37 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. ll this raises the question of what “capitalism” is to begin with, aquestion on which there is no consensus at all. The word wasoriginally invented by socialists, who saw capitalism as that systemwhereby those who own capital command the labor of those who donot.

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    1. This dilemma was reflected in the furor over a second round of Chinese simplification in 1977, an effort that was rescinded in 1986.

      พอดิบพอดีกับช่วงสิ้นสุดของการปฏิวัติวัฒนธรรมและเข้าสู่ยุคสมัย 改革开放 ของ 邓小平

  2. Nov 2023
    1. blah. this surveillance system is one big personality test.<br /> the problem is, they do not want a balance of all personality types or "natural order",<br /> but they do a one-sided selection by personality type.<br /> aka socialdarwinism, socialism, survival of the social, social credit score, civilization, high culture, progress, "made order", human laws, human rights, humanism, ...

  3. Aug 2023
    1. Last fall, I spent several days in New York City, during which time I visited a home owned by a group of pacifist Christians that lives from a common purse—meaning the members do not have privately held property but share their property and money. Their simple life and shared finances allow their schedules to be more flexible, making for a thicker immediate community and greater generosity to neighbors, as well as a richer life of prayer and private devotion to God, all supported by a deep commitment to their church.This is, admittedly, an extreme example. But this community was thriving not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another.

      fascinating example of anti toxic capitalism...

  4. Jul 2023
    1. As socialist realism was imposed on Soviet writers, one form of permissible resistance, of finding an inner freedom, was to read translations of foreign writers. No private library was complete without Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger—all officially permitted as “progressive writers” exposing the “ulcers of the capitalist world.”
  5. May 2023
    1. fighting the fear of not having enough money

      In a capitalist society, where the profit motive is the prime directive, the fear of not having enough money is one of (if not, the) greatest fears we have in our old age.

      My hope of a better tomorrow includes a society that has outgrown the profit motive and sincerely cares for everyone, even the old and unemployed.

    2. “I’m going to carry you. I’m going to carry you.”

      Christianity's greatest success comes from the sense of community it tends to generate amongst its followers. It is actually that community that does the real carrying. You will feel God carrying you, to the extent that you have community.

    3. Well, there are needy people everywhere, and maybe you’re just a little bit ahead of them, and you have something good to do. You can do good to them. So that would be number three: to free you from being self-preoccupied and to serve.

      This is the primary objective of Jesus' teachings and the tenets of socialism (which is really the economic expression of Jesus' teachings): loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

  6. Apr 2023
  7. Mar 2023
  8. Jul 2022
    1. Observing the wider world, Beatrice wrote of "Russian communism and Italian Fascism" as "two sides of the worship of force and the practice of cruel intolerance" and she was disturbed that "this spirit is creeping into the USA and even ... into Great Britain."[16]

      via Muggeridge and Adam, Beatrice Webb: A Life, 1967, p.225.

  9. May 2022
    1. Smith recognizes the role of bargaining by the workers as an important determinant of real wages (Aspromourgos, 2010, p. 1173; Stirati, 1994, p. 51; WN, p. 85). Thus, there is a central role for history and institutions to determine real wages (see Aspromourgos, 2009, pp. 248–249). Smith is also open to the possibility of workers’ wages rising significantly above customary subsistence such that it enables them to engage in “conveniences” consumption—especially when the economy is growing. This rise in wages, for Smith, occurs through strengthening of workers’ bargaining power (Aspromourgos, 2010, p. 1179). Smith believes that competition generates innovation which causes productivity growth and subsequently perhaps higher real wages (Aspromourgos, 2009, p. 208).

      Adam smith on the effect of competition of wagers & capitalists as beneficial for the increase of wealth.

  10. Jan 2022
  11. Dec 2021
  12. Nov 2021
  13. Jul 2021
    1. “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” ― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings
  14. Nov 2020
    1. Should Biden push a “socialist agenda, I don’t think you’ll have seen the end of Donald Trump,” Corey Lewandowski, a senior Trump-campaign adviser, told me ahead of Election Day.

      The lie underlying this false narrative is that Biden is definitively not Bernie. Biden is about as centrist as it gets when you look at everything left of center.

  15. Oct 2020
    1. are woefully underfunded. And many haven't quite found the egalitarian ideal that can really sustain them in the long term

      Issues between socialism and capitalism. Creating something to benefit society (although, the examples mentioned above seem to go against this idea...) versus something that needs to turn a profit.

  16. Jun 2020
    1. Piketty’s account of the past 40 years is less a story of capital being unleashed (as most histories of neoliberalism have it) than of progressive ideologies running out of steam. The failure of communism played a crucial role in this, producing a new fatalism about the capacity of politics to deliver equality. Globalisation eroded national borders, while “hypercapitalism” delivered concentrations of wealth not witnessed since 1914. In the context of post-socialist ideological cynicism
  17. Mar 2020
    1. Socialist economies can also be also more efficient, in the sense that there’s less of a need to sell goods to consumers who might not need them, resulting in less money spent on product promotion and marketing efforts.

      how does socialism make selling markets more efficient

  18. Feb 2020
    1. Most socialists, however, tend to find the profit motive problematic.

      Is it worthwhile to envision a society where people's motives are pre-anticipated or controllable?

      I think social systems should be robust enough to account for stable functioning of society, independent of the motives and only depending on actions.

