Why Are Americans and Conservatives So Afraid of Socialism?

[pknopp]

The better question for this thread would be why democrats so willfully ignore history.

Trump's Road to Socialism | Tho Bishop

A lot of people are.

 

[citygator]

How many times do you have to burn your fingers before you figure out not to
put your hand in the fire?

Like non-existent voter fraud?

 

[Harry Dresden]

A version of ‘socialism’ works in the likeminded nordics…they don’t have 20-50 million thirdworlders and 40 million Africans to foster.
Is it racist for me to expose this fact?
Harry Dresden

you are kinda stupid aint you?....i disagree with your racism not many of the things you talk about.....i think we have discussed this before....its how you present your argument....

 

[Votto]

 

[BrokeLoser]

you are kinda stupid aint you?....i disagree with your racism not many of the things you talk about.....i think we have discussed this before....its how you present your argument....

Are you saying I don’t frame my words just right for nutless, fragile sky screamers?

 

[HappyJoy]

Move to Denmark, fuckwad.
See how you like spending your life working to enrich others.

Enriching others? You don't think that happens here as the wealth gap gets wider and wider?

 

[2aguy]

So your want no roads, police, Military, Fire Depts...

If firefighters come to put fire out you would be "fruits of my labor stolen"...

Don't worry there would be no Courts or Prisons either...

Those aren't socialism you moron.......

Socialism is the government controlling the means of production....then they start killing and filling mass graves....

 

[22lcidw]

What an interesting blog article on American ideas about civil responsibility and the knee jerk reaction of Americans generally, and Conservatives specifically, to fear community welfare and immediately associate it with socialism or communism. It led to her asking “What are you so afraid of?”, and she received 5 specific groups of fears:

1. I’m scared of having to pay for other people’s laziness
2. I’m scared because I don’t trust my government or other people generally
3. I’m scared because socialism leads to authoritarianism
4. I’m scared because socialists and communists kill a lot of people
5. I’m not scared, socialism always fails

She has some good responses to these fears that I can’t do just to for a short attention span. Read the link if you want. I think these fears keep America from being a great and caring nation.

Why Are Americans and Conservatives So Afraid of Socialism?
I went a little bit viral on TikTok recently for voicing the unthinkable: I said that I like paying taxes. As you might imagine, the Americans and Conservatives in my comment section were shocked and appalled. The words communist and socialist were thrown around like insults, images of gulags and famine were invoked to prove some kind of vague and poorly-articulated point about freedom.

In contrast, the (predominantly western/northern) Europeans seemed to find my explanation pretty fair and even stopped to correct me on some of the finer points of Scottish, Scandinavian and German socialist democracy.

What shocked me, however, was not that so many Americans and Conservatives seemed to misunderstand fundamental aspects of civil life — like taxation — but that so many seemed so vehemently opposed to any suggestion that we should all contribute to the collective welfare of our countrymen.

Curiosity piqued, yesterday I made the mistake of asking Americans and Conservatives: “What is it about communism/socialism that scares you?” Here’s what they said.

We have to purchase cheaply made products overseas to counterbalance the massive taxes and corruption within our pseudo borders. And we are turning one nation into a superpower by doing it.

 

[2aguy]

Enriching others? You don't think that happens here as the wealth gap gets wider and wider?

Here, the rich get rich making things and providing services...in socialist states, the rich get rich as members of the government, taking from everyone else....big fucking difference.

Obama didn't get rich providing services and products, Elon Musk got rich making things and advancing society...

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

What an interesting blog article on American ideas about civil responsibility and the knee jerk reaction of Americans generally, and Conservatives specifically, to fear community welfare and immediately associate it with socialism or communism. It led to her asking “What are you so afraid of?”, and she received 5 specific groups of fears:

1. I’m scared of having to pay for other people’s laziness
2. I’m scared because I don’t trust my government or other people generally
3. I’m scared because socialism leads to authoritarianism
4. I’m scared because socialists and communists kill a lot of people
5. I’m not scared, socialism always fails

She has some good responses to these fears that I can’t do just to for a short attention span. Read the link if you want. I think these fears keep America from being a great and caring nation.

