Let's start with:: The world is filled with people who are jerks regardless of thier political persuasion....
Hardened cynicism *yawn*. It became hip in the '80s, another product of capitalism.
:and I am tired of everyone who says that this is an indication of an oppressive regime or ideology that does not care about people.
This, friends, is what Freud would call "transference." Blame others for accusing one of having an "ideology that does not care," after saying in the same breath that "the world is full of jerks." Kevin may be hardened and cynical, but it is the fault of others that he is hardened and cynical, for they accuse his attitude of being uncaring.
:I never had anything given to me.....I had to go to school take loans, and go to the library and read and grow my perspective and work part time jobs and live in crowded apartments to achieve a standard of living I am proud of.....You don't think because I went through this I can not appreciate the value of hard work, sacrifice and drive to accomplish?
I'm sure that many people who contribute to this Debating Room would salute the value of hard work, for they are especially interested in those who work hard yet don't have a "standard of living."
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: I feel bad that you experienced that, and it must have been a lonely time. Yet to arrogantly say that capitalism creates so few personalites worth meeting speaks highly of your attitude and bias than any truth....to see your point..every socialist I talk to is so out of touch with reality, they are boring.
Which of course explains why Kevin likes to have endless e-mail debates with people whom he thinks are "socialists." Come on, Kevin, despite your protests that we're all "boring," you at least like to chat with us. Admit it.
American capitalist society has turned out cookie-cutter consumers, and it is a byproduct of a previous longing of mine to escape from this reality that I find it boring. They all like driving in their cars to the mall, buying things, storing things in their homes, they like going places (and being tourists), they like working and getting paid (in jobs they perform like good bureaucrats) in order to support the scary realities of rent, or of real estate finance... none of these cookie-cutter consumers are "bad people" for liking these things, and for forming the modern version of Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD in the process, it's just that, from where they stand, there's nothing else to do. The commonly perceived need for spirituality in American life is a response to the boredom imposed on people in the form of the "consumer lifestyle" which they perceive little choice in adopting. One can see this pattern thoroughly documented in sociological ethnographies such as Bellah et al.'s HABITS OF THE HEART.
:The glorious idealism and morality of this imaginative system appeals to the heart strings of youth, yet is unachievable politically or economically. One of the things that everyone forgets is that an economy has to be viable to afford social programs....if the society is not wealthy it can not afford to have social programs.....
Karl Marx has beaten Kevin to this last argument by a few decades. Sure, socialism would require wealth. But since capitalism has, up to now, overproduced and overconsumed gross material wealth (while denying it to the world's majority) however, they type of wealth especially needed at this time (for that 5/6th of the world's people who don't go to sleep hungry each night) is a wealth of the imagination. Socialism couldn't happen as a "social program," at any rate, so if we have the least interest in socialism as a subject to be explored, we need to toss out "social programming" as an option.
All of Kevin's following arguments presume laws of property, money, and government power, things Marx wanted to abolish, as such laws enslave people to "their" things, to exchange values, and to bureaucratic status. Whereas Marx, on the other hand, wished that humanity would be FREE of these things -- he thought that when we were free of the whole power trip, work would be fun, giving would be easy, and power-trips would merely discredit their trippers. Social programs, on the other hand, would require a hierarchy of social programmers and social programmees, the concept of redistribution would require laws of property requiring us to own and hold "our" possessions (and in this regard it might be said that "our" posse
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