gardenman wrote:
With all the conversation on this site about socialism I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly how people define, and or what they know about socialism.
My consternation is with all the reports of corporations reaping billion dollar profits without paying taxes, and or petitioning local governments and getting tax dollars to finance multi million dollar expansions, and new developments, what else would it be called but “corporate socialism”?
Please don’t bring up any money’s given during the Obama administration because that is history. Currently republicans are already talking about cutting the top tax rates to instigate business investment, barely two years after the last 2trillion dollar cut.
As well trump is seriously talking about a negative interest rate, which means giving businesses tax dollars on top of the loans requested.
With all the conversation on this site about socia... (
show quote)
It is a good post that you wrote.
While I haven't seriously studied socialism, I did one day call up a socialist organization, and asked: "What is socialism?" Then the person replied, "Socialism is a system in which the workers own the means of production."
Wikipedia's definition of socialism includes a similar phrase: "social ownership of the means of production".
I say, one of the most important means of production is land.
I shall borrow a couple of ideas from a book. The book is _Rights vs. Privileges_ by Robert De Fremery. I would not call him a socialist, and he'd probably be offended at being called one, but in _my_ opinion at least one of the ideas he espouses is at least _related_ to socialism: That is the idea about who owns land.
(After all, land is important as a means of production, most obviously for farmers; and "means of production" can figure into the definition of "socialism".)
Land was not created by any person. Raw, undeveloped land, also called the site value of land, rightfully belongs or should belong to all of the people equally.
You said some things about taxes. We currently have a variety of taxes (taxes on land, improvements, sales, income, and some other things). It seems to me that our government relies mainly on an "income tax" system which is mainly based on taxing _earnings_!
I am against taxing earnings. (More particularly, I am against taxing labor, or taxing earnings from labor.)
I am for a tax on the using up of natural resources (which rightly belong to all equally, as "Commons") and that includes a tax on the site value of land occupied.
(The tax on the site value of land is the way the whole People (via their government) can recoup the site value of land which they all rightly should own as Commons.)
Ceasing the tax on labor frees up people to work and keep more of the fruits of their own labor. (One can argue for this by saying that they created that value by their own work, so it rightfully belongs to themselves.)
As for most of the people I've encountered on OPP, they seem to vehemently oppose something they call "socialism" which they associate with freeloaders, government handouts, and disincentives to being productive. I don't have a direct quote handy but that's how I recall what they tend to say. I can understand such concerns although I think it's a very weak characterization of what socialism really is or at least is intended to be by real socialists.
I agree with you that our country currently has a kind of "corporate socialism", not in the sense that real socialists want that system, but rather in the sense that those corporations are freeloaders getting government handouts and disincentives to making an honest living -- bad things often associated with "socialism" by people who aren't real socialists.
That so-called "corporate socialism" might also be called a part of a fascist system, I think.
There might be some kinds of "good" socialism:
Common ownership of the site value of land (a value which, generally, individual people don't create) makes sense to me, and _I_ feel that there's something socialist about that, in a good way.
Workers owning the means of production seems sensible to me, and some people call that socialism.
Stopping the taxation of earnings from labor (which I also favor) is not socialism. I don't have a handy label for it. Stopping that taxation is favorable to laborers.