
The world is socialist - davewiner
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/01/theWorldIsSocialist.html
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joelmichael
The author suggests that Ayn Rand would have had no response to the question
of "who cleans up the snow storm?", as if the idea of events affecting the
collective simply never occurred to her. What the author claims to be a gap in
her philosophy is actually a lack of understanding of it on his part. That she
had responses to many common criticisms should be obvious, but a focal point
of his argument rests on the false assumption that she did not.

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richcollins
I don't think the author understands that state socialism implies coercive
sharing, not voluntary resource pooling.

~~~
notahacker
In his defence, I find arguments that it's "coercive" for the state to take
money from me in return for services rendered but not for my landlord to do
the same to generally be tenuous[1]. The reality is that we live in a world
where various entities claim "ownership" of resources, and governments are
able to claim the "rule of law" over large areas of territory, and despite the
conflicts and examples of egregious unfairness the system generates, we're
usually better off for it than fighting for ourselves.

[1]I'm equally free to leave both my rental contract (upon expiry) and the UK
tax regime for cheaper/better alternatives. In the absence of the government
"coercively" imposing rule of law backed by social norms I would not only be
free from the government redirecting a proportion of my pay packet to other
causes, but also from any incentive whatsoever to divert a similarly large
proportion of my income to be able to live in a property the overseas-based
owner has quite possibly never even visited.

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srgseg
_There really isn't that much range in the smartness or fitness of human
beings._

Capitalism isn't necessarily about rewarding people that are "better".

It's about rewarding people that are productive in the ways in which other
people value.

It rewards people for making stuff other people want. It's about rewarding me
more for learning an in-demand trade than for skateboarding all day.

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michaelkeenan
An argument against an ideology's handling of a particular problem is useless
unless it quotes and responds to a respectable proponent on that subject.
There are plenty of Objectivists and libertarians who have written about the
provision of public goods.

Winer should read PG on How To Disagree:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>

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kevin_morrill
I am pretty tired of smears against Ayn Rand that amount to: I read her when I
was a teenager and I was hoodwinked into her ideas. That's your issue, not
hers.

I'll never forget her response to this very type of attack which you can see
at the 8:15 mark of this YouTube video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6jkQKAv13A>

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jdminhbg
This is a content-free political rant, as you'd expect from the title.

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patrickgzill
Thought experiment:

How many able-bodied people are there in NYC? Let's say 2 million.

If each of them had shoveled snow for 15 minutes with a snow shovel (working
in shifts, let's say, as there are not 2 million snow shovels) just in the
area they personally were affected by, how effective would that have been vs.
what happened?

~~~
locopati
It sounds good until you ask 'where are they going to put all that snow'?
Can't put it on the sidewalks, cars are parked on the sides of the roads. The
process of getting rid of that much snow in NYC involves industrial snow
melting machines, the sewer system, the rivers, and coordination of trucks.
Not so simple as getting together and shovelling out.

~~~
patrickgzill
I was actually talking about a relative level of effectiveness - surely doing
some shoveling even without snow melting, etc. would have resulted in
something better (not "completely fixed") ...

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McNulty
"Maybe there's a different premise. They [TV news channels] cover politics.
Politics is a Democratic and Republican game.It's left and right. But then you
begin to confuse everything through that same conflict. I think the conflict
that would be more appropriate to devote a news channel to would be
corruption."

John Stewart on the Rachel Maddow Show.

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908//vp/40141311#40141311>

Worth thinking about?

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Semiapies
Americans, through blatant ignorance and misuse of the term over the last few
years (on both sides of the political aisle), you've _ALL_ forfeited the right
to use the world "socialism" until such time as you can prove you actually
know what the word means and can use it properly.

~~~
Semiapies
Sorry, but it's a fair cop. Social services != socialism.

Socialism is the government control of production, and it's largely dead
outside of Cuba and North Korea.

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paradoja
_Socialism is the government control of production, and it's largely dead
outside of Cuba and North Korea._

Nope, not necessarily. There are many definitions of socialism, and lots of
movements defined as socialists. Many of them don't involve State control of
production, eg <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism>

~~~
Semiapies
You can find a few outliers (such as the usual crop of left-anarchists who
want to smash governments and replace them with, um, _different_ organizations
that make people in their territories follow rules through coercion), but they
are of no significance and give no cover to the sloppy American tendency to
call a capitalist society with a welfare state "socialist".

