issue- hell even the epitome of hubris to assume any bureaucracy, however intelligent, could ever be capable of effectively commanding a national economy.
Humans are not built for altruism...they are built to achieve and work together for a common good, that is to say when people choose to work together, everybody gets "something" out of the work product. If one person wants to give away what they earned....fine. But don't try to force others to give away what they gained.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was so seductive that it helped inspire communists for over a century, and still appeals to those whose needs exceed their abilities.
About a year or two ago, my parents made friends with an old couple who had escaped the Castro regime in Cuba at a church they visited. Both of them had gone into the US military after they became citizens here, and were proud patriotic veterans by the time of the meeting. The Cuban woman told my parents, in roughly these words, “I just don’t understand how young people in this nation are so brainwashed. Whenever they say ‘it wasn’t real Socialism,’ my response is always ‘I and my husband have lived in it, and let me tell you, yes it was and always is.’ The young people of Cuba back then are a mirror of you young Socialists in America today. And you will always get the same result.” Bottom line my family took from the mouth of experienced wisdom: Socialism will always create totalitarianism and poverty. There is no right way to do it. It’s all wrong all the time.
@@novinceinhosic3531Hell-care is probably a good example. It's the same where I live, actually. Extremely long wait-lists for many important examinations and surgeries, low quality service (if you survive long enough to get the help you need), old and understaffed clinics and hospitals, underpaid and burned out doctors and nurses, scarcity of medicine and all supplies in general, etc. It's a perfect example of what a Socialist system has to offer.
I actually got around to reading Marx one day, and I was surprised to see that not much of what he actually thought was an actionable plan for political change. He actually said that given the conditions of the time, the rule had to be "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work," and that they actually should only be paid if they work because of the problem of scarcity. The more popular motto was apparently intended for a post-scarcity society where human labor isn't needed to produce an abundance of goods... but it sounded nice and became the rallying cry of leftists everywhere, who tried to promise people something that even Marx didn't think was realistic in the present day when he wrote. If they actually understood Marx, they would have understood that capitalism was mostly a result of the Industrial Revolution and was an improvement over feudalism. And that the next phase will only be possible with another revolution that makes human labor unnecessary. As long as people have to work to produce goods, capitalism will be needed. But if, say, humans become obsolete due to AI, what else can we really do? Let all the tech companies who invented it get richer and richer while everyone else lives on subsidies or starves to death because their labor isn't needed anymore? That would be the point at which we'd just have to reconsider our whole economic system... when it's no longer possible for people to add value to society through their own labor and get paid because there is nothing left the average person can do. I don't think communism is achievable with 20th or 19th century technology where scarcity and human labor are still big issues. But I also am not sure how we can continue capitalism in a society where goods are not scarce and the average human is incapable of contributing anything because AI and robots are doing all the work. I think if an arrangement like communism ever comes about, it will come about more naturally, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, mostly because the technology is ready, and not because someone tried to force progress through the state. Sometimes I think the old feudalists who lost power back then took "communism" as inspiration to rebrand themselves for a new era, rehash all their old talking points against capitalism from a pro-worker lens, and then tried to recreate a more modern feudalism with rhetoric more appealing to a new age and a bit more idealism. The timeline would make sense... there would have still been a lot of people who remembered the pre-Industrial ways and thought capitalism and industrialization were causing society to lose something, and the new communism/socialism might have seemed like the answer to getting it back.
All of the heretofore "socialist/communist" countries in name have been, in fact, totalitarian states. Both China and Vietnam have (thus far) succeeded because the governments have loosened controls in the pursuit of self-preservation (prodded on a bit by the collapse of the Combloc). Cuba and the Hermit Kingdom-embracing the "traditional" totalitarian grasp have (the former, with the assistance of the continued US anti-Cuba policies) continue to fail. The hybrid model of Nordic social-democracy works exceedingly well. They surpass the US on numerous quality of life indices. With proper structures in place, societies thrive and all of the people benefit. When the system is driven by greed for wealth and power, society will fracture and eventually collapse. This holds true for the simplest of communes to the pinnacle of capitalist nations.
The common marxist plebs think "real socialism" is when they get everything for free for all of their lives, so when that doesn't happen, they say it "wasn't real".
Funny story, I don't have cable but I recently was gifted a DVD of "The Handmaid's Tale" as a Christmas present. Yes, I opened it early and watched some of it because I don't have that many hours to waste in a day. One thing I did notice when this old video popped up for some reason on my youtube was a stark similarity. At first I was confused but it made complete sense that the link is complete and total with the two following phrases" 1. From each according to their ability and to each according to their needs. 2. The abolition of the private ownership of the means of production. In short, "The Handmaid's Tale" is literally the embodiment of a socialist utopia.
You have never read or seen "The Handmaids Tale". It is totally about a society with massive wealth and social inequality from late stage capitalism falling into Fascism with a side order of religious nationalism and class bigotry. You are describing 1984 which is a dystopia of totalitarian communism where everything is owned by the state distributed in meager portions to the workers while a tiny elite live in isolated luxury.
I would have liked to see you delve more on exactly why the US communes failed, and if any succeeded for any length of time. Let's steelman the argument. What does the *most successful* socialist experiment look like, and what can we learn from that? Because, I imagine it might be possible to have 30 like-minded people in a close-knit community all helping each other. But the moment the commune is big enough to not know, *and explicitly trust,* your neighbors, is the point where force would have to come in.
Pretty obvious if you look at how things are organized in a socialist community. There are some that pull their weight by doing physical work, while others think they can "contribute" to society by writing poems or painting. Since everyone gets equal treatment, those that do actual work will eventually realize how bad of a deal this is for them and leave, which then quickly leads to the system's collapse.
The communes that lasted the longest were based around religious cults some of which had 100s of members. The story of Jim Jones shows how that all ended. Don't drink the kool-aid.
I love how Americans remember how awful Stalin and his communism but not how many kids died during industrial revolution as there was no regulation on how much labourers can be exploited And that's part of the reason communism became popular Yes communism is bound to turn into Dictatorship but as for now Partially socialist countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden where you don't have to sell one kidney to save another in the name of healthcare is much much better than US their education system is good, kids don't usually turn into dickheads because they know healthcare and education is covered all they have to do is focus on their goals And mark my words when human labour especially on white collar jobs becomes less and less significant you'd see what true capitalism looks like.
You need to read REAL history. Children worked for thousands of years, long before the Industrial Revolution. Children did farm work from the age of about five-years-old. The older they grew the harder they worked. It was common for twelve-year-olds to plow the fields and use a sickle, causing countless accidents and deaths. The Industrial Revolution is what finally permitted people to leave the farm and move to cities where jobs were more plentiful. Children continued to work for a while, but as productivity grew with new technology income grew which allowed more families to send children to school rather than requiring them to work. Communism became more popular because average workers felt envious of those who harnessed the new technology and prospered because of it. Their envy and jealousy was fueled by the greed of the elite union bosses, media moguls and politicians who learned how to channel that hatred to grow their own power.
We are currently in a wage based economy. People use wages to buy goods and services. But, over the course of this century more and more jobs will be done by robotics and AI till only about 10% of the people actually have a job. Obviously a wage based economy won't work anymore. Socialism may be necessitated by the failure of the current model with the dreaded guaranteed income becoming the norm.
Socialism - awful system that destroys economic motivation and requires extreme violence to implement. Unless you are suggesting that it is a great system for a species of robots with no free will whatsoever, then sure. As long as free will exists socialism is awful and destructive.
Its been tried, you do realise that the KIBBUTZ system was the most beautiful version of it.... borne out of tragedy. Alas, it took two generations for it to fail. Strange how its NEVER used as an example.
Because it relied on faith and strict religious observances as a foundation. Not so with faithless socialism that relies on fear and compliance without faith.
@@handimanjay6642 you're very wrong. I have visited and have family living there and that is pure nonsense... I know three generations who lived there and they're not one bit religious and they welcomed many non Jewish to work there for years and years. So you haven't a true picture only just what the academics have pushed to distract from the reality.
I have relations of 3 generations of adults and now a new generation as young children. I've been to a wedding there... eaten with in the communal canteen. They have welcomed travellers from all around the world to work and experience the way they life. Religious observance was very much non existant@@handimanjay6642
So you have absolutely NO CLUE. It was very much kommie living - children were even taken away from the parents and raised in huge halls by carers. Parents saw them one hour a day as they were the Communities' children@@handimanjay6642
that's where the saying "it takes a village to raise a child comes from" you can see echoes of this today when they yell - the children of America.... they are the children of the parents.@@handimanjay6642
The author of this video failed to include many things, such as: 1. Karl Max, He was the son of millionaires, after spending his inheritance on alcohol and women, he married a rich widow where he again spent her fortune, but before that he impregnated one of his maids. It was at that moment when he had nothing that he began his political role of asking the government to provide everything to its citizens, but when he had money he never helped anyone. 2. Nor was it mentioned how Karl Max wrote a manifesto in which he said that all loyalty of the individual should be to the government and attacked the structures of the family and churches. In addition to saying that the government should have the power to eliminate inferior and undesirable races from its territory. These ideas caught the attention of a young Adolf Hitler who used them to create his own political party called: Socialist Party of German Workers, also known as NAZIS. 3. He also said the final goal of socialism is communism, taking into account that many aspires to a system that murdered more than 120 million people, 70 million more if you count the dead of WWII since Nazism is a form of socialism to create their ideal society is somewhat worrying. 4. It is also worrying that young people do not realize that the only way to apply the ideas of that idiot Karl Max is by taking away all their rights and leaving them at the mercy of the government. There are socialist countries where they send you to prison for 7 years in prison for displaying a poster that criticizes the government. 5. Nor is it mentioned how socialist/communist leaders live in palaces like emperors while their people starve.
The fact that “private ownership” is one of the key aspects taken away in communism, that just makes me worried. Why should I share my business with someone when I have no objection towards it?
From each according to their abilities means someone else will test and determine what you MUST do. To each according to their needs means someone else will tell you what you need. Historically there's a select few that tell you what to do and need everything to compensate them for their exhausting work deciding for everyone else.
So the government must control the means of production. What is the ultimate means of production? The individual person is the ultimate means of production.
In some forms of socialism, sure. In others, the ownership is shared between the workers of such and such company. No private ownership don't necessarily to state ownership. For example, this is actually quite common in agriculture in some countries. Would this work applied to every company of large country? Certainly not in a short time scale at least...
That's because the problem is not the ideologies, but the existence of a government. If you grant power over a whole country to a select few, they are almost guaranteed to take as much as they can from them, while giving back as little as possible.
@@rap1df1r3 For the same reason you just pointed out we need something to keep the strong from becoming warlords, usually we pick governments because other alternatives are worse.
@@ZackeTheBrute All places with a weak gov are way better for those who are smart and strive for greatness. A strong gov is only good for those that are lazy and enjoy being slaves. In fact, the only way you're guaranteed to be extorted, harassed and oppressed is by having a strong gov. Also, all of the significant wars were started by govs, not warlords.
