What, exactly, is socialism? Again this discussion seems necessary.

Well, for starters, you could Google "apartheid" and start reading.

People are legally and forcibly required to PURCHASE permission to exercise their liberty to use what nature provided. But in order to acquire the purchase price, they are first required, by legal force, to pay landowners full market value just for permission to work, to shop, and to access economic opportunity.

Ownership of nature. Try to find a willingness to know facts.

 

Nope. That is nothing but ahistorical bull$#!+.

No. It was a quick and dirty way to secure the property rights in the fruits of their labor of those who produced fixed improvements, just as slavery was a quick and dirty way to avoid wasting the labor of defeated enemies while preventing them from presenting a threat in the future.

 

Sure it is.

For a real thing: people living in proximity to each other, under a single governing system, who consider themselves members of the group so constituted.

Government is an institution that can ideally act for society if it is accountable to the people it governs; but it is not the same as society as it can also be imposed by force. Society constrains its member through its norms, which members themselves voluntarily enforce.

 

Ah, no, they did not. People had property in the fruits of their labor, including producer goods, which is prohibited under communism. So you are just objectively wrong.

O B J E C T I V E L Y.

True. And one way to increase their numbers and thus their strength was by recognizing and securing property in the fruits of labor because that gets the incentives right. But it is prohibited under communism.

Warfare over land and resources has been observed even in chimp societies. But it turned out that once people were producing significant wealth, cooperation and peaceful coexistence within a large community was a more effective survival and reproduction strategy than the Hobbesian war of all against all, and at that point Darwin took over. Which is why today almost all people live in large nation-states numbering in the millions.

 

I already have. You see it a lot in advanced democracies other than the USA. You appear never to have lived in a place like Switzerland, Japan, Canada, Norway, Australia or Singapore.

Garbage.

 

They stop people from exercising their liberty rights to use land unless they buy permission to do so.

 

Sure, if you are the one paying everyone else just compensation for what you take from them by excluding them from the land. Of course, if it's my yard, normally I would be the one paying everyone else for what I took from them.

 

Hehe. I don't think you know many commies....

 

Society's undertaking not to let its members forcibly deprive each other of their natural ability to do what they are otherwise able to do.

 

Both, in different contexts. Liberty is what the right to liberty is a right to.

I feel like I am talking to one of those early unintelligent language programs that just followed some grammar rules, and didn't actually understand anything they were saying.

 

But that's the inevitable end result of private landowning. Typically things get so bad well before that happens that the landowners are overthrown by internal or external violence.

Landowning violates everyone's rights to liberty.

 

No you have not. And I DO live in one of those nations. A far more 'socialist' nation than America, as it happens. And our wealth divide is happening at the same rate yours is, because we cannot make those who refuse to participate, participate. It hasn't worked. You cannot make people participate - and when you make it so damned easy for them NOT to participate, they won't.

Now tell me how you will get a massive multicultural population (all on very different pages) to agree to drive this from the bottom up. In short, you never will. That leaves ONLY top down ... ie, totalitarianism.

 

Are you for real, now?

If I was any more 'red' I'd be banned for life.

 

Yes, I most certainly HAVE.

Then wake the frink up and smell the coffee.

I'm not American.

Sure it has. It's not a question of how many participate but of what those who do participate achieve.

Those who are interested will. The rest are unlikely to contribute much anyway.

I already have.

Nonsense. Totalitarianism -- or authoritarianism -- is always a danger, but a lot has already been accomplished from the bottom up. Your country has labor standards laws. Do you think they were written by the privileged?

 

I was talking about all the commies you don't know, not you.

 

Socialism accepts that efficiency and equity go hand in hand. False libertarians, typically parroting information fed to them by organisations funded by big business, push a fake agenda where equity necessarily attacks economic efficiency. It is an economic ignorance generated through influence costs spawned by market power.

Socialism generates democracy within the workplace. It is ironically libertarian in its nature as it eliminates coercion within the labour contract.

 

Bad news for you .. I know many. Real ones, too. Not middle-class posturing Progressives who think they're Marxists but live the lives of flaming capitalists.

 

This reads as one long backpeddle/flail.

 

No it freaking doesn't. It can only survive when all members agree to limited or nil choice.

See above. No form of collectivism can function in the presence of internal libertarianism. Each going their own way spells disaster for such a model. And there is no coercion in a voluntary collective.

 

So if you don't want everyone to own their land, then who do you want to own all their land?

 

So which particular people would you prefer own this particular bit of land?

 

So pay all 7.7 billion people in the community?

 

You continue to replicate right wing grunt. The labour contract is coercive, by definition. That's even accepted by orthodox economics, as it acknowledges that wages are not consistent with productivity criteria. And it's just factual to note that socialism generates democracy within the workplace. Indeed, that is a primary reason why the empirical evidence finds that worker ownership generates productivity gains. Such democracy improves decision making and ensures the diffusion of information (which is necessarily restricted in the traditional firm through the need of inefficient hierarchy for divide and conquer purpose)

 

I guess that's why worker owned firms are kicking the butts of other firms? Because they're more productive?

 

it always leads to totalitarianism, always...
yet, the wishful remain ignorant to that fact