FAKE NEWS EXPOSED: A Service of PoliticalChat.com

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by whell

And you claim you're a moderate, which makes me laugh out loud. With tripe like you posted above, you attempt to position yourself as knowledgable about " the difference between a soci@list and a social democrat (the former being autocratic, the latter democratic)." Bullshit.

The difference between a soci@list and a social democrat is leftist word-play, and a means to an end. Whether you want to talk about it includes forms of libertarian socializm, market socializm, reformist socializm, revolutionary socializm, ethical socializm, liberal socializm, social democracy, or what the hell every socializm, the end goal is the same.

Don't take my word for it. Friedrich Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom" makes the case quite convincingly...

Hayek and his Austrian School are not the last word on economics. I wonder what he'd say about the fact that Scandanavian countries have the highest standards of living in the world as well as the highest level of happiness of their citizens while scoring higher on the Freedom Index than the US does.

Indeed, the most cited criticism of the Austrian School is that it "lacks scientific rigor and rejects scientific methods and the use of empirical data in modelling economic behavior." In other words, real world economic data and performance don't support Hayek's theories. Citing Hayek as the determinate voice on economics is akin to holding Ayn Rand as the determinate voice on political science (which, given your take on most things, makes sense).

Your argument is that North Korea and Denmark have effectively the same economic and social models (or that Denmark's will ultimately evolve into North Korea's). Indeed, the contrast between the two illustrates my very point. Soci@lism is an authoritarian doctrine and Social Democracy is not. So, the key difference between the far left in the Democratic Party and the far right of the Republican Party (actually the majority nowadays) is the Democratic fringe is still democratic whereas a significant portion of the Republican Party embraces authoritarianism.

The distillation of your argument (i.e., that Trumpism represents freedom and not authoritarianism) is so ridiculous as to be laughable. In fact, the United States became measurably less free under Trump.