Top Ten Reasons to Favor Socialism

Socialism isn't the horrible, evil government that many conservative Republicans portray it to be! Resources are not taken from hard-working people to be given to the lazy. It simply means that we distribute the resources we have fairly throughout society.

People live comfortably. But in real life, eh... I won't say anything.

Inequality is necessary for wealth generation. If everyone receives the same outcome regardless of effort, then few will be motivated to make an effort. Capitalism has proven to be the most effective system for creating wealth by a large margin. Although this wealth isn't evenly distributed, in general, the poorest in a capitalist economy are often better off than most people in a socialist one.

Let's say you were born homeless. You don't have much to look forward to because you barely have any of the basic resources you need. Now, let's say you were born rich. You have a lot to look forward to and don't even have to try to become somebody because you already are!

Margaret Thatcher once said, "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." But the simple fact is that economics isn't just about money - it's about how we distribute resources in general.

So many people confuse socialism and communism. Communism, in general, tends to be a more extreme, more violent, and more authoritarian version of socialism. The hard left and dictatorships do not automatically go together. It's possible to have socialism and happy, free, liberal democratic countries. Just look at Scandinavia. The five countries making up Scandinavia (Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden - go look them up) are an example to the rest of the world.

One of the many misconceptions about socialism is that every time we see a socialist country, they end up under a dictatorship. But dictatorships have nothing to do with socialism itself. Lenin's USSR was functioning well before Stalin. In fact, Stalin had nothing to do with the revolution. Hitler used socialism as propaganda to gain followers, and Mao did something similar in China.

Listen up, mate, "all jobs being taken by robots" isn't going to happen. Post-scarcity is an anti-economic concept.

Let's say it's the year 1000 BCE, and a tribal guy comes across a vast grassland full of apples, mangoes, and oranges extending across a very large swathe of land. He thinks, "Wow, there are unlimited resources to support the existing human population forever." But that simply isn't true. The grassland is finite. This universe is finite. We won't achieve 100% energy efficiency due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. As long as there is room to improve human livelihoods, people are going to keep working actively in jobs, so you can effectively say that post-scarcity does not exist.

Now, let's say that for some reason, post-scarcity does exist. A machine is using some resource (which is hypothetically present in a very large amount) to continuously produce one burger per second. If I eat two burgers per second, eventually there will be a scarcity of burgers in my so-called post-scarcity utopia. How is this situation prevented? Only force would prevent it. So, will we end up living as slaves to robots? That doesn't sound fun.

Let's say we have a scenario where the jobs nobody wants are taken over by robots. Then, all of a sudden, the jobs that some people are okay with are taken over by robots. This keeps happening until the only ones left are the economic giants. The people don't have the money to make a living, so the giants can't make money off of them. Pretty soon, places like Walmart, Hy-Vee, McDonald's, and Burger King start going down because they don't have the money to keep going.

Even if we put liberal regulations on them, those might have their own contradictions, making the situation even worse. What we need is to adapt to the information age that we are stumbling upon. Hence, socialism. Socialism doesn't lead to its own destruction when we are...

You don't have any greedy company trying to use its economic power to twist the facts about global warming. Many of these problems are caused by companies that distort the truth to make money. The environment, obesity, etc.

Without government intervention, the economy would frequently fall into depressions. Socialism stimulates the economy during recessions, helping to stabilize it. It also regulates businesses to encourage cooperation and reduce risky behavior.

Equality is said a lot here! But it's kind of true!

I guess that's acceptable, but socialism is more about socioeconomic control of the means of production than just focusing on healthcare. I see "democratic socialism" more as a form of social capitalism.

But not just healthcare though - food, water, and shelter too. You pretty much get everything that everyone else gets. No one gets a golden house while another lives under a bridge, starving.

No, it is more than half, but that's not the point. If you can produce enough to give one person what would cost $350 million, then you could give 350,000 people an amount of product worth about $1,000 each.

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., all abide by a code that encourages a "Third Way" (Welfare State). So, if we have a welfare state that's doing quite well, we probably can have a socialist state that does well too.

We hear Socialism described as evil and big government. Nope! Socialism may have some political tie-ins, but they only make it stronger.

Now, I'm not saying that just because something is primitive, it means it's wrong! It's just that socialism and communism are two economic systems designed to improve upon capitalism by addressing the issues that cause capitalism to fail. Socialism is relatively new, so we don't know exactly how to use it correctly, but in the United States, we might as well give it a try.

Capitalism has you always chasing your material self-interests. It places too much importance on what you own and much less on who you are as a person, especially for those at the bottom, who are expected to work, consume, and not think. The fact that the successful have an enormous influence also has a negative effect on the population, who are constantly pushed around to believe strange, unnatural, and irresponsible things.

This sort of complacency gradually takes over other aspects of life. In the end, no one has any cultural awareness, and we live a kind of nihilistic hedonism. Really bad. The worst thing is that you can hardly avoid it. You're a teenager in the 21st century? Well, you're probably going to drink more Coke than water. When you leave school, you won't be reading very many books. Oh yeah, and the entire Western musical tradition is absolutely unknown to you, up until the 1960s maybe. By the time you're twenty, these behaviors are so ingrained it's almost impossible to rise above them. Barely anyone does. That's not a society I want to live in.