Why Are Americans and Conservatives So Afraid of Socialism?
I went a little bit viral on TikTok recently for voicing the unthinkable: I said that I like paying taxes. As you might imagine, the Americans and Conservatives in my comment section were shocked and appalled. The words communist and socialist were thrown around like insults, images of gulags and famine were invoked to prove some kind of vague and poorly-articulated point about freedom.

In contrast, the (predominantly western/northern) Europeans seemed to find my explanation pretty fair and even stopped to correct me on some of the finer points of Scottish, Scandinavian and German socialist democracy.

What shocked me, however, was not that so many Americans and Conservatives seemed to misunderstand fundamental aspects of civil life — like taxation — but that so many seemed so vehemently opposed to any suggestion that we should all contribute to the collective welfare of our countrymen.

Curiosity piqued, yesterday I made the mistake of asking Americans and Conservatives: “What is it about communism/socialism that scares you?” Here’s what they said.

Conservatives are willfully ignorant as to what socialism actually is.

 

[2aguy]

Right blaming every violent death on something and proclaiming a pretty center party as part of the fault...


Lets try this again... The premise of the OP is that 'Social Democracy' which is a government style of Western Europe has benefited them greatly... Other people call this 'Regulated Capitalism', they are effectively the same..

Lets compare Germany to US over last ten years, Germany has had a surplus for 8 of those 10 years, has universal Healthcare, Free Education even third level, very low crime rate (compared to US), takes in more refugees than US per Captia, strong enviromental laws, solid safety net, less recidivism crime rate.....
Just in case you want to go down NATO military spending route. Germany has spent plenty enough tanks and planes to defend itself against Russia (only enemy in region). What they spent money on was CyberDefence and vaccine R&D, most of the vaccines taken in the US for COVID R&D was paid for by the German Government.
Germany is a country run under Social Democracy. So please tell us the advantages with evidence of the type of government you are proposing...

Germany and Europe have wealth because the United States pays for their military, their medical and pharmacuetical advancements and their technological advancements...without us, their systems would have collapsed decades ago...

 

[2aguy]

Conservatives are willfully ignorant as to what socialism actually is.

No....we know full well what it is and who it murders....you guys are the ones running around in Mao and Che t-shirts and telling us that the mass graves weren't important...

 

[Pellinore]

None of that is socialism. There were fire departments long before Marx. You clowns will steal anything to get what you want.

All of those industries are socialism. They are public utilities, meaning they are owned by all of us as a group, and run by the government. We pay taxes, the government applies some of them to the fire department, who apply their product (fire protection) to the person who needs it (the one with the burning house). That is exactly how socialist ideals work when applied to a single industry.

And you're right, there were fire departments, but up until about the time of the Civil War they weren't public utilities. If you paid fire insurance, you got a plaque to put on the front of your house, and when the alarm went up, the fire companies would rush to the spot and the first one to put out the fire claimed the insurance money. The problem was, if a house didn't have insurance, the fire company would watch (or go home) as their house burned to cinders.

Even if we think that's OK individually, that didn't work in increasingly compact cities, when one person's fire could incinerate the entire neighborhood. I think Cincinnati was the first to have a single government-run and tax-funded fire department for the whole city—remember, a socialist kind of plan—in the 1850s.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

Why Are Americans and Conservatives So Afraid of Socialism?

Because it's violent and oppressive. Honestly, how dense are you people that you can't look at history and even the present day and understand that. Why don't you ask all the Cuban refugees who floated 90 miles on a raft to Miami how wonderful socialism is?
https://aninjusticemag.com/why-are-...raid-of-socialism-33409294290?gi=3f5ad72c43ff

In contrast, the (predominantly western/northern) Europeans seemed to find my explanation pretty fair and even stopped to correct me on some of the finer points of Scottish, Scandinavian and German socialist democracy.

None of those places are socialist. They are market based economies just like us who have a larger social welfare state, but that does not make them socialist.

