Full Metal Bolshevik said:
Lightknight said:
If you honestly believe that socialist and communist economies don't have people mooching off the system then you're entirely missing the point of those economies that are built to assist the moochers.
You're confusing with capitalism, that's an economy that assists the 'moochers', the owners of the means of production mooch of the value created by the workers.
Wait, does this mean you agree with everything I said about the whole freezing to death numbers? Because it looks like you chopped that part off and instead replaced it with this quote of me from a previous post that you've already responded to for some reason.
Mooching means you take without contribution. Someone who owns a business and pays you an amount that you agree to take is not mooching off of your labor. The only way an employer could mooch off a laborer would be if the laborer was actually a slave. However, a layabout mooch can absolutely collect a paycheck in a communist country as part of the system.
That's not to say capitalism doesn't also have moochers. But that's far more relegated to the areas of our government in which we are more socialist than not as well as a failure to police who is abusing the system. Russians not working was a well known issue with Russia's failed attempt at communism. So you can try to turn it around, but the buck still ends with people getting paid whether or not they contribute anything.
And by the way, you do realize that in a communist setup that everyone but the most skilled laborers doing the most difficult jobs are mooching? A street cleaner is mooching off of the nuclear engineer, for example. All communism does is redistribute the excess to people who may or may not be deserving. At least people who run companies facilitate the environment where people may be employed. At least people who started a company took the risk at the start to do so and deserve the rewards of the undertaking they started that now employs so many individuals. But in communism, some asshole that sleeps on the job keeps getting a paycheck that includes money produced by the hard working individuals. It's a shame.
Lightknight said:
China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. I understand that the term communist is weakly attributed to these nations but we can have a semantics debate on this point if you'd like. I'll warn you that the popular definition is the one that wins out and right now those countries are defined as communist nations by the common majority.
In my mind, a communist nation is really just a socialist nation with marxist ideals. However, I understand that I did say communist economy. I'm just not sure how a distinction between the state and economy is all that viable when the state clearly informs the economy.
That's bullshit and you know it. Communism is a classless, stateless society where the means of production are common ownership, I don't give a fuck about what the majority thinks. (altought without class consciousness we can't get to communism :S )
Yep, communist state is an oxymoron. But no, what it means in your mind isn't relevant to how it's actually used. You and I know the common vernacular is bullshit, sure, and yet literally is currently being redefined to include the definition of "emphasis" or "hyperbole" rather than literally literal. So there we are.
Lightknight said:
Oh? You mean the country that everyone else tells to get involved in wars where human rights are being violated ranks low on the peaceful scale? I'm shocked, simply shocked [/sarcasm]. Maybe if the index measured local "peace" then I'd actually matter to this discussion. That we're at war in Afghanistan and Iran (even if the wars are technically earmarked as over) has done next to nothing regarding my own personal quality of life aside from the loss of a few friends which happened over there, not here.
I assume you didn't realize that it included external conflicts (aka war or military excursions) or thought that was somehow relevant to what it's like to live here. You'd need to provide a resource that includes only internal conflicts that actually impact the quality of life of those living here. This would be like claiming that the main government district from the Hunger Games had shitty lives because all those external conflicts scored a lower ratio on the GPI. That's just nonsense.
Yes I noticed, but so what? ANd everyone tells to get involved? Do you only watch Fox News? There are millions of people protesting every year against those wars. But fine, take a look at this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate] or this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality]
How about I listen to the B.B.C and hear European callers call in and act all frustrated about why the US hasn't gotten involved in this or that. In several cases there is global support for US intervention as if we were the global police which seems to be a roll that we're actually filling for some odd reason.
However, there are certainly bullshit wars like Iraq where NO ONE was calling for us to do it and there is no foreseeable reason for it to happen and yet it did. But if you don't see external pressures on us to step into certain conflicts then you're just being blind to it.
