If you feel the need to take down capitalism then Tonight We Riot is out now

Quoting: DorritOpen borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

I'm not sure you can realistically close borders effectively enough to stop a virus from spreading. So, I don't mean "doing something about it" as preventing an outbreak from happening, I meant it mostly as being prepared for it when it inevitably happens. Which we weren't. We were required to wear respirators even though there were no such respirators available for quite a while. We were caught with our pants down even though it has been coming our way for a long time.

Quoting: Dorritthe return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Can you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

Or do you perhaps mean something else when you say "former glory"?

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

Quoting: DorritAnd you think that putting people in house arrest is "doing something about it" ?
Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Are you proposing 300k Chinese just happened to immigrate to Italy carrying COVID-19? Because I'm quite sure that is not the case. If you really want to restrict any disease from hopping from one country to another you need to totally isolate that country, meaning absolutely no travel, immigrant or otherwise. Immigration was not the issue here.

Also, yeah, putting people into "house arrest" is "doing something about it", since people won't flood the hospital capacity and leave tons of people to die in the streets.

Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

This I find extremely funny. It's not like in 1914 extremely powerful, centrally lead global superpowers existed. Even better, those superpowers usually had some kind of a king in control to whom your average individual was but an ant. And these kings had a nasty tendency to send these average individuals to fight each other in pointless wars. But I suppose since they never were encouraged to stay home for a few months in order to stop hospitals from overflowing, they must have had it so much better than us.

Socialism is a cancer to all who are motivated and self-sufficient. Their talents and productivity is harnessed against their will with the threat of force and/or imprisonment for noncompliance. Can't wait to live in a police state.

Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

Ah, the glory days back when European empires were still free to exploit their colonies, women could not vote, the majority of people were servants, peasant farm workers or factory workers who had no rights to speak of, and so on. Oh and my own country was still a few years away from winning its independence, but I guess your definition of Europe is quite specific and excludes large parts of it.

Sorry for being a bit meta now:

I must say, this thread has greatly restored my faith in humanity.
With a few exceptions people here manage to discuss such a sensitive topic in a very civil way, backed by historic arguments. I can find a lot of points I agree on with all sides in this discussion (with the aforementioned exceptions...).

That's something quite rare on the internet today. On most forums people just yell at each other, or make claims not backed by any actual data.

Thanks a lot, it is a pleasure following this discussion.

Rents are modern slavery. Shelter is a basic human right. No more proof needed than seeing workers ordered to stay at home, and unable to obtain a paycheck. Watch the capitalists defend their compensation at the cost of human suffering.

Quoting: LungDrago

Quoting: SolitaryI am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

The other side of that coin is that when stuff happens and something needs to be done about it, democracy can be slow to react. Take the Covid situation here in EU. Essentially, Italy had to take the punch for most governments to stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

The whole Covid situation in Europe is often misconstructed as EU acting late or not doing anything. EU has its limited competency and countries healthcare systems are not part of it, critics often like to bash EU for not doing anything or the opposite accusing them of overstepping their competency. Solving the Covid situation is national problem, so EU really has no say in here. Problem of Italy is that they have oldest population in Europe and they have lower amount of ventilators per capita than other countries. Italy is not a victim that got left behind by bureaucrats in Brussels. Nobody knew what to expect and they were the first that got hit hard, but not the only one (Spain for example).

What EU did and did it well was rescuing citizen from abroad that got stuck thanks to travel bans. What EU can do is to prepare some more coordinated effort in the future, but till then it is up to the countries themselves and that is not EU fault. This whole situation is unprecedented and makes sense there was no master plan for it. No country in the world, democratic or not really knew what to expect and how to prepare themselves. If anybody claims they have the answer (if only they had the power) they are most likely lying, there is no simple solution here. Lot of countries in EU solved the Covid situation fine though.

If anything I would say the migration crisis in 2015 was more of an example where we saw problems of such nature, but even that is not that simple, because it was Germany that initiated that whole mess with invitation and then acted surprised when other countries refused to participate. That whole issue is more political than anything else, because the solutions are already on the table.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: DesumMarx made certain hypotheses about human history and from there, human nature, which turned out to be wrong. That is why communism doesn't work.
And It has never been "tried" because it runs counter to basic human evolutionary psychology.

The basis of, perhaps not upper level academic capitalist economics, but the capitalist economics that people get taught in ECON 101 and is echoed in editorials and political parties, is the efficient market hypothesis more or less as seen in neoclassical Walrasian economics.
It assumes all human beings are completely selfish maximizers who can efficiently calculate the most effective way to maximize their wealth, have perfect information, and value gains and losses as equal. This "Homo Economicus" is the basis of most capitalist economics. It obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with actual human nature or evolutionary psychology. So if false ideas about human nature make a system not work, I guess capitalism must really not work, and if they cause it not to be tried, I guess capitalism has never been tried.

QuoteIs the current system in the west perfect? No. But at least capitalism is somewhat self-aware that it's playing on human foibles. Communism is basically a secular religion. You have a fallen state, a state of perfection and a means to get from A to B. The problem is that it's based on a fauls idea about what people need to be happy.

Ah yes, of course, while capitalism is based on the truth, that what people need to be happy is as many crappy clothes from malls as possible.

QuoteAs for socialism, it ironically has the same problem as what many people like to throw at capitalism: Every generation needs to chip in more resources into the system than the one before it. Elsewise, it cannot sustain itself. Or at the very least, it can't cover everyone of retirement age. Hence many of the problems socialist countries are facing now with their aging populations.

Huh?
First, socialist countries aren't facing any problems now because there aren't any socialist countries. There are some economies that are more mixed, but I don't see any signs that they're having bigger problems with taking care of their elderly than the more pure capitalist ones, unless you define "not letting them die in squalor" as a "problem".
I have seen a lot of articles talking about demographic time bombs and how supposedly we aren't going to have enough young people to take care of all the older ones. I've seen a whole lot of others about how the sky is falling because automation is going to take everyone's jobs and we'll all be unemployed. Well. It can't be both.
The fact is that productivity has grown faster than the proportion of dependent elderly in the population, so we can in fact spare more people to take care of them than we once could, and in the long term it's a temporary demographic bulge anyway.

You seem to be taking all of this quite personally. If you think a person can own their own business and invest their money and assets however they wish, then you don't have a problem with capitalism. Corporatism, sure. And the bigger problem of automation is that most people NEED to work to be happy. Nevermind just making a living, there is the matter of their mental wellbeing.

>there are no Socialist contries

Mhm, if you say so.