Great channel, Nick. Instead of creating an egalitarian society, socialism invariably ends up benefiting only the Ruling Class, with the rest of us their bondservants in serfdom. The idealists and utopians presume (or at least say) that the noble attributes of humankind will prevail to make the perfect society -- except that they forget the fact that human nature is inherently flawed, and left to itself will always seek its own gain.
What typically happens is never the initial aim of any version of socialism. It's failure isn't that it's a corrupt idea, as all the idiot conservatives say, but that it's easily corruptible. To work at scale, socialism must be paired with a system that prevents capture and ensures sustainable reciprocity.
You could argue we haven't tried real capitalism as well. Somehow the government gets involved in the private market every time. So really it's human nature that prevents utopia.
The Government are also the owners of the market so it's basically "real" Capitalism as well. Real Socialism have been tried and it did work. It's just too complex to explain Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology of Socialism that it gets you bored and leads you to despise it as you are rather not into its ideas. But if you want some evidences on why it will work. I mentioned that it had tried before. 1917 USSR to 1956. From a very backward semi feudal state with extreme Famine and conflicts to a United and advance country in just 23 years which Capitalist like US despite starting almost 200 years earlier, gets overtaken by USSR and also the US Economic Depression In 1930s.
As an average capitalism enjoyer, I also realized that every time capitalism has problems, capitalists also claim, "That wasn't _real_ capitalism. That was 'corporatism' or 'fascism' or 'capitalism that was crippled by a socialist welfare state'.". I'm not saying that any of those accusations are necessarily invalid, I'm just saying beware the "no true Scotsman" fallacy or false accusations of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy on either side.
Sure, fallacies are fallacies no matter who committed them. The problem begins with the word "capitalism". Its not at all an "ism" and the word itself is a politically invented term to criticize the free market, by socialists. The second problem is that people then adopted the term in a non-pejorative way, so at any given moment people aren't even talking about the same thing. What is "capitalism" to those for it, is not what "capitalism" is for those who are against it. Its basically the free market. The ability for me to engage in voluntary trade with you without restraint or taxation by a third party...The trade is between you and me, nobody else.
The gov’t tried this in the 1930’s & it prolonged the Great Depression. We would have lost WWII had the Roosevelt administration not changed its policies towards capitalist markets. Hitler hoped we would keep the authoritarian socialist & non aggressive views of the Roosevelt admin toward our markets...
Too many of FDR interferences into the economy are still present today, and are still failing to achieve intended results. Wage control policies created mass unemployment and drove up the cost of most everything. The new deal and ccc camps created spending deficits that are still happening today. All in all FDR was a complete failure. His road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly" is a great reference for exactly what you are mentioning. I also highly recommend "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes! Thank you for watching!
One strange modern creation as a consequence of feminism in western society is plenty of career women in high positions of power in government who have no children. Their desire to "mother" however has not gone away, instead channelled into a desire to "protect" something else, mainly the poor and immigrant culture who do not work, with endless socialist handouts. This has been pushed into more extremes in recent years to unsustainable levels, however arguing against it results in being labelled as a classist, bigot or racist, all illogical but effective methods of sending your public persona straight to gulag.
Simply because a real socialism unachievable under global capitalism economy. For socialism to work you need that whole world become socialism. Because what capitalism do is offering a high valued people high value life in expense of low valued people's life. I never heard, that the people with poor skills will migrate to a capitalist countries and succeed.
No. You missed the point. Real socialism has been tried. Those attempts that become tyrannical rule are legitimate. The only way socialism works is if everyone obeys the rules created. Only way you can make people follow the rules is to use force. Once you go down the road of using force it sets the course and evolves into tyranny. Every time. You will never see the envisioned goal of socialism because it cannot be achieved with human beings it can only be achieved by robots. It never makes it past the reshaping of the economy and industry. It never makes it past establishing the new order. Because in the process of trying to do that the same conclusion is made by those in charge. It's always force must be used.
In socialism the State becomes the Corporation. In capitalism the Corporation becomes the State. What we really want is best described as a Free Market Economy, where every man is allowed to extract the goods of the earth or his intellect and prosper thereby. But if one man or a group of men end up owning everything, then the majority of men end up owning nothing. I think the real question to answer here is how much can one man own before he infringes upon the rights of his fellow men to also own and prosper?
thats why we have monopoly laws. to prevent the unfair control of the market by a small group of elites. how ever we dont use those laws anymore because......well corruption
@@nickvanachthoven7252not really, if the government never has the power it does today to regulate the corporation wouldn’t be the government because want is the profit? Government is always corrupt so why give it the tools to use that corruption?
@@VeryProPlayerYesSir1122 Yes. There is a quote about serfdom in this video. I bring this up because in another video by TIK he points out how people try to "turn back the clock", (or in other words) make the world a kingdom where they are the king and everyone else is a slave.
According to “them” we will “own nothing and be happy” by the end of this decade. We’ll just rent everything we need, including clothes, and have the items delivered to us. If we’re not allowed to own personal property, and we’re forced to rent things we need, SOMEONE HAS RIGHTS TO OWN PERSONAL PROPERTY, because they will be who WE rent things from. So, who is the “they” who WILL have rights to property ownership? Well, it’s the same ones trying to sell US the idea that not owning personal property, and renting everything we need instead, will make us all very happy. Now, I ask you this, if not owning personal property is such a joyous experience, why don’t THEY want to join in on all this happiness? I’d say it’s because the only ones who benefit from such a scheme, and the only ones who will be happy with such a way of life, are those who own the property, and are making a boatload of money off of renting it to the saps who believed their scam. THEY can go somewhere with their corrupt schemes too, because only a dolt would submit themselves to such a system. I’ll die standing before I live on my knees as a bondservant to “them”.
Question: if you can only take "according to your needs", what does this entail exactly? Does it allow you to pursue hobbies such as learning a musical instrument, for example? If the idea is that you have no disposable income because you only take what you need, where are you going to get a musical instrument from? Or suppose you want to paint, or take up a sport, or learn a language, how are you supposed to source the equipment and training materials required? What about work - who decides what your "best ability" is, and what if you aspire to something else, and wish to source training to allow you to do that instead? Can somebody explain this to me, or does "true socialism" really only work if everyone has no aspirations beyond do whatever job they're "supposed" to do and waste any free time (and talent) they may have?
It sounds like it would work if nobody ever had any disagreements. I even had somebody say something like that recently, that if all the workers were allowed to run something in their best interest, we would all be better off. But maybe the entire working class isn't some monolithic group think entity. I mean what if someone said, "there's a lot of division and conflict among different religions, so we should just form a new one that everyone will want to follow."
Under socialist systems, the leaders always end up deciding that they need everything, because they deserve it, because they are the leaders organizing society, and that everyone else - well, they weren't grandiose enough to be social engineers, so they don't really deserve all that much.
@@lucasworktv Labor unions have virtually no power and there is no democratic decision making in private businesses. The workers work long hours for Western businesses.
In capitalism you can become rich if you have the drive and motivation to do great things that deliver value to others. In socialism they want everyone to be equally poor and reliant on the government.
man, isn't it amazing that we live in an economic system where we're free to try the opposite system without being afraid of being tortured in a gulag. It's almost like it's not bad to live here
bro the capitalism have done the same thing in America latina. Somewhere it's even worse, because the situation have been create by a foreigner country, not by the own peoples
The video is spot on. There are many kinds of socialism, socialism is designed to fail, and then naive socialists complain that real socialism has never been tried... Socialism is doomed from the start. 1) The "appeal" of socialism only exists for people who don't know what it (or capitalism) is. Those people conflate capitalism with "corporate philosophy", assuming it is greedy and profit-focused, instead of it as a system of economic organization with private banks and personal property protections. 2) Socialists were children who suddenly turned against their own childish selfishness, and assumed that socialism had a big-picture, moral, community-focused agenda for the betterment of the community. 3) Socialism is for people who are bad at math. They see two numbers, say that one is bigger than the other, and add this is not egalitarian for those numbers. Socialists disregard government's role in increasing inflation, and the floating-point math that requires flexibility and exponential increases over time. Maintaining socialism requires continuous monitoring and wealth redistribution. I've been to 26 countries outside the US, and socialism is disappearing everywhere that people are allowed to be educated. 4) If we were to be on a plane that crashed in the Amazon, money would be worthless and we'd have an immediate need for survival. We'd try a temporary socialism, and then go to specialization of function later. You only find the threat of socialism where there is gloom and doom, and an irrational fear for survival.
Socialismcexist as critics of the capitalism, then socialism is based on the knowledge of the capitalism. The reality is that before socialism résine, and its influence in western countries, by keft wing gouvernements for applying left wing politic, or by right wing governements or avoidingthe rise of a revolution , capitalism was about an oppressive system over workers,where they have no right, and kept in misery or poverty, it was authoritarian for the workers. It is history, facts. then the defense of a non tegulated capitalism is not the defense of the freedom but of the authoritarian oppression of the workets by the capitalists.
@@jean-louispech4921 Completely false. Elements of socialism go back over 6,000 years. It is as old as slavery, and pre-dates money. Earliest forms of socialism refer to a primitive lifestyle/tradition. Karl Marx was in favor of a proletarian utopia, and some 170 years ago he said the thing he found most frightening in the world was the British Industrial Revolution. He said that new inventions "enslaved" the worker majority into working for a new, higher standard of living. The workers, it turned out, enjoyed the fruits of independent- from- government markets (lights, indoor plumbing, automobiles, private loans, etc.). Marx also put his myopic eye to economics, and overlaid it with his "interpretive lens of oppression." He saw incidental conflict and called it a negative consequence of unplanned economic progress. Socialism always goes broke, as its adherents fail to incorporate inflation into their math-phobic calculations. It also goes broke because its massive government programs for the continuous redistribution of power, wealth, and property are extremely expensive and arbitrary in execution.
I escaped socialist Soviet Union into the West. I wish those who claim it wasn't "Real Socialism" would say it back then to KGB... Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite. -Old Soviet joke
If you don't get it you don't get it. Nothing to be ashamed of, you are in the company of 90% of Western academia. Sorry, can't help you, explaining a joke may kill its humor. @@dragoneyr1632
So we have no choice but to strip away our social safety net especially SS and Medicare??? Are you aware that the wealth disparity in America is on an unsustainable trajectory??? The answer is to regulate capitalism such that an aristocracy isn’t our future…. Sure we need individual incentive and reward but we cannot have the situation where those owning the means of production can act with impunity towards needing jobs.
When i was poor and homeless i never once received a dime from anyone. When i made low wages but had a place i never once received a dime or help from anyone. When i made average pay and had a nice house people started needing help and a place to stay...every last one betrayed me in one way or another. Now, i make great money after working my ass off all those years and dreaming, i rent, not own...at least once a week i hear a comment about my income being high or how i have nice things i should share the wealth. No. I was told as a 15 year old kid in school working a full time job and living on my own that " i need to do for myself, because its a life lesson, its not anyones responsibility but your own to feed you or put a roof over your head" and i took that to heart. Now that im successful, i find people think the opposite is true. And its not the poor that want in my experience, nor the wealthy...the ones that want the most from you for nothing are the ones most capable of doing it themselves but to lazy to do it, the middle class.
