Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
You mean like your claims about the end of the USA as we know it?
I might have said that here once. Don't remember. I may also have quoted someone saying that. Don't remember.
But "the end of the USA as we know it" has been happening almost every generation or two. Would the Founders claim that this present USA is the one they knew? Would Lincoln and the late 19th Century Americans claim the current USA as one like their own? What would Coolidge think? What would the average American from the founding to 1960 say? What would the grandparents and parents of our current young Americans say?
Hasn't the goal of our leftists from Woodrow Wilson to FDR and from LBJ to the present been to transform America? Even fundamentally transform it?
The phrase "end of America (or USA) as we know it" means different things to different people. To many leftists, if not most, it would mean something good, something desired, something rightly to be achieved (or as Shakespeare wrote, "a consummation devoutly to be wish’d."
What it means to me is not the expected cultural, technological, and low level or constitutional political changes, but the ongoing and final transformation from a Constitutional Republic to a centralized administrative state.
Did you claim Bill Clinton, in office 8 years, would usher in socialism. Then Obama, in office 8 years, would bring socialism. Now it's Biden will bring socialism.
I'm sure I've thrown the word "socialism" around, probably inaccurately, from time to time. Most of us, especially the so-called "conservatives," tend to refer to any thing more than moderately leftist as being "socialism."
But even many or most average American leftists use the word incorrectly, referring to the kind of government that European countries have, especially Sweden and Denmark. Those countries are not governed by socialism. To varying degrees, they are welfare states, not socialist (as in socialism) countries.
Care to explain why the US still isn't socialist despite the fear mongering?
|
If you mean why we are not yet ruled by true socialism, I'll give it a shot. Probably for the same reason that either we don't have countries that are under a true state of socialism, or that cannot sustain a state of true socialism as in "the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." Because "the community as a whole" either cannot, or cannot as well and constantly, create and innovate things to produce as can individuals motivated to do so--and that motivation is, in the main, driven by a desire for some sort of profit.
There could, conceivably, be a relatively brief period of time in which some socialist revolution nationalized an existing system of production and just kept repeating essentially the same methods of production, and the same products. But over time, without entrepreneurs (especially profit seeking entrepreneurs), the socialist system would collapse due to stagnation, due to the lack of change needed to satisfy those substantial numbers of "citizens" who seek various meaning to their lives other than being a cog in the monotonous turning wheel of the "community as a whole." As well, such a system, because it is authoritarian in nature, is inherently ripe for being corrupted by inevitable power seekers who either lust for power, or who gain power in order get more of what they desire than the system provides.
And so a socialist (as in socialism) system, for many reasons, including human nature, is more likely to lead to a far more authoritarian scheme in which the desired utopia transforms into the human nightmare in which individuals become purely a pawn of the state--Marx claimed that socialism was the interim stepping stone from capitalism to communism.
My fear is not that we will become a socialist state. For the above reasons that is not likely, at least not for long. But that something worse will happen. That we will lose that constitutional anchor which keeps us moored in the calmer, more secure, waters of individual freedom, and will cast us adrift into the dangerous seas of unchecked authoritarian statism.
Close examination of the direction we have been drifting into is that regulatory state which is cousin to socialism or economic fascism. We already to a great degree have been transformed into an administrative state. Our courts almost always defer to administrative law over Constitutional law when regulatory agency law is being challenged. I don't believe that it can be denied that the central federal government is far more powerful than it was in the beginning, and has incrementally grown so from generation to generation. Our government has grown, almost constantly--larger and more powerful and more authoritarian.
And if I were to stick a label on it, I would say that our present iteration of American central government, is a burgeoning form of economic fascism combined with a socialistic regulatory scheme. It is a behemoth complex of big business wedded to a big government regulator and enforcer. The only direction it can grow into from here is the total assimilation of huge corporations with the administrative state into an unlimited form of government--call it what you will.