Income equality doesn't show the relation of the average citizen in relation to other average citizens of other nations. It is only the inequality within that nation between the highest fee earners and the average fee earner. Yeah, we have Bill Gates and his like here but the average take home pay and purchasing power is generally much better than in other nations. It really doesn't mean shit if the upper class is making six figures and the average house is making $40k if the country that got a better score has the upper class making $2k and the average making $1.5k. Sure, the equality is better in the second country but what does that matter if they still can't make ends meet? There is no imperative to ensure wage equality. The man at the top is not inherently evil for being there as long as the people at the bottom are earning a fair wage and are able to enter and exit the job as desired.
In the US, we have the highest average disposable income and the 4th highest monthly salary in PPP (purchasing power parity) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage]. So pay equality be damned because the average American can purchase far more than inhabitants of the rest of the world despite us being the third most populated country. You can try to spin this in some negative way but at the end of the day we can afford our flat screens, we can go to the movies, and generally move up in the world. The truth is, owning a house is even cheaper than renting right now. One of my properties is $800/month to own which is a good $200-$600 cheaper than any apartment that would also have 3 bedrooms and two bathrooms with a yard, garage, and other amenities. I made enough for that house back when I was making $12/hour which is actually pretty low pay here. So I'm not seeing much of a complaint for people that have work. I'm seeing complaints from people that don't have jobs at all. It sucks that many of them decided that finishing highschool wasn't worth their time but I'd hardly consider that anyone's fault but theirs.
Our evil icons in movies aren't the wealthy. It's the asshole wealthy. The greedy people that have more than they could spend and yet still squeeze everything they can. We abhor that sort of person and praise the individual who take a cut commensurate to the value of their position or return on investment of starting the company without trying to squeeze every penny out of their workers. Just a little bit of generosity from them ends up absolving them in our eyes and we turn our gaze instead to the other ones that just can't be satiated.
As for the murder rate. This is where being such a large country sort of works against us. We have a few large cities that are absolutely tanking our numbers. New Orleans for example has a 52/100,000 murder rate. Countries with a lot of major cities seem to have a higher murder rate than countries with just one or two and we have a LOT of densely populated areas. So I'm not sure if other countries would fair any better with a similar distribution of population. Murders are notoriously under-reported in the only two countries with higher populations that we have and it's not like other countries all across the world don't also have a problem in their major cities [http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/30/new-york-crime-free-day-deadliest-cities-worldwide]. That's because large populations tend to pump out organized crime like gangs and something like 80% of gun related homicides in the US are actually gang related rather than just two random people on the street with the vast majority of homicide victims not being average citizens but instead having a criminal record. Even so, homicides in the US have declined by 49% since the 90's so we've fairly clearly put policies in place that are working now that our homicide rate is at the lowest it's been in four decades.
I'm also not sure how big of a difference every 1/100,000 is. People use terms like "double" and such but if 5/100,000 is low then double may not be all that meaningful. Seeing as the US still falls in the medium/low side of the link you sent me I'm not sure it's that big of a deal. Statistically significant? Sure. It is statistically higher than other first world countries. But we also directly border a country that is in the high homicide area and a lot of our highest crime-rated states hug the body of water we border with those countries.
But I digress. Let's treat homicide like a method of dying. Like a disease that is unique to a country. You could point to countries that suffer from malaria in much the same way without actually making a point about the overall safety of that country. The way to really deal with that is to look at the mortality rate by country and that's going to look very bad on your point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_mortality_rate
As of 2013, the US has a mortality rate of 8.39. As it turns out, that's lower than the other countries we've been touting. Germany is 11.7, Belgium is 10.7, Finland is 10.42, Sweden is 10.22, the UK is 9.33, Norway is 9.21, France is 8.96, and Switzerland is right along with us at 8.08.
Basically, the only thing new I've learned from all of this research is that Australia is pretty damn good in most charts. Is there some other nation you're trying to portray as hot stuff?