There are approximately - 4.5 million federal civilian employees - 20 million state civilian employees - 40 million civilians working in the aerospace/defense industry (MIC) - 4 million civilian contract workers that service government contracts - 1.4 million military personnel - 99 million people in the social safety net About half of the civilian employees are paper shufflers. If they didn't do their jobs at all, nobody would notice. Given all this, America IS the most successful socialist country of all time, though the government keeps telling the people it's based on capitalism. It's strange that the people calling for socialism in America seem to hate this socialist system. The end of capitalism in America started in 1913 when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. If we liquidated the wealth of every billionaire in America, we could use their wealth to pay all government spending for about 1 year. Thereafter, the vast majority of American product would be agricultural. We allow billionaires to exist so we can continue to misrepresent America as a capitalist country, but even openly socialist countries like China have their billionaires.
Que the “but that wasn’t REAL socialism” crowd in 3…2…1.
About a year ago I was talking to an old girlfriend about how people don't see the irony of socialism as a principle of government. Then I said I was libertarian.
Her: "I don't understand how you could have ever liked me. You know I'm basically a communist, right?"
Me: "uhh...no. I didn't know that." Giving her a look I simply said, "But you work for Apple..."
It took her a few months but she finally got back to me about it and thought it was kinda funny. lol, I died.
Is the "that's not real socialism" crowd any different than the "that's not real capitalism" crowd? I've seen plenty of people criticize capitalism & the response is that's not real capitalism that's cronyism.
@@coder_117unfortunately, capitalism is such a loaded word. 😶 Many socialists believe that anyone who owns "capital" (aka the means of production, including the money used to set up a business) is doomed to be greedy and exploitive, even if the "capital" was acquired in an honest manner. I personally prefer using the words "free market" or "voluntary transactions," and point out that other forms of economic systems (be it socialism, fascism, communism, etc) require the legalized violent physical force of centralized power (aka governments) to operate.
Don’t care! Always ends the same! Dictatorship. My family suffered under socialist rule and I will not tolerate it here!!!!!
@@coder_117 difference is free will to choose your own destiny.
"The vice of capitalism is that it distributes blessings unequally. The virtue of socialism is that it distributes miseries equally". ~ Churchill
All civilizations distribute blessings unequally, because civilization requires a diversity of jobs to function. Not all jobs are equally demanding; thus, all civilizations have a socioeconomic hierarchy as a result. A socioeconomic hierarchy is a universally recognized trait of civilization. Marxist nations have socioeconomic hierarchies that make those in free market economies look relatively flat.
No one has found a way to run a civilization that distributes blessing equally, likely never will, and doing so is not necessary or beneficial.
@@voxfan7403 Humans can't rule themselves. They need someone not human
A socioeconomic hierarchy is Not civilized. A civilized society must at minimum value every individual's best interests, never special interests, not the majority, not those who can do more complex or choose to do more demanding tasks.
Blessings need not be distributed equally but rights and opportunity must be in order to have reciprocity, which is the prerequisite for civilization never yet achieved at scale.
In Socialism, some Animals are more equal, than others.
I had a relative who lived on a commune for a time. He left because he was tired of working his butt off to keep it running while many of the others refused to do anything but write poetry and pursue intellectual interests. They felt that they were contributing by enlightening themselves and others. He disagreed. From his account the community fell apart when the physical labor force left. The sad part is that to this day he thinks that the key to making it work would have been to force everyone to share the physical work load more equally. All while enjoying a retirement earned by working for 40+ years for a major manufacturer and being wise with his earnings.
Yes, it would have worked just like it worked in China during the cultural revolution and great leap forward, and in the USSR during the many purges of Stalin
lol. It’s never worked. Millions of unmarked graves to prove it.
"...the key... [is] to force everyone...", and he doesn't see a problem with this?! Who's going to do the forcing? Who controls the enforcers? THAT is why socialism and communism doesn't work. There will ALWAYS be the "haves" and "have nots".
Force. That is the key word in all of this. You have to use force to try to make Socialism work, which is what causes it to fail.
Questioner to a young Socialist: What if someone doesn't want to go along with all of this that you're proposing?
Young Socialist: We'll have to make them do it.
Questioner: Ah... yep, just as I thought.
A group of people working their backsides off for minimal reward to support a non working elite! Sounds like a capitalist commune to me.
I had a dear friend who lived in one of those socialist communities you mentioned. He grew up on a family farm, did landscaping, was very mechanically gifted and a basic jack of all trades. He desperately wanted to live in a community of people who supported each other’s needs while living peacefully and happily with each other. He left after six months in extreme disappointment and physical exhaustion. He was constantly doing the tasks other people were assigned because he was more experienced than they, their back hurt, they didn’t like pulling weeds as much as he did, one man frequently used the excuse that he didn’t sleep all night because he was traumatized as someone cooked meat for dinner and he was forced to smell it. Those few who worked became resentful and started hiding food so they’d have enough to eat to keep working. When people who received without working discovered he was taking a larger portion, they accused him of being greedy and stealing from them. He took his dog and left, the community collapsed.
Lucky guy. He managed to run away before they were forced to eat his dog. 😅
That type of guy is referred to as "Pavel" in which they work tirelessly day and night for the community and party in hopes they would take care of him too, remember the horse is George Orwell's "Animal Farm"? That's also Pavel
Perfect example of why it will always fail.
Animal farm should be required reading
In my experience a lot of social people always assume that everyone is a good human like them, and can do things. They underestimate that some people are just parasites feasting on others.
Imagine someone in Russia under Stalin or in China under Mao saying, "But this isn't real socialism - real socialism has never been tried." They would have been dealt with quickly and rather harshly.
Yes
Staline was one of the bigger oppressor of socialists and marxists in history, he had persécuté all the historics revolutionnaries, because real socialism goes against his dictatorship like regime.
And for Mao else the label of his party there is nothing communist with him , workers have left the communist party when we was rumine it, and the révolution was made without the workers, it is just an alliance between bourgeois and farmers at the benefit of the firsts.
Maoism is in fact the bonapartist empire without the democratic revolution before.
If workers are exploited by prviligied elites, it is not socialism, it is again socialism.
Kind of like someone in North Korea saying it's not a real democratic republic?
@@Mark73
in fact north Korea follows the definition of an authoritarian monarchy , when we are not brainwashed by the propaganda of the regime.
Ronald Reagan once told a joke: "Two russians were having a chat. One asked the other "have we achieved full communism yet?", the other said "Ooooh, no, things are going to get a LOT worse..." "
@@jean-louispech4921 Stalin killed somewhere between 40M and 60M of his own countrymen, and Mao killed well over 100M. True communism/socialism is MUCH WORSE than that.
When anybody says "But that wasn't real socialism" or "Real socialism has never been tried", what they really mean is "They never put ME in charge of everything"
That's part of it. Lol. They also simply don't like the outcome and won't admit their ideas are junk
@@ScienceWatch2000-mh7cc True. In real Free Market Capitalism, the laws regulating the free market should prevent corporations from being able to establish cartels and monopolies to crush the smaller competition. But instead, we have politicians take money from corporate lobbyists to create laws that help corporations crush competition. Any attempt of Capitalism has so far always decended into Corporatism.
@@StarlasAikobecause of corrupt government.
Politicians have the Peoples Power. True though... The other issue with free market Capitalism is the establishment of monopolies, the allowance of and perpetuation of entitlement, and the gross laziness of the average person thus enabling Exploitation and Alienation and Abuses of Power.
Capitalism is a great idea (despite presumably being coined by French Socialists) but it doesn't take into account the dynamics between people and nuances of what people do with power.
I am not content with "Let God Sort Them Out" as an answer. This is one primary reason as to why I never liked Anarchism or Deflective Attitudes...
Hey, i've got the cure for what's wrong with your society! Try this thing with only theory and NO empirical record!
Socialism is attractive to people who lack the motivation to make money and is seen as a way to spread wealth equally which to them means everyone being equally well taken care of. What they don’t realize is the reality of a society full of people being equally unmotivated to work hard enough to meet the most basic needs of the people will mean that everyone is equally destitute and that society will break down. Of course there is always an exception with socialist supporters, always an excuse.
That is because people that champion socialism are lazy and unmotivated but for some strange reason they think they’re entitled to the hard work and the money of people that work hard and are not lazy and motivated. I am convinced that if people that champion socialism were left to their own vices, they would simply starve to death. Socialism is a complete modern invention, because no other time in human history have the unmotivated in the lazy been able to survive until now. in medieval times they would’ve been conquered or they would’ve starved to death
Bingo
Too many teenage slackers, not enough Mommies and Daddies.
Remember that when it says to each according to NEED that isn't WANT. The average person doesn't NEED a cell phone, internet access, tv, cable, a car, etc. They can get up early and walk or take public transportation to their no skill job. They can eat boiled potatoes for every meal. They can do their laundry by hand and hang it to dry. The list of needs is a lot lower than the idiot screaming for socialism is willing to accept and if they give you 30 seconds to explain it to them they suddenly no longer think socialism is good and want to continue the current American programs of stealing from the working class to provide for the worthless slave class.
Cliff notes: socialism/marxism/wokeism is for weaklings, cowards and losers.
Worth noting: The original Mayflower compact was a collective with communally owned farming land and with foodstuffs distributed on a basis of need regardless of individual production effort. This failed after one season. They had to bum off the neighbors (Native Americans) to avoid starvation.
Worth noting: 72 countries in the world have universal healthcare, and they haven't turned into starving dystopias. You guys look at one extreme, and think the answer is the other extreme. I don't advocate Communism, but I do advocate a country that looks after people and doesn't require us to spend every waking minute trying to survive.
@@kennethmacalpin7655subsidized social benefits are not extreme as you said. No issue with that on my end .
@@kennethmacalpin7655
I lived in one of those countries with national health care. Even as an American citizen I was granted it. Amazing, right?
Except it was absolute crap.
After returning from that country, both my sister and I had to have operations to fix what their free medicine destroyed.
And, no, it was not a third world country. It was the United Kingdom.
Remember that social programs in a country does not mean that country operates on a socialist economy.
The UK is capitalist.
All of your arguments fall into irrelevance when reality kicks in.
@@josephnebeker7976 My point is that "Socialism doesn't work" is used as a Straw Man argument against less-ruthless forms of capitalism. "US" and "USSR" are not the only choices.
Take Denmark. I'll say "I want a system like Denmark". Then you'll say "Denmark isn't socialist, it's capitalist". Well I don't care what you call it, that's what I want. By your own admission, you can have social programmes without being socialist. Maybe it's capitalist, that's fine, but it's a different form of capitalism to what America has.
@@kennethmacalpin7655 Then you completely missed the point.
Countries with social programs like free national healthcare are almost always not socialist governments or economies. Because of this they are not socialist nations. What do I mean by this?
Free healthcare is not free. It is paid for by taxes.
The people pay money to the government, and the government puts it in programs they call social programs. Not socialist programs, but SOCIAL PROGRAMS.
Think about Social Security in the United States of America.
It's not a socialist program. Workers have their money garnished from their paychecks to be put into their social security program.
