Greg Morga's List: Socialism v.s. Nationalism

• Liang Yage and his wife Wei Linrong had one child and believed that — like many other couples — they could pay a fine and keep their second baby. Wei was 7 months pregnant when 10 family planning officials visited her at home on April 16.

  Liang describes how they told her that she would have to have an abortion, "You don't have any more room for maneuver," he says they told her. "If you don't go [to the hospital], we'll carry you." The couple was then driven to Youjiang district maternity hospital in Baise city.

  "I was scared," Wei told NPR. "The hospital was full of women who'd been brought in forcibly. There wasn't a single spare bed. The family planning people said forced abortions and forced sterilizations were both being carried out. We saw women being pulled in one by one."

• ince 1913, the US dollar has lost almost 95% of its purchasing power. This loss in purchasing power is a direct result of a massive increase in the supply of money that has occurred since the founding of the Fed.

• "Without calculation, economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word ... All economic change, therefore, would involve operations the value of which could neither be predicted beforehand nor ascertained after they had taken place. Everything would be a leap in the dark. Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy." -- Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1981, pp. 103-105.

• The real solution to the financial crisis is not more financial irresponsibility and government controls, but forcing the government to be financially responsible and abolishing the controls.
• a part of the move to a free market, we need to establish a full-fledged gold standard--one that the government must be prevented from breaching. This is something we have never had in this country. We have been on a gold standard before, but the government intervened in many ways--from the very start of the nation--to undermine the gold standard, such as by issuing unbacked paper currency.
• The Fed injected massive amounts of money and credit into our financial system from 2001 to 2004 that led to skyrocketing housing prices and fostered irresponsible borrowing and lending by market participants. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 is used to intimidate banks and other mortgage lenders into making loans--such as subprime loans--in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Many of these loans would not have been made in a free market because they were made to borrowers who were not credit worthy. Making loans to people who cannot afford them is a policy that is destined to lead to a financial catastrophe.
• But the Fed’s creation of money does not solve problems; it creates problems. It causes prices to rise rapidly, devalues our savings and income, makes business planning and investing more difficult and risky, promotes more government borrowing, spending, and consumption, undermines economic progress, and thus lowers the standard of living in the economy.
• t’s no accident that government borrowing and spending soared as we moved off gold, and the price of gold has risen from $20.67 per ounce to as high as about $1000 per ounce recently.
• The gold price has risen because the Fed has injected so much money and credit into our financial system that the demand for gold has increased tremendously. A full-fledged gold standard would prevent the Fed from creating money and thus radically limit the spending in which the government can engage.
• President Reagan established a commission to consider a return to gold.
• We just need to define a new gold dollar at a high enough price in paper dollars for the existing supply of potential monetary gold to be able to back the number of dollars in existence. This, along with abolishing other government controls, will make it possible to instill financial responsibility into the economy and lift the burden of onerous regulations.
• We need to adopt the financially disciplined, long-term policies of "Austrian" economics, in particular that of its best expositor: Ludwig von Mises

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• The socialist market economy is a market economy that combines substantial state ownership of large industries with private enterprise, where both forms of ownership operate in a free-pricing market environment. It is the economic system that has supplemented the centrally planned economy in the People's Republic of China, and has been attributed to the high growth rates in GDP in the past decades. In contrast to the market socialist proposal put forth by Oskar Lange in the early 20th century, prices are not set by a government central planning board.

• Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system, the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group, which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal.

• Critics argue that since in a planned economy prices are not allowed to float freely, there is no accurate mechanism to determine what is being produced in unnecessarily large amounts and what is being produced in insufficient amounts. They argue that efficiency is best achieved through a market economy where individual producers each make their own production decisions based on their own profit motive.
• These opponents of central planning argue that the only way to determine what society actually wants is by allowing private enterprise to use their resources in competing to meet the needs of consumers, rather those taking resources away and allowing government to direct investment without responding to market signals. According to Tibor R. Machan, "Without a market in which allocations can be made in obedience to the law of supply and demand, it is difficult or impossible to funnel resources with respect to actual human preferences and goals."^[1
• For example, if the state directs all employment then one's career options may be more limited. If goods are allocated by the state rather than by a market economy, citizens cannot, for example, move to another location without state permission because they would not be able to acquire food or housing in the new location, as the necessary resources were not preplanned.
• critics contend that central planning intrinsically results in a top-down, dictatorial state where politicians and bureaucrats use the state to achieve their own ends, which are in turn described as the "social" objectives of the state. In essence, critics contend that a planned economy has nothing to do with the preferences of the individuals that comprise a society, but rather the abstract goals of some group.
• The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich Hayek and critical of collectivism, presenting the argument that a central planned economy must ultimately result in tyranny. An idea similar to this is the idea of the iron cage presented even earlier by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
• A planned economy creates social conditions favoring political corruption. "Particularly, command economies have been notoriously corrupt.^{[citation needed]} First, centralized decision-making predisposes planners to abuses of power. Second, the inherent inefficiency of plans drawn with insufficient information creates a need for bypassing or subverting the official decision-making process. For example, the Soviet Gosplan could not create plans that were feasible, and other means were used to meet the quotas." ^[19]A gift economy featuring corruption, blat, developed. The Chinese guanxi is somewhat similar.

