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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (3014)	10/31/2000 10:04:01 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

I think what you're talking about isn't necessarily a species of socialism, if socialism is collective ownership of the means of production (and distribution) (and exchange), but more just a system, like for example free enterprise, that incorporates a humane safety net. Helping the unfortunate isn't so easy to do "well,", though, is it? I mean, it's complicated. Economies are complicated, and human psychology is complicated, and help can inadvertently hinder, as we have seen demonstrated in the predictable phenomenon of multi-generation welfare families. On the other hand, if a particular social/economic/political system entails a built in certain percentage of its population being inevitably unemployed, aka "unfortunate," it would seem only simple fairness to see to it that those citizens, for filling those unenviable slots, get a little butter on the crumbs that fall from the table. It is complicated. I don't rue my taxes, either, X; at least not those spent on helping unfortunate people. <<I love the idealism of socialists.>> I don't! I used to, but now I have no patience with it at all. It doesn't feel like "idealism" any more, since the dissolution of and revelations about the Soviet Empire. It feels like ideology gone mad and blind. Of course their claim is that socialism was never tried. Any time it is tried, it won't work, so they will be able always to claim that it was never tried. And too many socialists (not by any means all) simply refused to acknowledge what the Soviet Union was for decades after that became clear. I don't call that idealism, I call it ideology uber alles. Most socialists also seem to be boring people, is my experience, though that is not true of Christopher Hitchens, who calls himself a democratic socialist. I think it's because people who are utterly predictable are by definition boring. If you know someone is a socialist, you know what he or she is likely to say about EVERY ISSUE THERE IS. A socialist will be, for example, utterly PC. Capitalism, which works so well in many ways, had better figure out pretty fast some way to reconcile itself with saving the planet, which is unfortunately not a profitable enterprise, or we are all in deep shit.