If socialism comes into this at all, it is when government officials steal that money from the coffers of social security which actually belong to us. If a government steals your money, you can be damn sure they're probably socialists.
However, when it comes to free healthcaredoctors and other employees are paid regardless how well or poorly they do their job. This is a huge reason the United States of America has not gone to a nationally universal free healthcare system.
I worked for a former College Professor who was a Sociologist. Every semester he gave the very same opening assignment: Create the Monopoly game to where all the money is redistributed, and nobody is allowed to be so rich that they own the vast majority of property. Same result year after year after year...yes, it can easily be done; however, the end result is, "It's boring." You remove the reward of capitalism and basically, you're left with nothing that anyone wants to play. There is no purpose, there is no reward for working harder, there is no mountain to climb, there isn't a means by which to get ahead. And in reality, everyone except the 1% who run the country are equally poor.
Bruh this sounds dumb. Of course the game will be Boring af if thats the case, because the game builds up on this private property. Thats all this game is about. Life is more than owning private Capital
@@noobixx8588Most historians and soft science experts would argue your statement historically and definitively inaccurate. Even religion is strongly rooted in wealth, humanity since civilization started beyond basic agriculture has been about $ or its Era appropriate analog. Everything else simply orbits around that trapped in its gravity.
@@joshbull623During the years of crisis of the COVID pandemic, the top 1% who owned the world made 1,000,000 USD for each dollar made by the bottom 70%. Doesn't that sound awfully like "everyone except the 1% who run the world is equally poor"?
@@DesignFIawthat´s totally normal and it´s called Pareto Principle or 80/20, and also in nature it´s mostly more, like 90/10 or even more. Like 99% of mass in our solar system is the sun. 90% of all river water is in 1-2 biggest rivers. 90% of all wealth is held by 10% of people. That´s how it always has been and always will be. Even if there will rise new socialist governments. It´s every time the same. People are greedy and people are oportunistic. If you have the power to rule 100 milion of people, because you are the one of 1% who rules in socialist country, you will give yourself and your family much more money than to other people. Every one socialist country is much more corrupted that that capitalists. Every one.
@@DesignFIaw I understand your point, but have you ever lived or worked overseas? They answer isn’t socialism. Power corrupts whether capitalist or socialist. You’d be exchanging one corrupt hierarchy with another. The answer is decentralizing power. If you notice, the 1% push for increasing the power of the federal government and international authorities ... which makes bribery and blackmail easier. The Founding Fathers sought to limit federal power and divide it among three branches with checks and balances for a reason. The gradual erosion of those protections by politicians and the 1%, which now the politicians are largely a subset of the 1%, is the problem ... exacerbated by their corruption of academia and the media.
My step mother was raised and served in the USSR. She was in charge of a hospital and an infectious disease specialist. She is brilliant and was a top scientist for years. She had to manage an apartment building to make enough money to live. Her family was located in Siberia and they were issued a motorcycle for their sole family vehicle. If your food rations weren’t enough, which they never were, and you decided to grow a garden to make up the gap, you could only get away with growing a certain small amount before the government would come in and confiscate it. People were regularly “disappeared” and sent off to gulags and everyone just moved on with life like they never existed. The scary thing is, even now, 34 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she is still indoctrinated into believing it was a viable system of governance. Whole wards of her hospital were full of patients left to die because they simply didn’t have medicine. Entire families were vanished to a gulag. Dozens of villages had every scrap of food taken so often they resorted to eating sawdust and eventually their own children. The absolute poverty caused by socialism cannot be overstated.
" Entire families were vanished to a gulag."
To remember that your step mother has to be over 100 yo, so, I believe either you didn't understand her or just made it up for the dramatic effect.
Nice made up story
@@anton7354the belief that people can't live past 100...
@@justjoking5841A fellow Siberian that made it past his/her 90s would be an extremely rare case. I'm not suggesting it's at all impossible but very very unlikely. On the other hand if she told those stories 20 years ago... So, yeah, I might have gone too personal here. But the premise itself is pretty much cartoonish - post-war USSR was not like that. "Food rations" and "eventual eating of own children"... Jesus, it's only one step away from the brown bears with balalaikas. I stand corrected, this is on par with that.
@@anton7354 Not going to be an apologist - the USSR did some horrifying stuff that makes the Suffering of the Natives of the Americas and the Holocaust look Tame.
But truly... using the suffering of others to justify creating a psychosomatic victim complex just to get attention... I'd almost want to be offended too.
There is no utopia. Dystopia is the result.
When you have to use threats of violence or death to keep your society running, no wonder it's doomed to fail.
Exactly the point of why capitalism is best operated at the highest risk possible. Don't regulate people/businesses. "Oh but how do we separate out the snake oil sales men!?"
Ok, a law doesn't prevent a snake oil sales men. It just allows the people to call it out and force the government to take action under a set of punishments. You still have a great risk of buying it and hope the government does something. Only, you still have to pay the government to do something. So you're double paying for nothing and, in fact are paying the government to marry the snake oil sales men....
So why even push regulations in the first place??? It only hurts in the end twice as much.
yea, good thing under capitalism you aren't forced to work or starve to death... oh wait. If you look up how much food and housing we need for everyone, then you will see that we have more than enough, yet people still starve and die from exposure. Since the beginning of time we have been able to produce more than enough for ourselves, yet even when industrialization is at its highest we still pretend we are not a post scarcity society. What we need to do is to work for the sake of people rather than for the benefit of the top 10%. It doesn't matter if that means democratically electing business leaders, banning or putting harsh taxes on generational wealth, or whatever, as long as wealth is getting evened out. We should be more focused on stabilizing society, eliminating extreme poverty, decreasing the suicide rate, wasteful consumerism, and less so on putting an extra camera on the iphone 16.
@@unsilencedderp9411 This is nonsense. Capitalism doesn't force you to do anything, that's the whole point. You can choose to work or starve to death, as it is and will always be with every system. The only difference is that with Capitalism you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor, while in Socialism they'll automatically steal it from you to feed the leeches of society. The only reason we have "more than enough" is because those who produce goods are motivated by the rewards made possible by Capitalism. Remove the motivation and watch how quickly your country will starve.
"What we need to do is to work for the sake of people rather than for the benefit of the top 10%." - How do you figure? We're already paying taxes, which is supposed to go to helping out those in need, yet, it actually goes to the top 0.1%. More Socialism would clearly just make it even worse, since then those in power wouldn't even need to pretend to help the people.
"We should be more focused on stabilizing society, eliminating extreme poverty" - I wonder, how much of your disposable income do you give to "extremely poor" people? Isn't it part of "wasteful consumerism" that you own a device on which you can write this? Wouldn't it be better - according to your logic - to sell everything you own and give the money to the poor? Or do you just want others to hand over their wealth, like every Socialist?
@@unsilencedderp9411 You will never get rid of or motivate the lazy and unwilling to participate in free market capitalism and do for themselves. Modern society in the US at least, has created an entitlement mentality and everything is a right, now. Right to this, right to that but, without having to contribute anything to earn it. You didn't see this so much in the past because, there was no safety net or bleeding hearts that would prop up people who wouldn't work. The ones who had that mentality, didn't last long or resorted to a short lived crime life.
@@unsilencedderp9411poverty will always exist. It’s an undeniable fact. It will always be the less fortunate. People work hard and get payed for it but there is never enough room for everybody
I had a teacher that used to tell me about the how's and whys of his resistance to, and eventual escape from, the Communist takeover of Hungary. True accounts of someone who lived through it.
No whiny pipsqueak defending socialism could ever hold the same gravitas as an old, and respected, teacher reminiscing about watching soldiers seize control of his people.
Certainly the case. But what about someone on the streets about to die of hunger, a disease he can't afford to cure, simple exposure. Your teacher has first hand experience of the failure of socialist ideology. So too does the homeless.
Do one on "why nuclear is the only viable energy source" cleanest, safest, most reliable source of energy. Or you can do one on "why over regulation is not protecting us but preventing progress".
This is a great idea!
Regulations and taxes are purposely designed to keep you and me out of The Big Club. Not only are we not in it, but they insure we never will be.
What about cheapest? How are we gonna expect the whole continent of Africa and a lot of Asia and South America to ever implanent it? Thats around half of earth that is too poor for nuclear energy.
@@luigigaming2717not if the only thing that matters is the profit motive
@@MrMinigunman101 no, i mean it is quite literally impossible for a 3rd world country to implement nuclear energy without significant outside investment, which unless you're Egypt or control a major trade center of the world is impossible to get. The profit incentive is already there but how can you profit off of something you can't even afford?
The real socialism had never been and will never be tried because it is impossible to do so. You can't have a stateless society as humans progress, you need structure, you need social classes, you need laws and orders, a society without state is anarchy. The ideology is kinda doomed from the start.
Socialism doesn't advocate a stateless society.
@@kennethmacalpin7655He’s probably mixing up socialism and communism.
There were very successful socialist societies. This was before widespread use of currency and centralized distribution was preferable to everyone bartering.
@@johndiss Sure, early agricultural societies used this method and success, but this was because the simplificty and the small scale of their society, in a tribe where most jobs were farming, hunting, simple tools making, arts and crafts making, it isn't hard to join in and contribute to the small society and distribute resources equally, but fast forward to modern day with higher living standards, where we have jobs like nuclear physicists, bankers, areospace engineers, and population of millions and millions and billions of people, we can't just go around giving a serving of free food to everyhome. Real communism is not achievable unless there is a glitch in time to spawn infinite delicious food, free large warm homes with swimming pool and endless other convenniences, the best we can do is implemented socialist-oriented policies into our society to curb certain spike of inequality, like workplace union laws, universal education and healthcare in certain countries with the right conditions.
@@luonggiaphat7946 Keep in mind that I'm not a proponent of socialism or communism, just making conversation. We know that kingdoms were distributing goods because of the invention of writing, which allowed them to organize and record exchanges. Leading a large (or a complicated) army is a matter organization - Sun Tzu. I think that with our technology or technology of the foreseeable future, we could organize a very efficient centralized distribution system. Hell, I think Amazon could do it given a few more data centers. Technically, I think it's absolutely feasible. The only fatal error I find it that people will act from self interest even if they want for nothing. The Hebrews were given manna from heaven to sustain them and they were commanded by their God to not collect it and save it. Still, their greed motivated them to defy God and profit from the free abundance. Just an illustrative story if you're not into that tradition. We would need to suppress that greed if we are to create a socialist utopia. It may be possible to negate the effects of greed at every turn, but people are seriously innovative.
But it has been tried, and every time with the same disastrous results. There's no way to do a wrong thing the right way.
Yet in socialism, nobody is ever right.
You’re gonna have to tell me the disaster. Socialism took Russia, which was basically a pre-industrial state, and in the space of 30 years made it an industrial world superpower.
Socialism took China from a preindustrial state, and in 40 years turned it into a world power.
Socialism rebuilt Eastern Europe and central Europe from an ash heap to a mighty economic union in the space of 15 years.
Socialism ended world hunger. Socialism brought medicine to where it had never been. Socialism took man into space.
