Big Problem For The Right: 'Socialism' Is No Longer A Bad Word. You Must Now Explain

[PoliTalker]

Hello Cypress,

I am no expert in Scandinavia, but am willing to learn from their experience.

Imagine the good we could do in this country if our oil, gas, and mineral resources were considered a public trust, and put largely under the control of a government-owned companies mandated to ensure the resource wealth were spent on the public commons and public welfare.

I always wondered about that. An oil company can buy a small piece of property, or the drilling rights to that small piece of property, and through that small surface presence, extract all the deposits which sit under neighboring properties, and call it all their own, to sell for huge profits. That doesn't really seem right. Why should they have any more right to all that oil than the owners of nearby properties who do not drill? Especially when those properties sit on top of the oil which is being extracted. That makes no sense. That oil sits under the nation. It belongs to the nation. It shouldn't be sold off to a relatively small group so that they can become extremely powerful and use that power to influence what our government of the people does. That is most certainly wrong. Totally favorable to a select elite few. That's not the spirit of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

It's not a Kenyan-Marxist hellhole - it is Norway.

Sounds more like paradise. The people share what they jointly have more equitably. Some can excel and have more, others have less, but everyone has enough to be truly comfortable and enjoy life.

Wrapping up, Republicans have a long history of calling western Europe and Scandinavia "socialist". I am not sure they intended to highlight Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, et. al as examples of Socialism. But if they want to provide that opening, I am more than willing to exploit it.

By the standards conservatives have set on message boards for years, a country like Norway with a remarkable amount of state owned companies controlling large sectors of energy, finance, and telecommunications, plus a generous social welfare state certainly sounds to me like a Socialist Paradise.

Trump wanted people to emigrate from Norway to the US. Fool! He shouldn't have even said anything. People who take a serious look at the comparison are more likely to emigrate from the US to Norway.

 

[Cypress]

Hello Cypress,



I always wondered about that. An oil company can buy a small piece of property, or the drilling rights to that small piece of property, and through that small surface presence, extract all the deposits which sit under neighboring properties, and call it all their own, to sell for huge profits. That doesn't really seem right. Why should they have any more right to all that oil than the owners of nearby properties who do not drill? Especially when those properties sit on top of the oil which is being extracted. That makes no sense. That oil sits under the nation. It belongs to the nation. It shouldn't be sold off to a relatively small group so that they can become extremely powerful and use that power to influence what our government of the people does. That is most certainly wrong. Totally favorable to a select elite few. That's not the spirit of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.



Sounds more like paradise. The people share what they jointly have more equitably. Some can excel and have more, others have less, but everyone has enough to be truly comfortable and enjoy life.



Trump wanted people to emigrate from Norway to the US. Fool! He shouldn't have even said anything. People who take a serious look at the comparison are more likely to emigrate from the US to Norway.

Mineral rights are an area of law and property rights I am generally uninformed on. In principle, I do not see a problem with a property owner who has mineral rights profiting from oil and gas resources associated with their property.

Public lands and our pubic offshore sovereign territory are another matter. Yes, to some small extent private companies have to lease public lands from our government, and there is some nominal revenue-sharing, so to some small extent there is a public benefit to oil production on public lands.

But the Norwegians took it a lot further - towards what rightwing posters on this forum would characterize as Kenyan-Marxism. Norway mandated that the nation's oil wealth would be a public trust, that development of that public trust first and foremost would be for the benefit and social welfare of the nation, and secondarily would generate profits for private enterprise. Surprisingly, state-owned oil and energy companies in Norway do not seem to have started a death spiral into a Kenyan-Marxist dystopian hell hole.

On balance, that kind of socialism seems to have worked out well for them.

 

[Nordberg]

TOTALLY UNTRUE!

The need to control or own all their own goods and services cripples Socialist, Communist or governments that want to control their citizenry, from cradle to grave,

Do you really believe that? the fact is all countries are an amalgam of capitalism and socialism? We have Social Security, the VA and food stamps while maintaining our oligopoly. Sweden, Finland, Norway and England all have a mixture of both and absolutely do not control the people from cradle to grave. There are no Socialistic countries. just like there are no capitalistic ones. They are not controlling their people. they are serving them. America is more controlling than those countries are.

 

[PoliTalker]

Conservatives now mistakenly believe all they have to do is drop the 'S'-word and voters will flee from their opponents.

Ha!

This next election should be good.

Can't wait to see them get educated.

Conservatives like to point out Venezuela as they recycle worn on Conservative Myths such as this full-of-baloney one: 'Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried.'

It used to be Greece. Greece was the big whipping boy socialist country 'that was failing.' (except it didn't)

Now they have latched onto Venezuela. They think it reaffirms their tired myth. They are wrong.

They always fail to bring up Norway. Norway is very socialist. Government owns many businesses there. They have universal health care paid for with government money.

The big difference between Venezuela and Norway is freedom. Norway ranks very high in terms of freedom. Venezuela is an authoritarian regime.

