"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
Literally no one anywhere wants central planning, no one wants America to be anything like Venezuela, these are fevered fantasies of uninformed minds, so feel free to put these lines to bed permanently.
"Essential business" designations are central planning, and I've seen reasonably influential people argue that we could keep them going indefinitely if we had to.
Examples of central planning do not imply a centrally planned economy, just as examples of free markets do not imply a free market economy. Every nation on earth has a mixed economic system (except maybe North Korea?) so let's not waste any more time denying that fact.
While not influential per se, it feels like every response to "people need work / pay" is "the govt can save us, get back in your house moron." The only way that anyone talks about it working is the govt taking over and suspending this or that, paying for this other thing, a few trillion here and there. They are all saying "centrally planned economy" without saying it.
No, you are saying "centrally planned economy" on their behalf. They are calling for extreme but temporary emergency measures to handle what may be the greatest economic crisis of our lifetimes.
Are you seriously confusing support for these measures with support for ending the market system in the United States? Can you see what a fantastical stretch that is?
The GND with its extensive use of private contractors is basically neoliberal like our current DoD. It is structured almost exactly the same as DoD and with a vague never-ending mission would likely take as much resources to fight an enemy that may honestly always exist. A better policy would be focused upon global trade policies to globally incentivize all countries to choose cleaner infrastructure. This sobering reality is one I certainly found refreshing from the Yang climate worldview than the climate alarmist view that civilization ends if we don't go carbon neutral in 8 years aggressively pushing the GND as a gold standard policy.
Let's just look at one (expensive) idea proposed in the GND:
>Upgrading all existing buildings and building new ones so that they achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability.
How is a directive to upgrade all existing buildings, anything but central planning of an entire industry?
That sounds awfully like a nod towards developers and REITs that you'd get property tax breaks and/or credits if you hit LEED certification levels.
What is the problem with that? It's already a thing, just not nationally. You get that pro-jobs angle for contractors, provide a stop-gap when new construction slows servicing existing owners looking to reduce costs.
You're reading the proposals with an ... impractical eye.
Canadian here. Supply management is probably great for many producers. They participate in legal cartels engaged in mandated price-fixing, so this can protect their bottom line. For consumers it keeps prices high on things like dairy (even with the CAD in rough shape, I could still find cheaper cheese just across the border, in the US; pre-covid, mind you).
Most major countries have some kind of scheme in place to fix agriculture prices. In the case of the US there are subsidies that everyone pays, via taxes.
I agree with everything in that link, but it's not a case for socialism. That's because Canada isn't particularly socialist, despite what both right-wing and left-wing Americans claim.
Canada was not founded by religious extremists and evangelical Christianity has no hold here. That's probably the biggest difference and it accounts for a lot, I'd say.
Canada was home to a large number of devout Catholics and Protestants, and has had many important internal conflicts between the two. Read up on Louis Riel for a good introduction.
What we lacked was homogeneity in the religious extremism; thanks to an early balance between French and English settlers there was never long a period when Catholic or Protestant were dominating.
We also enjoyed being the home to English loyalist refugees during the American war of independence... And the destination of the underground railroad.
If you read up the comment thread from my reply, we're talking about socialism, not democratic socialism. So Canada is irrelevant as an example (which was my initial albeit snarky point).
I suspect the downvotes are due to a lack of critical engagement. Even the Holodomor link offers a litany of reasons that aren't just "socialism," and we've been interfering in Venezuela for decades, not limited to: harsh sanctions, coup attempts, cutting off access to foreign markets, blocking access to its own funds stored outside the country, and so on. In addition to all the hoarding of food and medicine inside the country. There's a lot going on, and "third world oil country with US-unfriendly foreign and domestic policy in a region dominated by US interference" certainly also hurts countries that don't have "socialism" to blame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_in_Venezuela
Regarding US government incompetence in benefits: Not everywhere has distributing benefits been so inefficient (see: Denmark or Germany, among others). It's almost like a decades-long program of cutting funding and introducing tons of red tape undermines public confidence in social spending. I'm sure that's unintentional!