It’s said Socialism killed 100 million people over a century. Not only is this untrue, but it is demonstrable that 25 million people die per year under the capitalist system simply because it’s not profitable to take care of them. That’s from famine, deaths from unclean water, deaths from pollution, deaths from treatable disease. Capitalism i reality takes only four years to reach the myth of what Socialism never did in a century.
Amazing what mankind can accomplish when we are focused on the good of society, rather than vainly enriching ourselves.
@@MortabluntYou seriously think Socialism "ended world hunger?" Mao is quoted as saying "When there is not enough food to eat people starve. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half may eat their fill." An estimated 45 million people died in "Mao's famine." So I guess I'm not fond of socialism's cure for world hunger. But then your answer to such statistics is it isn't true, which is convenient as it won't damage your socialist delusions.
@@Mortabluntretard doesn't notice most these things happened when socialism was ditched
@@MortabluntNow tell me the quality of living for the people within the USSR and the Soviet Bloc
My issue is that the successful capitalists are financing socalist politicians in both political parties, to the detriment of their newer capitalist competition.
That means they are actually Fascists, not Capitalists. Capitalists gain their wealth without the help of politicians, while Fascists require it.
They are not capitalists in truth, they are economic warlords trying to create their own fiefdoms
@@rap1df1r3 So basically there exist no capitalist billionaires
successful capitalists really do not like competition.
@@cyclnvancouver8060 real capitalist love competition, it is the heart of capitalism. It is what drives progress
The main problem with a (socialist) society whose govt centrally controls all the means of production
and aims to distribute everything produced equaly is that (assuming that it could be done) you basically
remove the biggest driving force of every economy, which is
the human desire to improve each day by reaping the fruits of his labor using his own work, initiative, risk
and ingenuity.
If you're suddenly become a worker that is rewarded an x amount payment either in cash or goods,
regardless of what you produce or how much you work, several things will happen, 3 of which:
1) You'll start wanting to work as less as possible in order to get your benefits without punishment
2) You'll start comparing yourself to others and ask why do you have to work more than other people
if they're making the same as you and getting by managing to work less.
3) there is also the problem of "quality of work". How much does an engineer deserve to earn compared to a
farmer? Why? How to keep people satisfied with that? (spoiler alert: you cant)
The economy then enters a viscious downward spiral cycle where everyone will start to work less
and less because the benefits are the same, and the result is that the GDP of the economy falls,
in other words, the size of the cake to be sliced and distributed shrinks more and more, meaning
that there is less and less for everybody. This will require an even more tyrannical government
to monitor people and enforce they are doing their share of work, which is not only impractical
but oppressive and extremely unmotivating for workers, which only adds further inneficiency
to the system.
You can think of any economy as the sum of all relations of production and exchange of value
as a result of people's desire to improve himself day by day. Once the government
renders that desire, the whole foundation of the economy falls.
There are many other problems like for example price setting, a recurrent problem in the former USSR,
but I will not get into that as I already typed in too much.
Not to mention that enacting and enforcing socialism does not make capitalism and hoarding of wealth go away. Government corruption is endemic in communist countries across every aspect of the society, so much everyone tries to become a member of government because the rules quite simply don't apply to them. Black markets dealing in foreign currency and luxury goods are rife because there is a demand for value and the valuable. These countries also suffer brain drain escaping to other countries, because hard workers and well educated people are discriminated against by the general populace.
@@cattysplat
Very well said!
So I am a wage worker. I work for an x amount of payment regardless or what I do or how much I produce, because my capitalist boss is interested in paying me less while making me do more work. Then several things happen:
1) I start wanting to work as less as possible by to get my wage without being fired
2) I start comparing myself to my boss and ask why they have so much more money, because there is no way they are working thousands of times more
3) there is also the problem of the quality of work. How much does a capitalists to earn if most of the work are done by my fellow wage workers?
The economy then enters a vicious cycle where everyone starts to work less and less because the benefits are the same, and the result is that profits fall, in other words, the size of the cake to be sliced and distributed shrinks more and more, meaning that there is less for the investors or for everyone else. This will require an even more tyrannical corporate policies to monitor workers and force them to take more work, which not only eats the already reducing income but is oppressive and extremely unmotivating for workers, which only adds further inefficiency to the system.
@@SMT-ks8yp The whole point of Capitalism is that if you don't like your job, you can always get another one, or even start your own business, which is where the real money is anyway. You don't get to slack off if you want to make it big, though.
@@rap1df1r3 and if you don't like your government, you can always emigrate or even found your own country. Oh wait, you can't or it won't make things better. And to start a business. where will you find the money with your wage falling and prices rising? Where will you get the knowledge to not fail while being all alone if your boss wants more and more of your time? Aren't there a survivor bias in "start your business"?
I have lived in a Socialist country, Soviet Union and participated in the underground movement that destroyed it.
Everyone was equally poor just like slaves on the plantations are poor. Equality: check.
O wait, actually no, that's not true. There was a tiny tiny ruling elite, the upper echelon of the Communist Party, about few thousand strong, that controlled every last resource, every factory, all the land, police, armed forces and entire army of undercover KGB agents. Those people were the true elites if there ever was one. Not the 1% like in US, but 0.0001%. Much better!
They had luxurious villas (we called them "safe houses", idk how they called them themselves) that officially didn't exist. I've seen one of those myself, it was hidden behind the trees, surrounded with high fences with the barbed wire on top, patrolled by armed guards with attack dogs 24/7 and if you waited long enough you could eventually see a black limousine going in or leaving.
Soviet Union imported the best French vines during all of it's existence, and none of it ever reached the shops open for the general population. Are you kidding, you want to give the good stuff to the slaves? It all ended up in those villas. In the normal shops you were lucky if you could buy butter or watery sausages. On a normal day you couldn't, not for any money... which you didn't have anyway.
Goes without saying nobody had any means of production just like Marx prescribed. To even think about that was a serious crime.
What an ordinary citizen had was a tiny bug infested flat, usually kitchen and one small room, or kitchen and two small rooms if you had a bigger family. You couldn't own your flat though, it was a property of the state, just like the land it was built upon, and you were renting it from the state. Just like slaves on the American south had those tiny huts which were provided for them by the slaveowner.
You had to work in Soviet Union, that was the law. Like a good little slave you had to work your whole life, you could not leave Soviet Union, which was one big slave plantation, until you died in there. If you didn't like this reality and tried to rebel against it, you'll end up in the prison camps in Siberia called _Gulag_ -- where they forced you to work on the mines, anyway.
Yes there has been true Socialism, even long before Marx. All that Marx did was giving it a new name and ideological justification. Under the hood, nothing changed.
You can see today how popular Socialism is among the American blacks. All the people who created BLM were hardcore Marxists. Shows you how desperately those people hate their freedom. They want to go back to slavery, where you are taken care of by the slaveowner, life is simple, no need to make hard decisions, everything's already decided for you. Ofc people want it... just give it a different name and some kind of ideological justification and you'll have millions signing up.
It's hard to be free, that's the problem with mankind. Most of us prefer the safe life of a slave. Nobody wants to admit that thou, makes us look bad...
I gave you a like, but you are talking about corrupt officials, not a system of government. You can call it hop scotch if you like, but starving the population and eating gourmet is not a rule of socialism.
@@5400bowen he's talking about people
@@5400bowen Implementing socialism requires extreme government power and the use of violence to forcibly seize property. This alone makes it terrible but it gets worse! It also destroys economic motivation by punishing those who are most capable and rewarding the laziest individuals (generating more lazy individuals).
@@Gorpmeat what if socialism was the original system from the very beginning? No violent transition. Socialism is the natural state of affairs. Social creatures form societies to benefit the members. And socialism does not mandate disallowing private property. It merely believes society is more important than individuals. If the good of society requires private ownership and inequality, then socialism would adopt them. Socialism merely believes the good of society is more important than the good of individuals. How that good is achieved is not dictated by yours or anyone else’s opinion, and can be attained through trial and error. You assign peoples assumptions to political philosophies instead of defining them as concepts growing from the meaning of the words.
I think BLM only wants the free stuff part, not the work part😂
There's a book out there, 'California's Utopian Colonies' written by Robert Hine, that chronicles attempts at idealistic communities in the Golden State. All of them were variations of socialism, all of them failed. The ones that lasted the longest, sometimes decades, were religious, based around a strong charismatic leader that inspired the core members. They invariably collapsed when the leader died or was exposed as a fraud.
Let me simplify it. Someone has to be in charge. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Winston Churchill said that
@@jameshendrickson8159 it was Bakunin lol
I remember Poland in the 80's Miserable place. People were miserable, the shops were empty, black market was rife.
Today, beautiful country. Lots of development, clean, wealthy, a very desirable place to live.
Socialists hate these examples, especially former socialists hell holes that embrace Western Freemarket capitalism. It's direct evidence against their crappy arguments and ideology.
South Korea and North Korea are an even better example. It's like a double blind experiment
Ludwig Von Mises demonstrated the other fatal flaw of socialism: Its inability to rationally calculate, ie without a market to set prices, socialism cannot know WHAT to produce and how MUCH of it to produce. That is why you have mass deprivation under socialism. Here is a recording of a lecture I attended in 1981:
ua-cam.com/video/brUQpD18BKg/v-deo.html
That could be easily managed by distributing power and isn't an inherent part of or flaw of socialism.
@@havenbastion Under socialism, the State doesn't "distribute power". It keeps power to itself. It DICTATES prices. "freely set prices under socialism" is an oxymoron.
My brother had “Human Action” by von Mises when I was 7 in 1961. I read a bit of it later, but it was too vast for my young mind. But this “they cannot set value, therefore they cannot calculate the scale of production for goods and services without (ALWAYS phony) capitalists milking the populace for as much as they can” is the biggest fantasy I’ve ever heard. That’s like “ mom can’t figure out how much food to cook because a capitalist system hasn’t done the math for her”?!? What an obviously insane thought. “Uh, we have ten thousand citizens, how many pairs of shoes do we need?”. Really insane idea..
@@havenbastion "distributing power" doesn't enable rational calculation. Only a market does that.
@@5400bowen "That’s like “ mom can’t figure out how much food to cook because a capitalist system hasn’t done the math for her”?!? What an obviously insane thought. “Uh, we have ten thousand citizens, how many pairs of shoes do we need?”. Really insane idea."
That analogy makes no sense at all. An economy isn't "mom deciding what to cook". It's mom or whomever trying to decide WHAT food item to make, how MUCH of it to make, and what PRICE to charge. Socialism can't do that, because there's no way to calculate cost, no supply and demand. Neither can socialism determine what kind of shoes to make, how many shoes to produce or at what price to sell them.
Socialists clearly don't think through basic economics. The desire for socialism seems to stem from a desire of individuals to receive resources they don't own that they view as plentiful. I hear talk of 'universal income' without any consideration for the basics of production/consumption of products and services (i.e. generating and receiving 'value'). That paradigm also directly implies that forced labor *must* happen.
It's the ideology of envy. They are simply motivated by a fundamental hatred of the rich or anybody who is successful.
They can't think it through. 😅
They often gloss over the "from each according to their ability" part for a reason.