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• The Social Security Act of 1935, one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal creations, is seen by many as a socialist program because it is a government-organized and -regulated system. Social Security was designed to provide retirement benefits to citizens through mandatory donations to the program during one's employment years.

• Main Entry:

   

  so·cial·ism

   

  Pronunciation:

   

      \ˈsō-shə-ˌli-zəm\   

   

  Function:

   

  noun

   

  Date:

   

  1837

   

   

  1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

• Researchers at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society said Tuesday that other sites blocked included those on health, education, news, entertainment, religion and pornography.
  
  Ben Edelman, a Berkman researcher, and Jonathan Zittrain, the center's co-director, checked more than 204,000 Web sites, identified in part using search engines Google and Yahoo!, and found more than 19,000 inaccessible at least some of the time.
• The top 10 Google results using the key words "Tibet," "Taiwan China" and "equality" were all blocked, as were eight of the top 10 results using "democracy China" and "dissident China."
  
• Edelman noted that the blocked university sites host campus pro-democracy groups. One, MIT, also hosts scrambling software that makes e-mail unreadable to censors.

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• The Chinese government imposed a limit on birth in 1979: for the law every family can have up to a child (in the city) or two (in rural areas); in all other cases abortion is required.
   Every day they abandon just over 1000 girls born. People abandon or kill their children to be not discovered by the chinese government.
   There are abortion teams that catch women who refuse to abort and keep them in prison until they decide to do so.
   Otherwise, the children “outlaw” won’t have right to medical care, to education or any kind of social assistance.
   For this reason, many families sell their children to other couples.

• Attacks on private property include, but are not limited to, confiscating the rightful property of one person and giving it to another to whom it doesn't belong. When this is done privately we call it theft. When it's done collectively we use the euphemisms: income transfers or redistribution.  It's not just left-wingers and Democrats who call for and admire socialism but right-wingers and Republicans as well.
• After all what is the essence of slavery?  It's the forceful use of one person to serve the purposes of another person. When Congress, through the tax code, takes the earnings of one person and turns around to give it to another person in the forms of prescription drugs, social security, food stamps, farm subsidies or airline bailouts, it is forcibly using one person to serve the purposes of another.
• Charity is a noble instinct; theft legal or illegal is despicable. Or, put another way: reaching into one's own pocket to assist his fellow man is noble and worthy of praise. Reaching into another person's pocket to assist one's fellow man is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

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• Over the past few decades Western European countries have have passed laws and taken other steps towards socialism (or Marxism). This, combined with globalization, has lead to increased pressure on the United States to become more socialistic. Although the ideas of socialism seem appealing, it a fundamentally flawed system and it begins a slippery slope that falls into communism.
• capitalism utilizes the willpower of individuals, especially entrepreneurs, to foment economic activity. Capitalism is based on the assumption that individuals operate based on self interest; however, by doing so they not only help themselves, but also propel others towards economic success.
• How can France expect its workers to work hard if it's nearly impossible to fire them? How can we expect welfare recipients to find jobs if it's easy for them to sit at home and get welfare? I know that there is a real need for welfare among some people, but there are others who smoke and drink and do nothing to better themselves. Socialism is forced on the rest of Americans when they are taxed and their money goes to such people. If this continues, Americans will become more and more lazy and our nation will degenerate to a quasi-socialist, nonproductive society.

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• As an economic system, socialism seeks to manage the economy through deliberate and collective social control.
• Socialists, however, see capitalism as a possible part of the ideal state and believe that socialism can exist in a capitalist society. In fact, one of the ideas of socialism is that everyone within the society will benefit from capitalism as much as possible as long as the capitalism is controlled somehow by a centralized planning system.

• In the economy of the Soviet Union, state ownership of the means of production was combined with central planning, in relation to which goods and services to make and provide, how they were to be produced, the quantities, and the sale prices. Soviet economic planning was an alternative to allowing the market (supply and demand) to determine prices and production.

• The morality of socialism can be summed-up in two words: envy and self-sacrifice. Envy is the desire to not only possess another’s wealth but also the desire to see another’s wealth lowered to the level of one’s own.
• Yes, there are winners and losers in capitalism. The winners are those who are honest, industrious, thoughtful, prudent, frugal, responsible, disciplined, and efficient. The losers are those who are shiftless, lazy, imprudent, extravagant, negligent, impractical, and inefficient.
• Under socialism, most of life’s decisions are made for you.
• Under capitalism, the incentive is to work harder because each producer will receive the total value of his production--the rewards are not shared. Simply put: socialism rewards sloth and penalizes hard work while capitalism rewards hard work and penalizes sloth.

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