 

[2aguy]

A version of ‘socialism’ works in the likeminded nordics…they don’t have 20-50 million thirdworlders and 40 million Africans to foster.
Is it racist for me to expose this fact?
Harry Dresden

It isn't even socialism...they just have high taxes and social welfare benefits...made possible by the fact that the U.S. provides for their national defense and healthcare and technological advances....without us, they would have to actually pay their own way...

If you read what those countries actually say, they will state they are not socialist countries......they tried that and almost destroyed their economies....


Here...

EXCLUSIVE: Interview With Swedish Author Johan Norberg On The Destructive Nature Of Socialism | The Daily Wire

If we’re talking about those preconditions for a moment — we had Social Democrats in Sweden who said that this is the best place in the world to experiment with socialism because we already had these great foundations to make it work. We had wide-spread social trust, so people trusted one another, and they trusted the government. A strong Lutheran work ethic means we would work even though taxes might make it less economically beneficial. People would never accept welfare if they could work. We had already built all this wealth. What some of them said is, “If it doesn’t work in Sweden, it can’t work anywhere.”


What happened — even in Sweden — this began to undermine our foundations in various ways. Cultures don’t exist in vacuums, and if there are no institutions, no incentives that encourage them, they begin to fall apart — and that’s what happened in many ways. Work ethic decreased; our tradition of not accepting government benefits if they weren’t needed began to erode as well. It used to be that when we were asked something like, “under what circumstances is one justified in accepting government benefits to which one is not entitled,” we were always ahead of everyone else, 80% to 90% would say, “never.” That has begun to erode down to some 50% to 55%, which is higher than many other countries, but it tells you something about what has changed.

In the early 2000s, because of generous government sick leave benefits, Sweden — objectively speaking, one of the healthiest populations on the planet — were off “sick” from work more than any other population on the planet. Especially during events like the soccer World Cup in 2002, for example, the number of men taking short-term sick leaves increased by some 40%, and Sweden didn’t even make it past the final eight. It tells you that Swedes began to exploit the system, and some of the Social Democrats said, “Look, we’ve become a country of cheats.” This was not the way it was supposed to be.
The generation growing up with strong economic incentives to work and stay away from government benefits — they’re doing well, but then in the next generations, as taxes grew and government expanded, we got less of this work ethic.

This then is the question for all the Americans who want the Swedish system in the United States. First of all, it’s problematic because you don’t have some of those preconditions; you don’t have that trust in others and in government, and that others would never use government benefits to which they weren’t entitled, and so on. So, from a worse starting point, America would have to try to implement this.
-------


Additionally, and this is important, something the up-and-coming Swedish fans in the U.S. seem to miss, is that they think they can combine big government with squeezing the rich.


For them, it seems like they’re almost synonymous, as if that’s the way it would work. The rich can pay more, and then we’ll get this government. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Nordic social model is about because it’s not about squeezing the rich. If we did that with a government of this size, we would lose the rich, we would lose the big companies. We would lose the most important taxpayers.

The Nordic welfare states have always treated the big companies and the richest best in many ways.

They always get the exemptions and the deductions they need.


When it comes to the tax burden, generally, the latest study I saw showed that in the United States, the top 10% of earners paid almost 50% of all income taxes. In Sweden, the top 10% of earners paid just a quarter of total taxes. So, what the “Swedish model” does is it taxes the middle-class and the low-income earners much more heavily than the U.S. We do that with income taxes, but also with a national VAT tax on consumption, highly regressive at 25% on everything that you consume.
=========


Ten Reasons We Can’t, and Shouldn’t, Be Nordic | National Review
2) Most of what American progressives envy about the Scandinavian countries existed before they expanded their welfare state, and America’s voices on the left are mixing up correlation with causation.
As Nima Sanandaji, a Swedish author of Kurdish origin who holds a Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, wrote in 2015:

Many of the desirable features of Scandinavian societies, such as low income inequality, low levels of poverty and high levels of economic growth predated the development of the welfare state. These and other indicators began to deteriorate after the expansion of the welfare state and the increase in taxes to fund it.

