Originally Posted by roachboy

i thought it was nice too.

but truth be told, it reproduced as a much bigger fish than i imagined. a reverse fish story. so it's kinda like following with alot of exclamation points!!! a point that didn't need them!!!

anyway:


you gots to get your head out of american paranoia about the old left.

socialists (democratic socialists, french socialists etc.) aren't terribly radical politically, particularly not in terms of property claims/rights. they just work with a different conception of capitalism--a (to my mind) sane(r) one that assumes that markets left to themselves cannot be justified on utilitarian grounds and that the state should adjust for these effects. some of these adjustments involve wealth transfers---but these are matters of political consent and the arguments for them are utilitarian as well.

there's a debate to be had about this--an old school one---but it's about how actual markets function and whether it makes sense for their long-term functioning that the social system be maintained.

to turn it onto "respect for property rights" is the red herring.

you must have been arguing on libertarian grounds---arthur darby nock and all that---but those grounds are at best eccentric.


aside:
it's a tiresome quirk of tfpolitics that anyone can say just anything about words like socialism. over and over and over it happens. i call it the ustwo effect, when i bother to call it anything.

Originally Posted by willravel

As for socialists being property disrespecters? As rb said, we're not all extremists. We simply believe in economic equality of a certain degree.