Being a dictatorship is why Venezuela has failed. It has nothing to do with socialism.

 

[Cypress]

Conservatives now mistakenly believe all they have to do is drop the 'S'-word and voters will flee from their opponents.

Ha!

This next election should be good.

Can't wait to see them get educated.

Conservatives like to point out Venezuela as they recycle worn on Conservative Myths such as this full-of-baloney one: 'Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried.'

It used to be Greece. Greece was the big whipping boy socialist country 'that was failing.' (except it didn't)

Now they have latched onto Venezuela. They think it reaffirms their tired myth. They are wrong.

They always fail to bring up Norway. Norway is very socialist. Government owns many businesses there. They have universal health care paid for with government money.

The big difference between Venezuela and Norway is freedom. Norway ranks very high in terms of freedom. Venezuela is an authoritarian regime.

Being a dictatorship is why Venezuela has failed. It has nothing to do with socialism.

There is a very clear, transparent, and obvious reason conservatives have belatedly tried to limit the use of the word "socialism" to authoritarian and totalitarian states, to Leninism, to Stalinism, to Maoism. They would belatedly prefer that in talking about socialism, the debate strictly be limited to Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and communist Cuba, and other failed authoritarian states..

Bottom line: If teabaggers are going to spend 12 years hollering that Barack Obama is a socialist, then Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Finland are all unequivocally examples of socialism. That is exactly the type of "socialism" wingnuts have spent message board careers whining about.

That is the standard of socialism Republicans themselves have set.

In which case, it is indisputable that by historical standards, European socialism is one of the most successful, admired, and effective socio-economic systems humanity has ever devised.

Even Conservatives Support Sweden’s Welfare State. Here’s Why.

It’s practical and efficient, allowing for a very competitive economy while ensuring a high standard of living.

https://www.thenation.com/article/sweden-welfare-state-benefits-popular/

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Leading Republicans Refer to Western Europe as "Socialists"
...(and let's not forget, rightwing message boarders have spent years calling western Europe "socialist")......
Lately it seems that not a day goes by without a Republican presidential candidate portraying Europe as a socialist nightmare. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum paint a picture of the Old World as unfree, strangulated by bureaucratic and inefficient welfare systems, and unable to reform and modernize. To these Republicans, Europe seems to be the antipode to everything America is meant to be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.310f3f267a8a

Leading Republicans Call Western Europe "Socialist"
Newt Gingrich has constantly accused the president of being a "European Socialist", often adding in a reference to an all-but-forgotten community activist from Chicago, who died in 1972, but whose Democratic-leaning writings are thought to have influenced the current president

"I am for the Declaration of Independence; he is for the writing of Saul Alinsky. I am for the Constitution; he is for European socialism," Mr Gingrich told voters in Florida last week.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16583813

Bill O'Reilly noted rightwing blowhard: Western Europe is basically socialist
"I received a letter from Rhonda Hallett who lives in Jacksonville, North Carolina asking me to define Bernie's doctrine of Democratic socialism. Ok. That's basically what some countries in western Europe have, a political system that limits personal income through taxation in return for cradle to grave payouts from the governments. That's the trade."
http://nation.foxnews.com/2016/02/14...atic-socialism

Mike Pence is on record referring to western Europe as "socialist".
when Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, denounced “European-style socialism,” in his speech at the conference on Thursday, the jeers from the crowd did not exactly signal an openness to debate it on the merits.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/w...leibovich.html

European socialism taking root in US, Fox News's Stuart Varney says
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics...us-varney-says

 

[NiftyNiblick]

No matter which party controls the government, we're still going to have both public and private sectors.

Nobody who can't deal with both socialism and capitalism is capable of governing this nation.

Under-educated people react to scary words instead of actually understanding what the words mean.

No wonder the right has no commitment to properly funding public education.

A low information electorate is the only thing keeping the Republican Party alive.

 

[Nordberg]

TOTALLY UNTRUE!

The need to control or own all their own goods and services cripples Socialist, Communist or governments that want to control their citizenry, from cradle to grave,

There are no socialist countries and no capitalistic. They are all a mix. What we are arguing about is what that mix should be. You are off the rails arguing about a boogieman that does not exist.

 

[PoliTalker]

Hello NiftyNiblick,

...

Under-educated people react to scary words instead of actually understanding what the words mean.

No wonder the right has no commitment to properly funding public education.

A low information electorate is the only thing keeping the Republican Party alive.

Sometimes it almost seems like everything the right knows about socialism, it learned from Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

I know there are people on the right who know better, but since we don't hear from them very much (would be labelled RINO) then we get these persistent 'alternative' non-facts as their basis.

The Conservative Myths, they die hard.

 

[Mason Michaels]

 

[PoliTalker]

Hello Mason,

View attachment 9078

OK, I had to click on that thing to get it big enough to read it.

"Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor."

I know it is easy to believe that, but it is not an absolute rule. Look at Norway. It's a rich socialist nation. They don't have poverty, but they have wealth. What they do have is a compassion for life and sharing. They work together to lift themselves up.