How do you define "Socialism"?

How do you define "Socialism"?

Different sources relate different definitions of socialism, so I want to hear how different Sup Forumslocks define it.

As a burgerclapper, I define socialism as an outlawing of profit and private property. In a completely socialist society, I think that the government would outlaw any kind of profiteering for any reason, and a complete outlawing of any privately owned property in exchange for an allowance of the government to be in possession of material goods sanctioned by the government.

National cuckisim

Shouldn't there be houses underwater in the $7/hr scenario too?

This
Eliminate min wage, so we can all have jobs and maximize profit and GDP!!

State owns the means of production and allocates the resources.

le Denmark meme pisses me off because they have a "freer" economy than the American one yet it is touted as a success for socialism.

Of course, it would be jobs that are worth less than the $7/hour wage. Think of a shitty business model that wouldn't get much attention in your area.

There probably wouldn't be much call for a used toilet paper store in my town, but if I could afford to pay some asshole 1$/day to stay open on the off chance that he sells enough product to afford the $200/month rent then you bet your ass I'd have a store open.

At least in the case of the $7.25 minimum wage, most businesses had already moved to that on their own. A slow, gradual minimum wage is like a response to a mild coast increase. A doubling of the minimum wage is like a category 5 hurricane.

I don't define it. I adapt Marx' definition made in his manifest. It's not merely outlawing, but making them obsolete. It's an utopia.

When was the last time you went to a sweat shop in a minimum wage country?

Banning and outlawing are essentially identical in the scope of this conversation.

Anyone who acquired a good at (X) cost but then traded them for (X+[X>0]) would be making a profit. Anyone who acquired any good for any reason (including things like food or water) other than it being state appointed would be responsible for acquiring a good outside of the state approved reason. How would you enforce that?

wait? so If I make 7 dollars an hour I can have beachfront property? Shit, where is the nearest mcdonalds? I need a job!

That's not necessarily the ocean, it could be some shithole polluted river located anywhere in the country. Sure, the people under $15/hour wage could afford to live right on the water but they'd probably be flooded out after the first heavy rain.

Classical absolute socialism basically equals to the state owning all property, which is supposed to be a preparation for communism.

In the modern day, socialism has 'evolved' so to say. Since govt-owned business is so poor, badly managed and only brings about debts, the socialists decided to regulate private businesses instead. In the end, instead of being a manager in a govt business, you end up a manager in your own business, but can't do anything without getting a permission from the govt first and you pay a huge amount of your profit to the govt.

The generation of regulators, those who want to set limits, licences, permissions, requirements upon private businesses;
they are the modern socialists.

And they rule over us.

they're all trash.

fuck em and fuck you, poland

you should know better, eastern bloc

I already told socialism is an utopia. It only works with small communities because socialism requires free stock for everyone and completely denies greed. As soon as there is an anonymous trader who can't be punished by society (you don't work in our favour , you don't get access to our Stock), the whole system crumbles. Socialism fails because humans aren't altruistic. See ttip: both sides try to get the best deals for them and simultaneously try to deny the other the same benefits. It simply can't work. But that wasn't OP's question. The question was how we define socialism. The definition is a society without classes and state control (in the long run) where everybody works as good as they can for the benefit of everyone.

socialism is expressly defined as the nation state directly producing certain goods or services which would otherwise be relegated to private entities.

municipal water systems is an example of this, roads and police are another.

only lolbertarians think socialism is bad on principal. the only real question is how much socialism is enough

Why fuck me tho?
I merely stated the sad truth.

These tryhard shit comics again.

But the people making 7 bucks an hour would never be in houses anyway.

Doesn't socialism essentially boil down to "all for one, one for all"?

>Shouldn't there be houses underwater in the $7/hr scenario too?
No, they can't afford houses. Shacks maybe.

No but seriously the 7 dollar minimum wage killed things like serviced gas pumps etc.

>full serve gas
right

because that's not expensive and a waste of my time as a consumer for shit i can do myself really easily

>SWEDEN YES

>Socialism fails because humans aren't altruistic.
It worked pretty good in 100 iq ethnically homogeneous white countries like in Scandinavia.

