a film maker comments on leftist activists

Freedom.

Not all those are essential, and, of your list, all but the military could be done locally, not by a national central authority.

The problem with doing things by a national central authority might not seem as obvious on a little island out in the Atlantic where people are close, climate similar, wants, needs, and crops too. But in the US, anything central means a cowboy in South Dakota gets the exact same as the barefoot single mom in New Jersey. He might not like it.

Money is an excellent motive, not unseemly at all. Money is a great gauge and feedback of what the customers think something is worth. If it's not worth it, don't buy it. Everybody votes day-by-day with their choices--it's very democratic.

As long as there's free, fair competition, companies are *far* more responsive, *far* more efficient, and give better service and products than the government.

They have to, otherwise you won't buy their stuff.

The government has every incentive to be as wasteful as it can possibly be, has no impulse to save, or improve services, can't be fired, and in fact grows and gets more money the more it fails.

Possibly the worst of all worlds is when a too-powerful central gov't chooses a few companies, on politics, and makes them fabulously rich. That's undemocratic, bordering on a soft fascism. There's a lot of that these days, e.g. Obamacare, denying the Keystone Pipeline, etc.

Cheers, James Arthur

A fine buzzword.

I can certainly see that the USA is a collection of widely different states, with different needs. And I can see that for many things, it would make more sense to handle issues at the state level rather than the national level. The EU has the same problems - rules aimed for the south of Italy are not necessarily a good match for the north of Sweden.

Yes, that's really it. Our form of government was meant to let disparate states cooperate where needed--e.g. national defense--but leave them to govern their own affairs otherwise.

It has the side-effect of tolerating, even celebrating pur diversity (rather than forcing everyone to live identically). And we can do it amicably--if the people of Massachusetts want to live differently that's fine--that doesn't affect me. If Vermont wants single-payer, VA-style health care, go for it.

Even better, our design spurs competition between states, each trying to measure up to and out-do the others in jobs, taxes, education, etc.

That's very healthy, but lost living under uniform national edicts.

Cheers, James Arthur

Unfed trolls get no podium. ...Jim Thompson

the

This seems to be one of James Arthur's less plausible strawman arguments. J ames Arthur can imagine a whole range of implausible situations, but this o ne is more implausible than most. Not even the silliest social security org anisation would equate the needs of a single mother with those of a male ag ricultural labourer.

n.

To own slaves, or not to own slaves as the local economy dictated ...

You did change your mind about the slaves. And that "separate but equal stu ff" after you'd liberated them. You've still got quite a lot of catching up left to do.

At the moment it looks more like a race to the bottom.

A bit ironic, when the US is 30th on the UN public health statistics.

You don't like the UN basket of statistics, but the simple, obvious life-ex pectancy table puts the US at 35th, behind every other advanced industrial country. Russian (at 130) and China (at 95) may be industrial, but they are n't all that advanced.

dy to agree - but what you refer to is more like "communism" than "socialis m".

we have bad vs. good 'socialism?' Your whole argument rests on the premise that in a state-powered system of socialism, the people in power are going to behave themselves, going to be good boys and girls.

If they don't they get voted out. "Bad socialism" usually comes up in a one

-party state, which is to say some kind of oligarchy that has decided to ca ll itself socialist, despite not being democratic.

n't?

You could look at Scandinavia and Germany.

Not to mention motherhood and apple-pie.

of large organisations - you need military, police, fire brigades, hospi tals, welfare systems, etc., that require a lot of money and a lot of orga nisation, and that provide no direct benefit to most people but a dispropor tionate benefit to a few.

d be done locally, not by a national central authority.

Bad joke.

But it's hopeless way to run natural monopolies - transport and communicati ons systems, health care and the like.

The Victorians found this out the hard way, and Thatcher and Reagan repeate d the experiment. Does anybody want another Enron?

So you've never a bought a copy of Widows? Even though it's over-priced rub bish?

It does in the US where the two parties on offer are much the same, and equ ally corrupt. If the US had a better constitution, and proportional represe ntation, government could be a lot more responsive to the desires of the el ectorate, and a lot less responive to the desires of the people who own the country.

Sadly, James Arthur doesn't believe in real democracy - the founding tax ev aders didn't want it, and their preferences are sacred (even if they were b ased on blatant self-interest).

ooses a few companies, on politics, and makes them fabulously rich.

Sounds like the US today. Strictly speaking it isn't the government that ma kes the choice, but influential lobbyists working on the government. But th at's US politics for you. The best politicians that money can buy.

That's a pretty accurate description of the current US system of government . Under Dubbya the fascism was less soft. Invading Irak for the greater goo d of Halliburton does seems to have made Halliburton even more fabulously r ich.

Obamare did buy off the medical insurance industry with large bribes, but t hat was just lobbying as usual. Denying the Keystone Pipeline doesn't seem to be making anybody any money, but James will tell us exactly how black is really white any moment now.

Tell that to the Germans and the citizens of the various Scandinavian count ries. If you can find any evidence of "compelled compliance there" post a link to it.

Total nonsense. Modern socialist governments are elected and re-elected. In practice, since all the countries involved seem to go for proportional rep resentation, there are almost always several parties in power in a coalitio n government, and the electorate fine-tunes their preferences by moving fro m party to party.

Europe spends a lot on defence - not as much as the US which spends more th an everybody else put together - but quite enough to deter any feasible all iance of plausible enemies. As you might have noticed - if you brain was in state to absorb new facts - Russia isn't spending anything like as much of defence as it did when it was part of the USSR. China is spending a whole lot more than it used to, but not as much as Europe as whole, and it's unli kely to invade Europe.

Socialism with genuinely free elections usually works out pretty well. Socialism in one-party states tends to be a very different system of govern ment.

m".

krw doesn't understand history and he certainly doesn't observe human behav iour. His brain seems to be one-time programmable with no error-correction mechan ism.

Modern socialism has nothing to do with tyranny - which is rule by a single individual. Individual tyrants have been known to claim that they are impl ementing socialism (or christianity, or freedom, often all three), but info rmed observers don't pay much attention to the claims and concentrate on th e behaviour.

krw is the perfect antithesis of an observer.