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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mark silvers who wrote (2376)	7/29/1999 10:09:00 AM
From: Catfish	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

mark, Think income redistribution. Then, tell us how that attracts people who are doers? The party philosophy of the Socialist Democrats want people who are sheep. They provide benefits (with our taxes) for votes.

To: mark silvers who wrote (2376)	7/29/1999 11:12:00 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Mark, what you say is true. However, it has become increasingly clear in the latter half of the 20th century that capitalism is a better development model, and promises greater economic reward in absolute terms even within more developed countries. Basically, the Austrians and the Chicago school have won the "efficiency" debate. Thus, the new buzz- phrase in social democratic circles is "the social market" or "market socialism". The problem is that there is no clear conception thus far of what that would entail. At a minimum, it just looks like the welfare state, using tax revenue generated by an essentially capitalist system to promote various social goals: in other words, more or less what we have now. Sometimes it manifests itself in proposals for employee shareholding. The problem is that in order to maintain a market in capital, the shares have to be negotiable, and experience has shown that most employees trade in their shares for immediate consumption within several years. There are other versions, like focusing on the socialization of health, and leaving most everything else alone, but the point is that the old goal of approximate income equalization and central planning is pretty much gone, and therefore it is unclear whether anything is left except fine- tuning welfare capitalism. It is pretty much true that only flakes or people with little exposure to economics continue to believe in the old- time socialist religion...