Honestly, I'd support an opt-in universal income program, as long as the recipients of it are not allowed to vote. And vice-versa. If you're not willing to engage properly with society to make a living, you should not get a say in how society is run.
@@tau-5794 Universal income programs take over all other areas of social services, so when you lose your job, you receive UBI. If you retire, you receive UBI. Disability - UBI. This reduces costs for all of these government departments. Don't you think all of these people have a right to vote? Even people who choose not to work are still participating in society. They're still consumers. Some may volunteer or create in other ways like music or art. Taking away rights never leads to anything positive.
This was the simplest, and best, refutation of the argument that "real socialism has never been tried" that I have ever seen. Just excellent. The inclusion of utopian communes was the real linchpin of this video.
Knocking it out of the ballpark yet again, Nick. Thank you.
Please dont stop. These videos are amazing in my homeschool.
We love to hear this!
Please stop. You are an idiot feading other idiots bullshit.
Socialism isn't an end. It's the means to acquiring something else. Power.
The biggest problem with socialism is that people don't understand nothing about it yet they think they can explain it in a two minute video
The Soviet Union called themselves "CCCP", The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" for a reason.
They KNEW Communism was the extreme version of Socialism.
In the early Americas, the Virginia Compact was inacted. It pooled the labor of all, and each member of the Compact would share in the bounty.
That first year, the people taking part nearly starved to death because the people forgot to work with their fellows, and ended up rescued by the nearby Indian Tribe.
The compact was abolished, private property was inacted by the Group, and.individual effort went towards families and their posterity. The end of the second year, the members of the original compact did so well, they invited the Indian Tribe to a meal.
The beginnings of what we call today "Thanksgiving".
Socialism has never worked, and never will, because some will never agree to share... You know, like Klaus Schwab.
I think women are the worst with sharing. They HATE sharing their bodies with ugly and short men. And that also impacts why communism or true socialism would never happen
What your average socialist means when they say "Real socialism hasn't been tried!" What they mean is that socialism with them in charge hasn't been tried.
That doesn't make any sense
@@reidwinter1023 of course not, but that's how their delusional socialist mind works.
What he is trying to say is that they think that they could have done a better job or they just "didn't understand how it should be done" and so they think that they are so much smarter and could have made the so called "Utopia a reality" when in reality they just can't admit that it does not work no matter who tries it.
@@ChannelFish279 ^ This mostly, plus a bit of the fact a lot of them know it won't work but still want to kick it off anyway out of envy or a lust for power.
no, socialism is not a state like the propaganda says, get over that and a new path of thinking opens... try!
Capitalism: The lazy envy the ambitious.
Communism: The ambitious envy the lazy.
I have a great appreciation for knowing you people at the Why Minutes are aware of the Roblox Death sound.
If you missed it, 2:39
2:22 Misleading information- there are still many good examples of successful and stable anarchist/libsoc communities: the autonomous Twin Oaks community has been going 1967, the NY Ganienkeh community established in the 70s that was literally TAKEN BACK by the Mohawks of that region. And that isn’t even mentioning the amount of autonomous communities around the world (e.g. the Zapatistas in Mexico established in ‘94 with a few hundred thousand, Rojava in Syria established 2013 with MILLIONS)
2:38 Well of course the owning class will be cracked down upon, they’ve been stealing wealth and hoarding property from the beginning! Socialists, whether statist or anarchist, believe in the prosperity and liberty of the many over the prosperity of the rich and suffering of the working class. Whether this does actually turn out well is up to whether or not the wills of the people, the ones supposed to be controlling the economy, are actually represented (but hey hey anarchists do believe in bottom up systems where all power actually belongs to the people rather than the “representatives”)
There is a very important part Marx left out of his original statement. Here is a much clearer version:
_THE STATE WILL TAKE_ From each according to their ability, _THE STATE WILL GIVE_ To each according to their need.
Much clearer.
It was, it works, it’s call family. Any socialism bigger than that is doom to fail
The problem is people in power, regardless of system, they are not infallible, or always noble.
And that's why Anarchy is the only form of "government" that's not totalitarian.
@@rap1df1r3 One man kills another.
It's a cold case and you have no money.
How do you arrest the man and put him on trial with no cops, and without being called a murderer yourself?
@@Servo_M Local militia, neighborhood watch, etc. Also, you have money because you pay no taxes - so you can even hire a private investigator.
@@rap1df1r3 There is more then one way to lose money, taxes are only one of them.
A milita could work, but would lack training and direction without leadership.
Here's a biger problem, what if the milita becomes a mob? then what?
P.S. I just wanted to point out that I am not a Fascist, Communist/Marxist, National Socialist, Anarchist, or Socialist.
I am a Christian first and foremost, and that's why I don't think man can be trusted.
@@rap1df1r3 And then what? What good would do you a private investigator if there is no jury to sentence the murderer? After all, the judicial body is part of the goverment.
I appreciate your insights to this topic. It really helps me in debates with social democrats and communists outright.
Could you possibly make a short expanding on why the communes failed so horribly?
I fully expect they failed because people left but in debates if I just say they failed because people left it would be a weak argument
Our team is really interested to dive deeper into the 30 communes which failed as well. Taking note of this. Thank you!
I'm guessing you will find the people that left those communes were the ones doing the lions share of the work and left in disgust.
@@TheWhyMinutes Is there an update on this? This would be an excellent topic. Thanks!
Communes fail for the same reason governments and societies fail; they don't have the basics right.
@@TheWhyMinuteswell a social democracy isn't fully socialism its a mixed economy but I agree
A documentary I watched about an American commune ended with its last member sighing and saying "The thing is, people like to own stuff."
At some point the population gets too large for all to participate at the council meetings.
After that point it is no longer a social society with all participating in the planning. At that point you have chiefs and councils, They decide who gets what and when.
In Vietnam, we called them Party Cadre.
The settlement that gave us thankgiving tried it.
The plan was that everyone would contribute to the community, and that everyone would get an equal share of the resources that were produced. It did not matter what you provided.
So, there were a lot of families that had not produced enough for thier own survival, but they were provided an equal share out of the communities resources. It became obvious that they were going to starve long before spring came.
So they asked the natives for help. The natives had some extra, but that was intended in case the winter was long. But the gave it anyways.
They settlers revised their rules, everyone was to be responsible for producing their own resources.
The following harvest, they had an excess of food, and decided to thank those that had risked survival do that the settlers could survive.
So one of the lessons of thanksgiving is that socialism doesn't care if you survive, as long as you die with everyone else. At least you'll die equal.
Nick Freitas without a beard is nightmare fuel. You're great Nick... don't lose the beard. It looks too good.
By siezing the means of production and redistributing it, you are creating a government that has to manually control for every resource and service needed for society (at the minimum), this is an issue for one main reason. Economies are incredibly intricate ecosystems that often fluctuate based on a myriad of factors. Something seemingly as simple as a pencil has to have multiple proceeses and resources to make it mass produced. Now expand that to everything, and you see why it might be an issue- hell even the epitome of hubris to assume any bureaucracy, however intelligent, could ever be capable of effectively commanding a national economy.
"I, Pencil" is a tale that illustrates this point.
Humans are not built for altruism...they are built to achieve and work together for a common good, that is to say when people choose to work together, everybody gets "something" out of the work product. If one person wants to give away what they earned....fine. But don't try to force others to give away what they gained.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was so seductive that it helped inspire communists for over a century, and still appeals to those whose needs exceed their abilities.
About a year or two ago, my parents made friends with an old couple who had escaped the Castro regime in Cuba at a church they visited.
Both of them had gone into the US military after they became citizens here, and were proud patriotic veterans by the time of the meeting. The Cuban woman told my parents, in roughly these words, “I just don’t understand how young people in this nation are so brainwashed. Whenever they say ‘it wasn’t real Socialism,’ my response is always ‘I and my husband have lived in it, and let me tell you, yes it was and always is.’ The young people of Cuba back then are a mirror of you young Socialists in America today. And you will always get the same result.”
Bottom line my family took from the mouth of experienced wisdom: Socialism will always create totalitarianism and poverty. There is no right way to do it. It’s all wrong all the time.
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In Canada, we paid good money for our socialist industries but found they couldn't turn a profit but instead were a big drag on the public purse.
@@novinceinhosic3531Hell-care is probably a good example. It's the same where I live, actually. Extremely long wait-lists for many important examinations and surgeries, low quality service (if you survive long enough to get the help you need), old and understaffed clinics and hospitals, underpaid and burned out doctors and nurses, scarcity of medicine and all supplies in general, etc. It's a perfect example of what a Socialist system has to offer.
I actually got around to reading Marx one day, and I was surprised to see that not much of what he actually thought was an actionable plan for political change. He actually said that given the conditions of the time, the rule had to be "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work," and that they actually should only be paid if they work because of the problem of scarcity. The more popular motto was apparently intended for a post-scarcity society where human labor isn't needed to produce an abundance of goods... but it sounded nice and became the rallying cry of leftists everywhere, who tried to promise people something that even Marx didn't think was realistic in the present day when he wrote. If they actually understood Marx, they would have understood that capitalism was mostly a result of the Industrial Revolution and was an improvement over feudalism. And that the next phase will only be possible with another revolution that makes human labor unnecessary. As long as people have to work to produce goods, capitalism will be needed. But if, say, humans become obsolete due to AI, what else can we really do? Let all the tech companies who invented it get richer and richer while everyone else lives on subsidies or starves to death because their labor isn't needed anymore? That would be the point at which we'd just have to reconsider our whole economic system... when it's no longer possible for people to add value to society through their own labor and get paid because there is nothing left the average person can do. I don't think communism is achievable with 20th or 19th century technology where scarcity and human labor are still big issues. But I also am not sure how we can continue capitalism in a society where goods are not scarce and the average human is incapable of contributing anything because AI and robots are doing all the work. I think if an arrangement like communism ever comes about, it will come about more naturally, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, mostly because the technology is ready, and not because someone tried to force progress through the state. Sometimes I think the old feudalists who lost power back then took "communism" as inspiration to rebrand themselves for a new era, rehash all their old talking points against capitalism from a pro-worker lens, and then tried to recreate a more modern feudalism with rhetoric more appealing to a new age and a bit more idealism. The timeline would make sense... there would have still been a lot of people who remembered the pre-Industrial ways and thought capitalism and industrialization were causing society to lose something, and the new communism/socialism might have seemed like the answer to getting it back.
All of the heretofore "socialist/communist" countries in name have been, in fact, totalitarian states. Both China and Vietnam have (thus far) succeeded because the governments have loosened controls in the pursuit of self-preservation (prodded on a bit by the collapse of the Combloc). Cuba and the Hermit Kingdom-embracing the "traditional" totalitarian grasp have (the former, with the assistance of the continued US anti-Cuba policies) continue to fail. The hybrid model of Nordic social-democracy works exceedingly well. They surpass the US on numerous quality of life indices. With proper structures in place, societies thrive and all of the people benefit. When the system is driven by greed for wealth and power, society will fracture and eventually collapse. This holds true for the simplest of communes to the pinnacle of capitalist nations.