Until the politicians decided to import problems from abroad.

>How do you define "Socialism"?

>flooding
thats ok, Im too poor to buy electronics with all the child support I have to pay since bitches love getting laid by the beachfront.

There's nothing wrong with socialism to provide things like firefighters, police force, infrastructure and safety nets.

That's government/the state not socialism.

Exactly. As soon as there was an anonymous "abroad" , where you can work for your own benefit without social persecution, it failed. Globalisation and socialism contradict each other in their current forms.

That's because globalisation is profit driven garbage.

That's kind of the point though. Would you spend $1 for a guy to do 7 minutes of work to afford his $8/hour job when you could do it yourself for free? Would you spend 25 cents for him to do the same thing for his $2/hour job? Keep in mind that doesn't mean just filling gas, it would be cleaning all of your windshields and checking your fluids and tire pressure.

Sure, you could just pump your gas for free, you probably already do that right now, but if you had the option to do /all/ of the services listed above for 25 cents (in today's money) on top of your $30 gas bill, would you not accept that offer? You probably have 25 cents lodged between your seat cushions because that amount of money means so little to you, but some 25 year old kid walking away with $20 for working 10 hours on a Sunday doing the easiest job on the planet is a lot more valuable than your quarter.

I'm sure this cunt will figure things out

Or couldn't the guys just, you know, instead of dividing their resources, share them and all use that same ladder to get where needed? Where is the capitalist version of the ladder owner on top pulling them up saying "sorry guys I have to charge shekels for you to use my ladder but you don't have enough so instead of all of us going forward I'm going to leave you two there and face new challenges here alone and weaker"

No globalisation. Humanity.

15* year old kid

Theoretically it could apply to a 25 year old too, but it changes the point I was making

>every time the goverment spends money that's socialism

kill yourself

25 year olds aren't kids

thats the age people used to have families of their own already

I'm interested to know how much it costs to live in America because $20 a day for 10 hours in the UK would be unacceptable.

See
Just to reiterate: it works just the same for a 25 year old. The 25 year old would probably only be doing that job because he couldn't find anything better or didn't want to have a job doing anything harder.

Even the most radical libertarians promote those examples as a state's duty. There is simply no way the free market will solve the problems they do.

That description fits Nordic countries better than eastern block.

Who said anything about a certain wage being livable off of? What does that have to do with the wage an employer pays them?

>Exactly. As soon as there was an anonymous "abroad" , where you can work for your own benefit without social persecution, it failed.
No, it failed because we let in millions of people from iq and have good work ethics.
>Globalisation and socialism contradict each other in their current forms.
Yep. But its because people come here, not because they leave.

Ofc now when we have imported 1 million migrants that drain on the society a lot more people will start to leave. But before we did this not that many left because even though we had high taxes people accepted it because they got something back in the form of social security, health care, schools etc. Its only now when all of this is falling apart that every one is leaving.

Ofc it would never have worked in america because america was never (well not the last 500 years at least) ethnically homogeneous.

TL;DR
Socialism can work on a national level in countries with an average iq of 90 or higher.

Not really, it's a sea level rise. Equally catastrophic, it just happens it gives you time to figure out how to handle the remaining land, but you are still gonna be worse off than before.

>I have to charge you
>face new challenges here alone and weaker
If he can overcome these challenges by himself, why not? And if he can't he won't deny himself the opportunity of help, considering that he owns all the stock required to obtain that help.

Socialism did not work on china, that has an iq >100. Just because you are more intelligent doesnt mean you will help the society more

That's what levees are for

This post made me think about the affection of these regulations to different size companies. Wouldn't a large multi-industrial company actually benefit from these regulations and minimum wage laws? When you think about it, a smaller company is less likely to be able to pay these minimum wages, huge taxes etc since it makes less profit than the big company. Also if these said minimum wages are raised, the smaller company suffers more from it. And since this removes the possible competition from the big companys it benefits them?

That's just simply not true though.