      Only actions can be observed, and hence only actions can be regulated in any form of organized society and highly so in capitalism.

    1. socialists do not support capitalism, meaning they want workers to control the means of production

      Workers controlling the means of production sounds like co-operative industries. This paradigm is not antithetical to 'capitalism' in the sense that there is still private ownership of the means of production. I disagree with the statement that democratic socialists do not support capitalism.

      A good debate on this topic here - https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/323/are-worker-cooperatives-socialist-capitalist-or-their-own-category

  19. Jul 2019
    1. it seems very possible to get the same improving life expectancies as the US without octupling health care spending.

      Support for socialism is rising among young people in the US. Is the support rising because people are looking at the data themselves and coming to the conclusion that socialism is better, or that there's more this kind of information available for use by advocates to make the case for socialism? If you look at the data yourself, you don't necessarily go to socialism as the solution, as PG's and Tyler's posts make clear.

  20. Jan 2019
    1. Système de Politique Positive

      A work by Auguste Comte (System of Positive Polity in English) published in 1851-54, which emphasized morality and moral progress as the central preoccupation of human knowledge and effort.

      https://www.britannica.com/topic/System-of-Positive-Polity

  21. Aug 2018
    1. But those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.

      and then there are the millennials...

  22. Jul 2018
    1. Leading thinkers in China argue that putting government in charge of technology has one big advantage: the state can distribute the fruits of AI, which would otherwise go to the owners of algorithms.
  23. Feb 2017
    1. Participatory decision-making involves the participation of all persons in deciding issues in proportion to the impact such decisions have on their lives.

      How does one determine where the impact falls? What type of models are economists making?

  24. Dec 2016
    1. Helen Keller became a member of the Socialist Pary in 1909 and by 1912, she had become a national voice for socialism and working class solidarity.

      Helen Keller was a main voice for socialism and suppurated it very much so.

  25. Nov 2016
    1. Castro’s commitment to fighting racism in Cuba wasn’t as much an explicit mission as it was a convenient byproduct of adopting the Soviet model of governance — when you start to eliminate private property, mechanisms of systemic racism are rendered impotent.

      I love this paragraph.

  26. Aug 2016
    1. But second, a sense of what could have been. What if Stalin hadn’t murdered most of the competent people? What if entire fields of science hadn’t been banned for silly reasons? What if Kantorovich had been able to make the Soviet leadership base its economic planning around linear programming? How might history have turned out differently?

      I asked my brother, who writes about Soviet economics, whether he ever had this sense of sadness at what could have been. He responded that in his experience everyone who studies the period shares this feeling.

    2. First, amazement that the Soviet economy got as far as it did, given how incredibly screwed up it was.

      I feel this.

  27. Feb 2016
    1. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

      Of course, the cynics would rather not admit that it's possible for a human whose basic needs are met to consider that benefit divided unselfishly is still non-zero benefit, or is possibly even greater than selfish benefit.

  28. Oct 2015
    1. “O sistema do marxismo é fundado em princípios morais, enquanto o capitalismo só está relacionado a ganho e rentabilidade... Não considero a ex-URSS, ou a China, ou mesmo o Vietnã, verdadeiros regimes marxistas... Penso que [sua] falha principal é que eles colocaram muita ênfase na necessidade para destruir a classe governante, na luta de classe, e isto encoraja o ódio e negligencia a compaixão... Penso em mim como meio marxista, meio budista.”

      Olavo cita esta frase numa aula do curso de História Essencial da Filosofia, e logo depois comenta brevemente: "pois eu digo, tu é meio mentiroso, meio idiota!". o efeito cômico é maior do que neste artigo.

      Depois ele prossegue dizendo que depois desta não respeita mais o Dalai Lama como autoridade espiritual de coisa nenhuma, diz que ele sofre da Síndrome de Estocolmo e afirma: "se o sujeito tivesse consistência espiritual não cairia nisto".

  29. Sep 2015
    1. Falando muito sério, este homem fala da pobreza da "música de massa" (o jazz, principalmente) e da piora geral da qualidade da música, mesmo a "erudita", e põe a culpa toda no "capitalismo", sem o menor pudor.

      É estranhíssimo. Será que toda a mentalidade esquerdista que hoje nós conseguimos identificar facilmente com todas as formas de destruição da cultura não existia nessa época? Ou existia, mas não estava formal e individualmente ligada à esquerda política como hoje está? Se sim, este homem pode estar sendo sincero -- mas não podem os esquerdistas que, hoje, repetem o mesmo discurso, quando a situação claramente já não é a mesma.

      De qualquer forma, o diagnóstico do problema não bate nem um pouco com a defesa de propostas esquerdistas de qualquer tipo, que, como vemos hoje, só o fazem piorar (e isto já devia ter ficado claro na época em que este artigo foi escrito).


      Contribuindo para o atestado de sinceridade do artigo há Roger Scruton, que o leva a sério quando vai falar de música quase 80 anos depois.

  30. Aug 2015
    1. Stockholm City Council now has an official housing queue, where 1 day waiting = 1 point. To get an apartment you need both money for the rent and enough points to be the first in line. Recently an apartment in inner Stockholm became available. In just 5 days, 2000 people had applied for the apartment. The person who got the apartment had been waiting in the official housing queue since 1989!

      onde foi que eu vi uns esquerdistas as belezas do controle de aluguéis outro dia? algum desses sites de esquerda brasileiros, eu acho.