 

[2aguy]

All of those industries are socialism. They are public utilities, meaning they are owned by all of us as a group, and run by the government. We pay taxes, the government applies some of them to the fire department, who apply their product (fire protection) to the person who needs it (the one with the burning house). That is exactly how socialist ideals work when applied to a single industry.

And you're right, there were fire departments, but up until about the time of the Civil War they weren't public utilities. If you paid fire insurance, you got a plaque to put on the front of your house, and when the alarm went up, the fire companies would rush to the spot and the first one to put out the fire claimed the insurance money. The problem was, if a house didn't have insurance, the fire company would watch (or go home) as their house burned to cinders.

Even if we think that's OK individually, that didn't work in increasingly compact cities, when one person's fire could incinerate the entire neighborhood. I think Cincinnati was the first to have a single government-run and tax-funded fire department for the whole city—remember, a socialist kind of plan—in the 1850s.

Wrong........socialism controls wealth generation.....those other things are services.....the socialists couldn't run a lemonade stand let alone an economy.....they can spend money, they just destroy the people who actually create the money.

 

[2aguy]

Because it's violent and oppressive. Honestly, how dense are you people that you can't look at history and even the present day and understand that. Why don't you ask all the Cuban refugees who floated 90 miles on a raft to Miami how wonderful socialism is?
Why Are Americans and Conservatives So Afraid of Socialism?

None of those places are socialist. They are market based economies just like us who have a larger social welfare state, but that does not make them socialist.

Exactly....those countries would tell them this but they and their tiny brains will not listen...

 

[HappyJoy]

Here, the rich get rich making things and providing services...in socialist states, the rich get rich as members of the government, taking from everyone else....big fucking difference.

Some do. Some inherited and simply invest. What they all have in common is they can't do it without the consumer or the worker. The fact that you ignored my entire point that the middle class is falling further and further behind and your response appears to be to bend over and take it.

Obama didn't get rich providing services and products, Elon Musk got rich making things and advancing society...

Actually he kind of did. Netflix, speeches and books.

Elon Musk is more dependent on labor than Obama is. Musk also relies on our infrastructure in order to make the massive amount of money he does (the portion that isn't purely speculative gambling) so he should be expected to pay more in taxes and some of those taxes should be redistributed to others in our society to include the middle class. Elon Musk doesn't give a fuck about you.

Also, Tesla has benefited from government programs to make his product more affordable.

 

[BrokeLoser]

Enriching others? You don't think that happens here as the wealth gap gets wider and wider?

This “wealth gap” you beggars always speak of….I’ve never once gave two shits about my wealthier neighbor and his earnings….why would you care about what others earn in relation to what you earn?

 

[Rogue AI]

All of those industries are socialism. They are public utilities, meaning they are owned by all of us as a group, and run by the government. We pay taxes, the government applies some of them to the fire department, who apply their product (fire protection) to the person who needs it (the one with the burning house). That is exactly how socialist ideals work when applied to a single industry.

And you're right, there were fire departments, but up until about the time of the Civil War they weren't public utilities. If you paid fire insurance, you got a plaque to put on the front of your house, and when the alarm went up, the fire companies would rush to the spot and the first one to put out the fire claimed the insurance money. The problem was, if a house didn't have insurance, the fire company would watch (or go home) as their house burned to cinders.

Even if we think that's OK individually, that didn't work in increasingly compact cities, when one person's fire could incinerate the entire neighborhood. I think Cincinnati was the first to have a single government-run and tax-funded fire department for the whole city—remember, a socialist kind of plan—in the 1850s.

The Roman emperors were socialist? They built roads. It's always the same with you clowns. You claim things are socialist that aren't. Investment in the common good is not socialism, it dates back long before political theories even existed. The crux of socialism is stealing from those who have and giving it to those who don't. Even the most ignorant folks can see that's wrong, so you socialists steal ideas and pretend they are socialism to mask your thieving ways.