They say it wasn't real socialism to give them an excuse to do it again, its just that simple.
The common marxist plebs think "real socialism" is when they get everything for free for all of their lives, so when that doesn't happen, they say it "wasn't real".
Really doesn't matter, all of these systems involve humans so expect: greed, lies, violence, etc.
True, all governments are, or eventually will become evil. It's coded into the system and there's nothing that can change it.
You know what’s nice? Working hard for what you can get, getting it and keeping it. That’s about as good as life gets.
Under capitalism your boss pays you only a fraction of what you're actually worth
Now tell me where pure capitalism has been practiced and how it worked out.
Nearly every modern economy is a mixed economy.
we have a joke in Poland. Never ask woman for her age, man for his wages and Party leaders how many hours they've worked in a factory.
No one rules alone, even if you can be the benevolent dictator, can you really be sure that everyone who works for you is also going to be benevolent?
Funny story, I don't have cable but I recently was gifted a DVD of "The Handmaid's Tale" as a Christmas present. Yes, I opened it early and watched some of it because I don't have that many hours to waste in a day. One thing I did notice when this old video popped up for some reason on my youtube was a stark similarity. At first I was confused but it made complete sense that the link is complete and total with the two following phrases"
1. From each according to their ability and to each according to their needs.
2. The abolition of the private ownership of the means of production.
In short, "The Handmaid's Tale" is literally the embodiment of a socialist utopia.
You have never read or seen "The Handmaids Tale". It is totally about a society with massive wealth and social inequality from late stage capitalism falling into Fascism with a side order of religious nationalism and class bigotry.
You are describing 1984 which is a dystopia of totalitarian communism where everything is owned by the state distributed in meager portions to the workers while a tiny elite live in isolated luxury.
I would have liked to see you delve more on exactly why the US communes failed, and if any succeeded for any length of time. Let's steelman the argument. What does the *most successful* socialist experiment look like, and what can we learn from that? Because, I imagine it might be possible to have 30 like-minded people in a close-knit community all helping each other. But the moment the commune is big enough to not know, *and explicitly trust,* your neighbors, is the point where force would have to come in.
There was a Spanish commune that lasted until a bigger, badder socialist named Franco destroyed it.
Pretty obvious if you look at how things are organized in a socialist community. There are some that pull their weight by doing physical work, while others think they can "contribute" to society by writing poems or painting. Since everyone gets equal treatment, those that do actual work will eventually realize how bad of a deal this is for them and leave, which then quickly leads to the system's collapse.
The communes that lasted the longest were based around religious cults some of which had 100s of members. The story of Jim Jones shows how that all ended. Don't drink the kool-aid.
I love how Americans remember how awful Stalin and his communism but not how many kids died during industrial revolution as there was no regulation on how much labourers can be exploited
And that's part of the reason communism became popular
Yes communism is bound to turn into Dictatorship but as for now
Partially socialist countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden where you don't have to sell one kidney to save another in the name of healthcare is much much better than US their education system is good, kids don't usually turn into dickheads because they know healthcare and education is covered all they have to do is focus on their goals
And mark my words when human labour especially on white collar jobs becomes less and less significant you'd see what true capitalism looks like.
You need to read REAL history. Children worked for thousands of years, long before the Industrial Revolution. Children did farm work from the age of about five-years-old. The older they grew the harder they worked. It was common for twelve-year-olds to plow the fields and use a sickle, causing countless accidents and deaths.
The Industrial Revolution is what finally permitted people to leave the farm and move to cities where jobs were more plentiful. Children continued to work for a while, but as productivity grew with new technology income grew which allowed more families to send children to school rather than requiring them to work.
Communism became more popular because average workers felt envious of those who harnessed the new technology and prospered because of it. Their envy and jealousy was fueled by the greed of the elite union bosses, media moguls and politicians who learned how to channel that hatred to grow their own power.
We are currently in a wage based economy. People use wages to buy goods and services. But, over the course of this century more and more jobs will be done by robotics and AI till only about 10% of the people actually have a job. Obviously a wage based economy won't work anymore. Socialism may be necessitated by the failure of the current model with the dreaded guaranteed income becoming the norm.
Socialism - great system, wrong species.
Socialism - awful system that destroys economic motivation and requires extreme violence to implement.
Unless you are suggesting that it is a great system for a species of robots with no free will whatsoever, then sure. As long as free will exists socialism is awful and destructive.
Its been tried, you do realise that the KIBBUTZ system was the most beautiful version of it.... borne out of tragedy. Alas, it took two generations for it to fail. Strange how its NEVER used as an example.
Because it relied on faith and strict religious observances as a foundation. Not so with faithless socialism that relies on fear and compliance without faith.
@@handimanjay6642 you're very wrong. I have visited and have family living there and that is pure nonsense... I know three generations who lived there and they're not one bit religious and they welcomed many non Jewish to work there for years and years. So you haven't a true picture only just what the academics have pushed to distract from the reality.
I have relations of 3 generations of adults and now a new generation as young children. I've been to a wedding there... eaten with in the communal canteen. They have welcomed travellers from all around the world to work and experience the way they life. Religious observance was very much non existant@@handimanjay6642
So you have absolutely NO CLUE. It was very much kommie living - children were even taken away from the parents and raised in huge halls by carers. Parents saw them one hour a day as they were the Communities' children@@handimanjay6642
that's where the saying "it takes a village to raise a child comes from" you can see echoes of this today when they yell - the children of America.... they are the children of the parents.@@handimanjay6642
The author of this video failed to include many things, such as:
1. Karl Max, He was the son of millionaires, after spending his inheritance on alcohol and women, he married a rich widow where he again spent her fortune, but before that he impregnated one of his maids. It was at that moment when he had nothing that he began his political role of asking the government to provide everything to its citizens, but when he had money he never helped anyone.
2. Nor was it mentioned how Karl Max wrote a manifesto in which he said that all loyalty of the individual should be to the government and attacked the structures of the family and churches. In addition to saying that the government should have the power to eliminate inferior and undesirable races from its territory. These ideas caught the attention of a young Adolf Hitler who used them to create his own political party called: Socialist Party of German Workers, also known as NAZIS.
3. He also said the final goal of socialism is communism, taking into account that many aspires to a system that murdered more than 120 million people, 70 million more if you count the dead of WWII since Nazism is a form of socialism to create their ideal society is somewhat worrying.
4. It is also worrying that young people do not realize that the only way to apply the ideas of that idiot Karl Max is by taking away all their rights and leaving them at the mercy of the government. There are socialist countries where they send you to prison for 7 years in prison for displaying a poster that criticizes the government.
5. Nor is it mentioned how socialist/communist leaders live in palaces like emperors while their people starve.
The fact that “private ownership” is one of the key aspects taken away in communism, that just makes me worried. Why should I share my business with someone when I have no objection towards it?
Wasn't the Jim Jones sanctuary in French Guyana a commune? How did that turn out?
Cool video glad i came across this channel
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is the credo of plantation slavery.
From each according to their abilities means someone else will test and determine what you MUST do. To each according to their needs means someone else will tell you what you need.
Historically there's a select few that tell you what to do and need everything to compensate them for their exhausting work deciding for everyone else.
This is one of the few explanations that at least is accurate as to the definition of socialism.
There is also the case of farmers rights, you cannot just turn freemen into peasants, this is how the Holodomor started,
So the government must control the means of production. What is the ultimate means of production? The individual person is the ultimate means of production.
In some forms of socialism, sure. In others, the ownership is shared between the workers of such and such company. No private ownership don't necessarily to state ownership. For example, this is actually quite common in agriculture in some countries. Would this work applied to every company of large country? Certainly not in a short time scale at least...
The problem is that in an extremist society the distinction of left and right is pointless, the outcome is the same.
germany and the soviet union got to the same conclussion, targeted the same people and had the same outcome. just got there by a different path.
That's because the problem is not the ideologies, but the existence of a government. If you grant power over a whole country to a select few, they are almost guaranteed to take as much as they can from them, while giving back as little as possible.
@@rap1df1r3 For the same reason you just pointed out we need something to keep the strong from becoming warlords, usually we pick governments because other alternatives are worse.
@@ZackeTheBrute All places with a weak gov are way better for those who are smart and strive for greatness. A strong gov is only good for those that are lazy and enjoy being slaves. In fact, the only way you're guaranteed to be extorted, harassed and oppressed is by having a strong gov. Also, all of the significant wars were started by govs, not warlords.
Great channel, Nick. Instead of creating an egalitarian society, socialism invariably ends up benefiting only the Ruling Class, with the rest of us their bondservants in serfdom. The idealists and utopians presume (or at least say) that the noble attributes of humankind will prevail to make the perfect society -- except that they forget the fact that human nature is inherently flawed, and left to itself will always seek its own gain.
you mean, like how capitalism is currently working now? only benefiting the rich and fuck everyone else?
What typically happens is never the initial aim of any version of socialism. It's failure isn't that it's a corrupt idea, as all the idiot conservatives say, but that it's easily corruptible. To work at scale, socialism must be paired with a system that prevents capture and ensures sustainable reciprocity.
Bingo!
You could argue we haven't tried real capitalism as well. Somehow the government gets involved in the private market every time. So really it's human nature that prevents utopia.
The Government are also the owners of the market so it's basically "real" Capitalism as well. Real Socialism have been tried and it did work. It's just too complex to explain Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology of Socialism that it gets you bored and leads you to despise it as you are rather not into its ideas. But if you want some evidences on why it will work. I mentioned that it had tried before. 1917 USSR to 1956. From a very backward semi feudal state with extreme Famine and conflicts to a United and advance country in just 23 years which Capitalist like US despite starting almost 200 years earlier, gets overtaken by USSR and also the US Economic Depression In 1930s.
As an average capitalism enjoyer, I also realized that every time capitalism has problems, capitalists also claim, "That wasn't _real_ capitalism. That was 'corporatism' or 'fascism' or 'capitalism that was crippled by a socialist welfare state'.".
I'm not saying that any of those accusations are necessarily invalid, I'm just saying beware the "no true Scotsman" fallacy or false accusations of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy on either side.
Sure, fallacies are fallacies no matter who committed them. The problem begins with the word "capitalism". Its not at all an "ism" and the word itself is a politically invented term to criticize the free market, by socialists. The second problem is that people then adopted the term in a non-pejorative way, so at any given moment people aren't even talking about the same thing. What is "capitalism" to those for it, is not what "capitalism" is for those who are against it.
Its basically the free market. The ability for me to engage in voluntary trade with you without restraint or taxation by a third party...The trade is between you and me, nobody else.
@@ScandinavianHeretic facts
The gov’t tried this in the 1930’s & it prolonged the Great Depression. We would have lost WWII had the Roosevelt administration not changed its policies towards capitalist markets. Hitler hoped we would keep the authoritarian socialist & non aggressive views of the Roosevelt admin toward our markets...
Too many of FDR interferences into the economy are still present today, and are still failing to achieve intended results. Wage control policies created mass unemployment and drove up the cost of most everything. The new deal and ccc camps created spending deficits that are still happening today.
All in all FDR was a complete failure. His road to hell is paved with good intentions.