If there were no firefighting entity in a town, a firefighting company would open up and they'd charge whatever they wanted to the citizens that they could feasibly service. Then a competing company would open up and charge a reduced rate and the two (or more) companies would all compete until they reached an equilibrium that the workers and company seemed fair without having to reduce their wages or cost of firefighting equipment.

The only thing that would reduce this free enterprise competition would be if the firefighting companies came together and said "hey, if we all charge X and don't go lower then we'd all make a profit and we could charge whatever we wanted", which is a monopoly/trust situation. If they were all forced to compete fairly then the market would determine the price of the service.

This exact scenario happened to my dad in the 90s. He settled in a budding development about 20 miles outside of a major city and for the first 5 years he was forced to pay a high cost for a shitty landline (aka house phone for all of you millennials) because the company had no competition. Eventually in the early 2000s a major networking company came to the city and installed fiber wire high speed internet and phone line connections and even charged a lower rate than the other company which was so complacent to improve their service because before they literally didn't have to.
That's how capitalism works. Competition determines everything. Breaking competition by introducing price floors (like minimum wage) or allowing companies to enter into agreements with each other (monopolies) kills the system from inside out.

>Socialism did not work on china
China has communist right? Also china went from being a middle age farming society to an industrial powerhouse and the worlds larget economy in 100 years so you could say it worked.
>Just because you are more intelligent doesnt mean you will help the society more
As long as people do the bare minimum work and manage to not be a drain on society it works. This is a lot more likely to happen in a high IQ ethnically homegenous country because people feel that they have a sense of duty to each other.

This is all falling apart now and more and more swedes feel like they have no responsibility to be good goy tax payers because the money doesn't go to handicapped swedes that fell and broke their neck when building bridges, it goes to somalians and their 8 kids.

Well, the problem is that those things predate socialism by far.
State paid education, firefighters, roads, law enforcement, water systems etc. have existed long before socialism was even a thing.

Socialism was a after all conceived around the time when WW1 was starting, which means that pretty much all the social programs that we enjoy and consider necessary nowadays existed before Socialism was even conceived.

China is outright fascist at this point. Their state is essentially one large corporation.

Socialism as defined by Wikipedia is social ownership of the means of production.

However since anything can be used to produce something else what is really means is that it's the social ownership of absolutely anything.

That means no private property, that which you build or earn is to be redistributed to other people against your consent.

That means no incentive to work harder than the average person because anything extra you make goes to someone else, capitalism fails and progress stops.

It's basically a political nightmare that impoverishes everyone.

Yeah sorry to break your echo chamber but Finland is a socialist country and has lower corporate tax than US. Otherwise I would guess we are a bit more taxed country than US, but VAT, income tax and such do exist there as far as I know. So, what does this socialism do FOR corporations? Well, free education means we can get the best out of everyone, thus providing better workers for the corporations hiring them and generating more tax revenue. This might be a shock to you but there is both public and private healthcare to choose from, and most companies have opted to use private, while public is still a viable option for not so busy stuff like getting a checkup for a lower rate than in private sector. The only govt monopolies I can think of are Alko, selling all the hard liqour in the country, and VR, govt owned railways. Sure, the Alko thing is fucked, but railways are competing with private airlines which are cheaper for long distance commuting. You seem to think socialism=kgb death patrols who look our for everyone not wearing just rags, while it can actually in real life practice allow private business, corporations, competition, while also ensuring a working society for these private businesses to thrive in. Fite me.

China went from a third world to a first world because of capitalism.

Socialism ultimately failed. All socialism did was allow the average citizen to maintain the average quality of life that was present at the time of institution. It was capitalist ideals that ultimately led to improvements because it created both supply and demand for better qualities of life.

For all of you guys who didn't realize that he's shit posting, the leader of Finland came out and begged the world not to refer to them as a socialist country.

Dont know really anything about economics, but how would Bernie Sanders' plan work, would it work well or not, and why. Positives/negatives?

>China is outright fascist at this point.
Yeah, there is no real difference really.

I like capitalism to. Just saying that socialism can work in small ethnically homogeneous countries with high iq population. You hear people talk about the ''Swedish model'' like its some kind of magic but its really just a high iq highly altruistic ethnically homogeneous country. It would literally only work in (past) Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and a few other homogeneous countries with high social cohesion.

