Comment: Discourse

I suppose that if you believe that a forum like this should be just a bunch of think alike sheep getting together to pat each other on the back for following the same party line, then you are right, I am on the wrong page because I don't swallow everything RP has to say hook line and sinker.

But if you believe that freedom is about people with different views coming together to share their different points of views and possibly finding a common ground and even solutions to common problems, then I have to say that anywhere I find people with viewpoints different than my own is a good place to share my point of view and to read theirs.

As far as communism/socialism, there are as many different flavors of that as there are different opinions on what capitalism is. If you haven't done so, you might find a quick youtube search of Noam Chomsky to be rather enlightening. As far as that thing they had in the Soviet Union, it could better be described as Statist Capitalism than it would be Communism. IMHO any system that centralises power and enables a few to exploit the many is a bad system. I am kind of partial to the kind of low grade social capitalism that they had in Ben Franklins day.

But you need to be careful how you use the word Socialist or Capitalist, or any other word. They don't mean the same things to everyone. That said, when i use the term Capitalist toward Ron Paul I don't so much mean free markets as I do a supporter of a system whereby there are owners and there are workers, and the owners get rich by exploiting the efforts of the workers with or without the self righteous presumption that they are entitled to do this simply because they know how to.

When I use the term Socialism or Communism I don't mean the Nazi "Socialism" we are seeing developed in this country under Woodrow Wilson = yada yada = Clinton = G.W. Bush = Obama. I mean a system in which the people who do the work own the results of that work. Everyone who participates gets an equal piece of the pie commensurate with their labor (not necessarily their "ability" which is highly subjective at best).

Few laws, or government regulations, small confederacies of worker/owners, a presumption that money is perishable and not something to be hoarded or exploited at interest. For example, maybe money should be tied to the labor hour and not a material thing. That is more in keeping with my vision of how a good system would work.