That’s right!!!
Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly" is a great reference for exactly what you are mentioning. I also highly recommend "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes! Thank you for watching!
Wow. Nick looks so different without the beard.
One strange modern creation as a consequence of feminism in western society is plenty of career women in high positions of power in government who have no children. Their desire to "mother" however has not gone away, instead channelled into a desire to "protect" something else, mainly the poor and immigrant culture who do not work, with endless socialist handouts. This has been pushed into more extremes in recent years to unsustainable levels, however arguing against it results in being labelled as a classist, bigot or racist, all illogical but effective methods of sending your public persona straight to gulag.
Simply because a real socialism unachievable under global capitalism economy. For socialism to work you need that whole world become socialism. Because what capitalism do is offering a high valued people high value life in expense of low valued people's life. I never heard, that the people with poor skills will migrate to a capitalist countries and succeed.
No. You missed the point. Real socialism has been tried. Those attempts that become tyrannical rule are legitimate. The only way socialism works is if everyone obeys the rules created. Only way you can make people follow the rules is to use force. Once you go down the road of using force it sets the course and evolves into tyranny. Every time. You will never see the envisioned goal of socialism because it cannot be achieved with human beings it can only be achieved by robots. It never makes it past the reshaping of the economy and industry. It never makes it past establishing the new order. Because in the process of trying to do that the same conclusion is made by those in charge. It's always force must be used.
In socialism the State becomes the Corporation. In capitalism the Corporation becomes the State. What we really want is best described as a Free Market Economy, where every man is allowed to extract the goods of the earth or his intellect and prosper thereby. But if one man or a group of men end up owning everything, then the majority of men end up owning nothing. I think the real question to answer here is how much can one man own before he infringes upon the rights of his fellow men to also own and prosper?
thats why we have monopoly laws. to prevent the unfair control of the market by a small group of elites. how ever we dont use those laws anymore because......well corruption
@@nickvanachthoven7252not really, if the government never has the power it does today to regulate the corporation wouldn’t be the government because want is the profit? Government is always corrupt so why give it the tools to use that corruption?
Tell it like it is!
Thanks for watching!
Marx: "All production of value comes from labor"
Also Marx: "We must seize the means of production"
So Marx said people is entitled to fruit of labor made by other people??? Does that mean slavery??
@@VeryProPlayerYesSir1122 Yes.
There is a quote about serfdom in this video. I bring this up because in another video by TIK he points out how people try to "turn back the clock", (or in other words) make the world a kingdom where they are the king and everyone else is a slave.
Why hasn’t real capitalism ever been tried?
Because of vacuum of power. Evil groups of people will always step up and try to force their own rules upon others.
When bro said Venezuela is a socialist country that was kinda rude ngl
Plenty of people will watch this and still say, "those weren't real attempts at socialism..."
According to “them” we will “own nothing and be happy” by the end of this decade. We’ll just rent everything we need, including clothes, and have the items delivered to us. If we’re not allowed to own personal property, and we’re forced to rent things we need, SOMEONE HAS RIGHTS TO OWN PERSONAL PROPERTY, because they will be who WE rent things from. So, who is the “they” who WILL have rights to property ownership? Well, it’s the same ones trying to sell US the idea that not owning personal property, and renting everything we need instead, will make us all very happy. Now, I ask you this, if not owning personal property is such a joyous experience, why don’t THEY want to join in on all this happiness? I’d say it’s because the only ones who benefit from such a scheme, and the only ones who will be happy with such a way of life, are those who own the property, and are making a boatload of money off of renting it to the saps who believed their scam. THEY can go somewhere with their corrupt schemes too, because only a dolt would submit themselves to such a system. I’ll die standing before I live on my knees as a bondservant to “them”.
The people who rents are called ELOI and the people who rents are called MORLOCKS.
Since there are no rewards for excellence, there is none. Kind of a death to society thing.
But at least a bunch of lazy marxists would get to receive UBI and keep doing nothing but complaining all day long.
Well produced , well said.
Thank you!
You’re a powerful voice young man. Please keep pushing.
Grampa
Question: if you can only take "according to your needs", what does this entail exactly? Does it allow you to pursue hobbies such as learning a musical instrument, for example? If the idea is that you have no disposable income because you only take what you need, where are you going to get a musical instrument from? Or suppose you want to paint, or take up a sport, or learn a language, how are you supposed to source the equipment and training materials required? What about work - who decides what your "best ability" is, and what if you aspire to something else, and wish to source training to allow you to do that instead? Can somebody explain this to me, or does "true socialism" really only work if everyone has no aspirations beyond do whatever job they're "supposed" to do and waste any free time (and talent) they may have?
It sounds like it would work if nobody ever had any disagreements. I even had somebody say something like that recently, that if all the workers were allowed to run something in their best interest, we would all be better off. But maybe the entire working class isn't some monolithic group think entity.
I mean what if someone said, "there's a lot of division and conflict among different religions, so we should just form a new one that everyone will want to follow."
Under socialist systems, the leaders always end up deciding that they need everything, because they deserve it, because they are the leaders organizing society, and that everyone else - well, they weren't grandiose enough to be social engineers, so they don't really deserve all that much.
Socialism/communism remind me a great deal of an M. C. Escher engraving. Looks really awesome on paper, but can never be accomplished in reality.
Capitalism isn’t perfect, but at least we don’t have to build a wall to keep our people inside 😊
Yes they do actually, look at the Congo 😂
@@RomanII499 it isn’t capitalist
@@lucasworktv Yes it is, the entire economy is privatized
@@RomanII499 where? How?
@@lucasworktv Labor unions have virtually no power and there is no democratic decision making in private businesses. The workers work long hours for Western businesses.
In capitalism you can become rich if you have the drive and motivation to do great things that deliver value to others. In socialism they want everyone to be equally poor and reliant on the government.
man, isn't it amazing that we live in an economic system where we're free to try the opposite system without being afraid of being tortured in a gulag.
It's almost like it's not bad to live here
bro the capitalism have done the same thing in America latina.
Somewhere it's even worse, because the situation have been create by a foreigner country, not by the own peoples
The video is spot on. There are many kinds of socialism, socialism is designed to fail, and then naive socialists complain that real socialism has never been tried... Socialism is doomed from the start. 1) The "appeal" of socialism only exists for people who don't know what it (or capitalism) is. Those people conflate capitalism with "corporate philosophy", assuming it is greedy and profit-focused, instead of it as a system of economic organization with private banks and personal property protections. 2) Socialists were children who suddenly turned against their own childish selfishness, and assumed that socialism had a big-picture, moral, community-focused agenda for the betterment of the community. 3) Socialism is for people who are bad at math. They see two numbers, say that one is bigger than the other, and add this is not egalitarian for those numbers. Socialists disregard government's role in increasing inflation, and the floating-point math that requires flexibility and exponential increases over time. Maintaining socialism requires continuous monitoring and wealth redistribution. I've been to 26 countries outside the US, and socialism is disappearing everywhere that people are allowed to be educated. 4) If we were to be on a plane that crashed in the Amazon, money would be worthless and we'd have an immediate need for survival. We'd try a temporary socialism, and then go to specialization of function later. You only find the threat of socialism where there is gloom and doom, and an irrational fear for survival.
Socialismcexist as critics of the capitalism, then socialism is based on the knowledge of the capitalism.
The reality is that before socialism résine, and its influence in western countries, by keft wing gouvernements for applying left wing politic, or by right wing governements or avoidingthe rise of a revolution , capitalism was about an oppressive system over workers,where they have no right, and kept in misery or poverty, it was authoritarian for the workers.
It is history, facts.
then the defense of a non tegulated capitalism is not the defense of the freedom but of the authoritarian oppression of the workets by the capitalists.
@@jean-louispech4921 Completely false. Elements of socialism go back over 6,000 years. It is as old as slavery, and pre-dates money. Earliest forms of socialism refer to a primitive lifestyle/tradition. Karl Marx was in favor of a proletarian utopia, and some 170 years ago he said the thing he found most frightening in the world was the British Industrial Revolution. He said that new inventions "enslaved" the worker majority into working for a new, higher standard of living. The workers, it turned out, enjoyed the fruits of independent- from- government markets (lights, indoor plumbing, automobiles, private loans, etc.). Marx also put his myopic eye to economics, and overlaid it with his "interpretive lens of oppression." He saw incidental conflict and called it a negative consequence of unplanned economic progress. Socialism always goes broke, as its adherents fail to incorporate inflation into their math-phobic calculations. It also goes broke because its massive government programs for the continuous redistribution of power, wealth, and property are extremely expensive and arbitrary in execution.
@@paulroyal2177
Comment from z jlind ignorant.
Thank you you are a joke.
I escaped socialist Soviet Union into the West. I wish those who claim it wasn't "Real Socialism" would say it back then to KGB...
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite.
-Old Soviet joke
I don't get it
If you don't get it you don't get it. Nothing to be ashamed of, you are in the company of 90% of Western academia.
Sorry, can't help you, explaining a joke may kill its humor.
@@dragoneyr1632
“Under capitalism, man exploits and oppresses man. Under Socialism, those roles are reversed.”
-Old eastern bloc joke
If we say, "Under *crony* capitalism..." that is even more true, IMO.
So we have no choice but to strip away our social safety net especially SS and Medicare??? Are you aware that the wealth disparity in America is on an unsustainable trajectory??? The answer is to regulate capitalism such that an aristocracy isn’t our future…. Sure we need individual incentive and reward but we cannot have the situation where those owning the means of production can act with impunity towards needing jobs.
When i was poor and homeless i never once received a dime from anyone. When i made low wages but had a place i never once received a dime or help from anyone. When i made average pay and had a nice house people started needing help and a place to stay...every last one betrayed me in one way or another. Now, i make great money after working my ass off all those years and dreaming, i rent, not own...at least once a week i hear a comment about my income being high or how i have nice things i should share the wealth. No. I was told as a 15 year old kid in school working a full time job and living on my own that " i need to do for myself, because its a life lesson, its not anyones responsibility but your own to feed you or put a roof over your head" and i took that to heart. Now that im successful, i find people think the opposite is true. And its not the poor that want in my experience, nor the wealthy...the ones that want the most from you for nothing are the ones most capable of doing it themselves but to lazy to do it, the middle class.
There are approximately
- 4.5 million federal civilian employees
- 20 million state civilian employees
- 40 million civilians working in the aerospace/defense industry (MIC)
- 4 million civilian contract workers that service government contracts
- 1.4 million military personnel
- 99 million people in the social safety net
About half of the civilian employees are paper shufflers. If they didn't do their jobs at all, nobody would notice.
Given all this, America IS the most successful socialist country of all time, though the government keeps telling the people it's based on capitalism. It's strange that the people calling for socialism in America seem to hate this socialist system. The end of capitalism in America started in 1913 when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law.
If we liquidated the wealth of every billionaire in America, we could use their wealth to pay all government spending for about 1 year. Thereafter, the vast majority of American product would be agricultural. We allow billionaires to exist so we can continue to misrepresent America as a capitalist country, but even openly socialist countries like China have their billionaires.