It would never work in the U.S because you never had that population or that shared history and it won't work in future Sweden because the politicians killed the thing that made it work.

The landline was a safe game for the company. Fire fighting is riskier because you A) don't know how much work there will be and B) if you fail to completely safe the building, there is a high chance your customer can't pay you or will even sue you for letting his building burn down. As a entrepreneur, I would stay the fuck out of that business because the majority of your customers either can't or won't pay.

He would do more labour to go back to the guys he left there, whom might be a bit bitter about being left there, or happy that their services are demanded now. Then again, would they just have used the same ladder together the first time they would have faced and solved new challenges faster and in better strength. Also, the two guys already had a ladder, the third guy just came along, took the ladder, and denied the men from means to get ahead because "it's mine now".

He wants to make the min wage $15 an hour.

Unfortunately some jobs do not generate the employer $15 an hour worth of revenue therefore any job that is below $15 an hour will simply cease to exist and will be replaced by the next cheapest thing, probably automation.

In a lot of cases were we absolutely need humans to do the job the extra cost of hiring means the price of the services/goods goes up to compensate for the additional pay, which means the overall cost of living goes up.

That means the poor are now paid more but they're taxed more, plus the cost of living is higher meaning they can't buy any more with the money they have.

As the cost of living starts to raise the people hit the hardest are the poor, because the rich can afford minor increases in cost of living but the poor cannot.

>have to help some useless fucks that didn't even bring a ladder
>at the next challenge they sit and wait for me to solve it again and push them through

Yeah no, how about they fuck off.

If they can demonstrate some use, they can have the ladder. It's in my self-interest to arrange something with them.

But If I decide to unconditionally help them regardless of what they do, I set myself up to be exploited.

This might be due to the leader of Finland being from our Neo-con party. They sure are trying trying to tear down anything resembling socialism, while giving in return none of the good sides of the free market.
>destroy the good things of socialism
>raise taxes and prices on everything cause of muh national debt
>Finland actually turns a profit with these socialist policies in place
Sure, I wouldn' mind lower taxes and costs if we got rid of the eelfare state, as I could save something for a rainy day. This is just not the case with neo-cons. Or how is american "banks get to keep profits while taxpayers foot the bill for failures" not socialism for the highest class?

The fucking ladder was already there. The guy just came along and sold it to both guys, instead of all of them going forward with intact ladders. I guess as an ex commie state it's hard to see the possibility of working together as opposed for working for the party but fucking try atleast.

Yes. The minimum wage is a job killer. It should go.

So if the minimum wage was raised, but the cost of living went up, and there would be less jobs because some companies couldn't afford to employ, what is the benefit?

Would the combination of a higher minimum wage, and a higher tax, just mean that taxation would be a larger generator of tax money or whatever you call it

>So if the minimum wage was raised, but the cost of living went up, and there would be less jobs because some companies couldn't afford to employ, what is the benefit?

There is no benefit, not to the people, the only benefit is that politicians get to say they're doing something nice for the little guy and use that to buy voters at election time to gain power.

>Would the combination of a higher minimum wage, and a higher tax, just mean that taxation would be a larger generator of tax money or whatever you call it

Not necessarily, some people would be paying more tax that's for sure, but there would also be people out of work because they don't have the skills yet to offer more than $15 an hours worth of value to anyone. Not only do these people stop paying tax but they also require benefits from the government which means more tax money needs to be spent on them.

Whatever tax the government does collect it has to be spent back into the economy to do whatever tax money does, build schools and roads and hire people etc, but all those things now cost more because the businesses that the government contracts with to do the work have to charge more for their services because they're forced to pay their workers more.

Working together, on a voluntary basis, is what I'm defending. Conceding to a socialist order is not working together.

The two guys are already there with the ladders, so we can assume they aquired them by either building it themselves or finding it, but in either case you as the third person have no claim to the ladder. You do, instead have the idea how to utilize the ladders the best, and you are not forced in any way to share it with the men who have the actual claim to the ladder. You see that arguing gets you nowhere so you decide to share your idea of using the ladder intact together to get to the next challenge. Nobody is thus exploiting anyone as two invested manual labour and one mental. All profit by actually getting forward.
But nobody forces you to do anything, you can just watch the two men argue till eternity.

