Quote:
Originally Posted by piece-itpete
Perhaps I'm not being clear - how can the government, say, tell me what to plant or produce, or where I can live or how much a house I can have, and I still be a free man?
Pete
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Look at communism as a employee owned company with a voices/votes/power coming from both labor and management equally for the benefit of the whole company/country. Tie wages/compensation/bonuses(i.e. vacation time) to production and initiative. (Yeah,I'm an old piecework type of guy
) Sounds like a kinder, gentler form of capitalism, doesn't it? Except the only owners/shareholders are us. Of course there are a lot of details to be worked out and those should only be implemented by a vote of the citizens. It would undoubtably be a mixture of old style and new style economics and actually take a century or more to achieve. Mao tried to do it in a generation and screwed the pooch and two or three generations of Chinese in the process. Who can forget the massively stupid & sick anti intellectual Great Leap Forward that he tried in the sixties?
As others have said it has only been attempted at gunpoint and so destined to fail. We get hung up on words that don't resemble the actual construct envisioned due to propaganda both for and against. That communism failed as the Soviets tried to do it was a clusterfuc*k before it got off the ground. Stalin was a gangster plain and simple who murdered any opposition real or imagined and became an ally of convenience only when the blitzkrieg was turned on him. Just look at their previous 300 years of Czarist history. There's no way a leopard changes their spots that easily or quickly.
We have a unique condition of being an egalitarian country from the git go (allegedly
) without a deeply authoritarian societal structure like Russia and China. Yeah, I'm being an apologist towards the British crown in this argument, (though they had the Magna Carta and a nasty civil war to build on). Please don't tar and feather me!
I think whatever we come up with will be uniquely American but having the one per centers in the driver's seat of the bus is foolish and shortsighted. They aren't qualified by their track record as displayed by their handling of the economy both in this century, the last century and the one before that. Like Stalin and Mao they are more sociopathic gangsters than someone to be admired IMO. I don't see Romney as any expert. So far he's more like King Midas in reverse.