Having slept on it, I think we agree here on the majority of points and are in danger of quibbling over fairly fringe issues of terminology and exactly where lines should be drawn. I certainly am not a right-wing anarchist favouring some Ayn Rand style stateless system. I believe we need nation states and we need those nation states to act as regulatory referees and to provide a cushion to help even out the rises and falls in the market and those who fall through the system.
But my personal experience and knowledge of history and economics also tells me that governments are no better at running industries and services than private industry, and when the government creates a monopoly for itself that is just as bad for the consumer as a private monopoly. So I am certainly not convinced that nationalisation will solve any problems and I foresee it will create a lot of new ones.
So as I say, it is a matter of where one draws the lines. Most politics in most advanced countries is a back and forth about exactly how much can be taken from the system in tax before it damages the economy too far, and how much regulation is too little or too much before it damages society and the environment. That is really all the battles between normal left and normal right amount to. What is scary is that for the first time in my life there is an extremist hard left party within reach of power. They do not just want to adjust where the normal lines are drawn, they want to completely overthrow the system and change it to something non-capitalist. They call that socialism, not communism, but that is a PR trick since their version of socialism amounts to the same thing. So when I see ordinary mainstream left people denouncing 'capitalism' it scares me. It makes them seem like they are preparing the way for the hard left to introduce the alternatives to capitalism, which are far, far worse.
Now if you see your soft left version of capitalism as an 'alternative to capitalism', that is not so scary. But the problem is to anyone listening it sounds like you are denouncing all capitalism, all free markets, all of the basis of the western economic system. The nuance that you don't like the extremist forms of capitalism but support the moderate ones is getting lost. When Doctor Who says things celebrating the overthrow of capitalism in some future society, there is nuance, no sense that this was an extreme form of capitalism or capitalism gone wrong, because they just used the word capitalism. And if people go around demonizing the system that keeps us all fed, housed, educated, healthy and in luxury our non-capitalist ancestors could not imagine - then is it any surprise when the young who don't know any better turn out to vote for extremists who have promised to overthrow the system? The West needs to start standing up for capitalism, all of us, or we will find the young want to replace it with communism.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2017-06-17 06:41 am (UTC)But my personal experience and knowledge of history and economics also tells me that governments are no better at running industries and services than private industry, and when the government creates a monopoly for itself that is just as bad for the consumer as a private monopoly. So I am certainly not convinced that nationalisation will solve any problems and I foresee it will create a lot of new ones.
So as I say, it is a matter of where one draws the lines. Most politics in most advanced countries is a back and forth about exactly how much can be taken from the system in tax before it damages the economy too far, and how much regulation is too little or too much before it damages society and the environment. That is really all the battles between normal left and normal right amount to. What is scary is that for the first time in my life there is an extremist hard left party within reach of power. They do not just want to adjust where the normal lines are drawn, they want to completely overthrow the system and change it to something non-capitalist. They call that socialism, not communism, but that is a PR trick since their version of socialism amounts to the same thing. So when I see ordinary mainstream left people denouncing 'capitalism' it scares me. It makes them seem like they are preparing the way for the hard left to introduce the alternatives to capitalism, which are far, far worse.
Now if you see your soft left version of capitalism as an 'alternative to capitalism', that is not so scary. But the problem is to anyone listening it sounds like you are denouncing all capitalism, all free markets, all of the basis of the western economic system. The nuance that you don't like the extremist forms of capitalism but support the moderate ones is getting lost. When Doctor Who says things celebrating the overthrow of capitalism in some future society, there is nuance, no sense that this was an extreme form of capitalism or capitalism gone wrong, because they just used the word capitalism. And if people go around demonizing the system that keeps us all fed, housed, educated, healthy and in luxury our non-capitalist ancestors could not imagine - then is it any surprise when the young who don't know any better turn out to vote for extremists who have promised to overthrow the system? The West needs to start standing up for capitalism, all of us, or we will find the young want to replace it with communism.