So if there saying they're doing it to help the little, who would the little guy be? Someone making minimum wage who wants to make more? But only some people would be able to make that minimum wage because less jobs would be able to provide it? What happens to the people who cant find a job if there's less jobs because of fewer employers capable of hiring?.

The little guy in this case is basically anyone currently earning less than the minimum wage, they are the people that theoretically stand to "benefit" from the increase.

Yes generally what happens is the number of jobs goes down because some placements become unprofitable. Businesses wont continue to hire people if the value that person provides is below that which they're forced to pay them.

The people who can't find a job basically end up on welfare or work illegally for less than minimum wage which cases another set of problems.

This is why minimum wage hurts the poor, it doesn't help.

correct, and there is PLENTY of houses underwater thanks to minimum wage

Taking money from people who work and give it to people who do jack shit but breed and feel offended.

This is a disingenuous image, in that it suggests that jobs which make less than fifteen an hour generate less than fifteen an hour in revenue. If we adopt this reasoning, then jobs at MacDizzles can easily pay twenty five.

The real issue is not how much revenue a job provides, it is how much the labor is worth in the market, which is only partially related to the marginal revenue product of an hour of labor.

Jobs that lead to higher revenue generation are paid better because profits are only ever marginal due to competition in the free market.

Capitalism means that businesses compete for customers and they do that by lower prices and they do that by maintainly very small profit margins, it means that workers value is closely related to their wage.

The value people have in the free market has nothing to do with money, value is intrinsic to the person and their skill set and what they can offer an employer. What people like Bernie want to do is give these people more money but what they really need is more value. If you give these people more money then the costs of everything changes to balance out the market.

The poor will be no better off because they don't have any more value to offer someone, that comes through increasing experience, knowledge and skills.

You are citing the model of perfect competition, which is a pedagogical model used to help illustrate concepts, not to actually describe reality.

In the real world, worker wages are only partially related to their productivity. Regulatory capture, an upward sloping labor supply curve (as opposed to the flat curve in the competitive "free market" model), the presence of monopsonies, internal labor markets, information problems faced by firms, collective bargaining agreements, non-pecuniary benefits, efficiency wages, and a whole damn host of other factors that actual economists deal with make the situation far more complex and nuanced than what you are describing.

Case in point: did you know that under the right conditions, raising the wage floor actually induces firms to hire more workers instead of laying people off, reducing output, or replacing them with capital?

Economist reporting in.

>As a burgerclapper, I define socialism as an outlawing of profit and private property. In a completely socialist society, I think that the government would outlaw any kind of profiteering for any reason, and a complete outlawing of any privately owned property in exchange for an allowance of the government to be in possession of material goods sanctioned by the government.

If this is what Americans typically view as 'socialism' they're even more retarded than I thought in calling certain European countries and Obama 'socialist'...

15 year olds make the full minimum wage in the US? We have a 'minimum youth wage' that scales up from age 15 up to age 23. At 23 you make full minimum wage, which is more than 3x the minimum for 15 year olds (though in practise

>If there were no firefighting entity in a town, a firefighting company would open up and they'd charge whatever they wanted to the citizens that they could feasibly service. Then a competing company would open up and charge a reduced rate and the two (or more) companies would all compete until they reached an equilibrium that the workers and company seemed fair without having to reduce their wages or cost of firefighting equipment.

>Americans are actually this retarded

Wew...

Minwage does fine in Germany (8,50€ or for burgers around $10/$11)

Wouldn't work less as 10€ though.
It is salary-dumping

I hate to say it but were there large scale union action the boats would (at least temporarily) appear.

Youth wages used to be different in some places here, but we ditched the concept decades ago.

Those aren't examples of socialism my dude.