Are they though? In order to have socialism, you have to give more money and power to the state. Money and Power in state hands can go in dark directions "for the common good". The culture must be ready for it (like the Danes and Fins but unlike the Russians or Americans); it's really important.
Culture matters. The Nords are more oriented towards social harmony, are culturally homogeneous, have high transparency, low rates of corruption. This means everyone's one the same page more-or-less.
Vs the large diverse cultures of the US (where I'm from) and Russia (where I now live). After living in Russia, it's no surprise that socialism did not work here. Forcing socialism onto cultures when they're not mature enough won't work. Even worse, it leads/would lead to massive oppression and corruption.
It seems to me that the culture is largely forced down or forced to shape on us from the top, especially in the US. The elites, the billionaires and the wealth owners don't want much harmony because they can squeeze the lower layers at their benefit. The current culture appears to have something to do with this but in fact it's a side effect of this increasingly growing gap between the rich and the poor.
Your first paragraph makes a thesis that is not easily falsified by anecdote (both capitalist British Raj India and communist Stalinist Russia had large famines).
However I agree that US food production is already highly centralized, at least where big ag is concerned, with the characteristic that profits fill private pockets while losses are subsidized by the people at large.
In Scandinavia we've had some sort of pragmatic market socialism, not much central planning but reasonable redistribution in various ways. Seems to work fairly well, although large parts of it has been (and is being) dismantled by the liberals (those are the right here, not the left).
Carl Bildt (former Prime Minister of Sweeden) said "Bernie Sanders was lucky to be able to get to the Soviet Union in 1988 and praise all its stunning socialist achievements before the entire system and empire collapsed under the weight of its own spectacular failures." [0]
Lars Løkke Rasmussen (former Prime Minister of Denmark) said "I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy" [1]
Seems like they both reject the idea of them being socialist countries. They are both non-socialist countries that have market economies. They just happen to have a larger welfare state than a lot of countries. Having a large welfare state has nothing to do with socialism though.
Yes, both Carl Bildt and Lars Løkke are liberals and part of dismantling/developing our system into less socialist or "social" if you prefer.
We certainly don't have central planning, and if that was inherent in the word socialism I guess Lars Løkke wouldn't have had to say "far from a socialist planned economy". It is far from that.
It is also, as I see it, increasingly far from a social(ist) system, but we did use to have more of that, and in my opinion (not alone here) it was better.
I am fairly well educated and have had a good salary when I was working (voluntarily not working right now because I have lots of money and prefer to do other things), but like many others around here I prefer that my money gets spent having a functional society to having more pocket money to buy luxury items.
And I know that from a Liberal/libertarian pov I don't have the right to decide that for others, but from my point of view that kind of exaggerated individualism is dysfunctional and individuals don't exist any more or less than groups. We need both rights and pragmatic optimisation of general wellbeing. Everybody is better off when there is less poverty and misery around.
Seriously though, Scandinavia is proof that you can have a free market and social programs at the same time and have it work well. It's when bureaucrats get their fingers into planning the economy when things end up very poorly.
Wait, are you saying that the terms "right/left" are used opposite compared to the US (meaning that the Scandinavian right prefers socialism), or that the term "liberal" is used opposite compared to the US (meaning that Scandinavian liberals oppose socialism)?
"Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.[1][2][3] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support free markets, free trade, limited government, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), capitalism, democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion."
In the US, the overton window is so far right that liberals are considered left of moderates. But liberals are not leftists, i.e. people who would support socialism. It's like
left --------------------- liberals --- moderates ---- right
Liberals and Christian Democrats are center-right, Social-Democrats and Greens center-left. Those are the main power blocks in quite a few European countries.
And US liberals and European liberals have quite different ideas about taxes, immigration, climate change, law and order. Europeans would not call Biden or Warren liberals. (Who would Europeans call a liberal? Maybe Paul Ryan, or Bloomberg).
The word "liberal" in the US is used in a way unlike anywhere else. Classic liberalism, as the term is used everywhere else, is embodied by publications like eg The Economist.