Ok got it, so what is the downside to leaving it, the amount of poor people stays the same, there would be less of a tax on income(not necesarilly bad right?)so less tax money, But more jobs, and tax money that can be spent less on welfare because more jobs?
so what's your opinion on the economic plans of trump/bernie/clinton

The funny thing about this story is that the hypothetical scenario my fellow is describing actually did happen with clockwork regularity back when firefighting companies were private.
The only problem is that competition did not lower the prices, they formed regional monopolies and jacked them up. Furthermore, the quality of the service was very poor, the system was plagued by free-riders which caused entire blocks to burn down, and in the end the laissez faire approach was abandoned in favor of public provision.

Maybe next time pick a speculative scenario that didnt actually happen and blow your theory out of the water.

State supported collectivism.

Wait so what's the solution to making sure that people with jobs that pay poorly aren't having to live in squalor? Welfare? Basic income?

So how would education affect this, with free education would people really develop the skills or would more people just blast through free school and not really obtain anything of worth arent only some degrees proof of any real worth

Im inclined to think that basic income proposals tied to tax policies seeking to capture economic rents (resource rents related to land or oil, etc) are the best bet. They are the most economically efficient, can have current welfare funding diverted into them, can be structured in such a way where they dont distort labor market outcomes too much, and still meet intuitive principles regarding justice and the give and take expected of each person in society.

Policy makers dont listen to economists though, just like they dont listen to other experts on other subjects, so we end up with mouth breathers forming policy and get dumb shit like minimum wage and currency inflation instead.

Im out guys.

Yes you're absolutely right, all those things are factors, however in the free market businesses which mitigate or compensate for these issues are the ones which go on to be successful and those which for example lack information about the rest of the market and wages/rates are going to not be competitive and go bust.

The free market as described is not exactly what happens in reality, in reality many different factors and influences change how businesses operate.. However what it does mean is that the market is always tending towards that model and those which match it closest are the most successful in the long run.

It's essentially like biological evolution applied to businesses, the strong survive and the weak die because none of this occurs in isolation, there's always competition or threat of competition which always drives down margins to be small.

Education matters quite a lot in most, but not all professions. It's one way of increasing the value you represent to someone and thus will land you better paying jobs. That's why it's better for poor people to get educated than it is to raise minimum wage, because raising minimum wage doesn't give that person any more value and thus they are not better of.

First thing to acknowledge is there's no such thing as free education, it's always paid for by someone. When you socialize the cost first of all you guarantee it, which means educational institutions can jack up their prices above market rates because the government is just handing out that money to students. This is what has caused a massive increase in the cost of university.

So first of all government should stop backing student loans, they should be private. That way the people going to get loans are those which have demonstrated they're a good investment, people that study hard and get good grades and study useful subjects that will lead to them having real value in the free market. Right now we have thousands of people going through uni who are doing useless degrees which don't increase their value in the market place (gender studies kinda thing)

That'll put a stop to the crushing debt of student loans afflicting a lot of young people today. But it would mean that you can't be a lazy fuck, you have to work hard and prove your worth through your actions.

Giving people things, be that money or education never solves the problem, making someone work for what they have is what creates value where there previous was none.

Original Socialism is about human rights, liberty, equality and fraternity. The difference between people were supposed to be based on the general utility, for example, if you were good at maths, the state would help you get a job in those areas by funding your engineering studies.

It changed to freaking hell like the suppression of private property and related.

Liberty meant "Individual responsibility in regard to the same law for everyone"
Equality meant "Equal opportunity"
Fraternity meant "The weakest points of society won't be neglected because everyone can become the weakest point at any time (illness, war, natural disasters)"

Socialism means collective property of production means. For example, in a capitalist system a business works with a director, shareholders and employees, in a socialist system, the employees possess the business. A government/state is not required in a complete socialist society.

About wage, there are two philosophies.
No minimum wage : Less unemployment, more profits for businesses, but social dumping inside the country.
Minimum wage : More unemployment, more money into consumption, workers have better situation, social dumping outside the country in poorer states.

Minimum wage was about doing something for the workers who were precarious/miserable, and transforming an industrial society into a mass consumption society. While there is not clearly a best policy, I somewhat see minimum wage as a natural evolution in developed countries, while slave labor in third world countries can provide its products.

Pic semi related.

...