On Socialism
When discussing Socialism it is helpful to define what you're referring to.
Plain ole' Marxism?
In that case there are a few huge issues with these views besides several others.
It completely misplaces where value comes from in a society. Value comes from joules and not human labor. Getting this wrong sets it up to get almost everything else wrong.
The workers are to a company as the leaf buds are to a tree. Yes, without leaf buds the tree literally cannot function. They produce the leaves that absorb CO2 and sunlight to produce energy. But they produce the leaves using materials harvested in the roots, moved up the trunk and through the branches and stems. The roots (investors), trunk (executives), branches (upper management) and stems (lower management) don't exploit the leaf buds any more than the leaf buds exploit the rest of the system.
The Nordic Model?
The Nordic Model works well. It can be made to work (without going into serious debt) if two things are present.
- There exists a successful market economy. (Capitalist)
- The country sells more to the world than it buys from the world.
Can the United States implement this model? Not immediately.
The US has a burden that none of the Nordic countries have. It runs the Global Reserve Currency. This alone means that the US is always going to increasingly BUY more from the rest of the world than it sells to it. This translates into a technical term called a Trade Deficit. The US has the LARGEST trade deficit in the world. If it were a race, the US wouldn't even be able to see the runner ahead of it. That is how behind the US is.
So if the trade deficit could be balanced (it took 50 years to become this unbalanced) then yes we could implement some sort of Nordic Socialism. But this requires having businesses in the US that make US products with US resources so that people don't have to buy foreign products. It is also going to take a lot of time and resources.
What Bernie wants to try beyond just the Nordic Model?
This is just a rehash of what the Russians tried a hundred years ago.
Democratic Socialism depends on creating many Worker's Coops and forming a hierarchy of Worker's Coops to help distribute resources and power to the people. Well if we went back to 1919, grabbed an educated Russian off the street and described to her what a Worker's Coop is she would say, "We have a word for that type of organization. It is called a soviet. A soviet is a democratically run workers organization and our plan is to form a hierarchy of these organizations to better distribute wealth and decision making. A, union of soviets, so to speak."
But granted, how they structured it was only part of the issue. The other part of the issue is that the system was quickly taken over by extremists even further to the left who used identity politics and violence to accomplish the take over. The Bolsheviks.
The US has its own extremists on the left who are increasingly using identity politics and violence to accomplish their goals. When Bernie Sanders was running for president in 2016 some of our modern day Bolsheviks stormed the stage during one of his rallies and demanded that they be allowed to speak.
Bernie's staff discussed it quickly and announced that he would make room for them to speak during that campaign event. When they presented this solution to the extremists they screamed about how they were being oppressed and demanded more. When Bernie's staff asked them to, "Please be reasonable," one of the extremists screamed, "WE ARE BEING REASONABLE," and Bernie's staff caved.
That story alone paints enough of a picture to know how quickly the moderates and Socialists would cave to demands from today's Bolsheviks.
Am I wrong to say that #berniesanders has become just as extreme as them? If he thought that would increase his standing among the voters, surely he should have first run a strict investigation as to how many Americans are in favour of marxism(communism).
One last point if I may. Diggerent systems that make up what socialism is today, are :
Yeah Bernie has drifted leftward even since 2016. This makes it even more likely that any administration headed by him would cave even faster to the BLM/Anti-Capitalist/ANTIFA types.
Corporate Marxism
This is huge actually. A Capitalist would have voted to NOT bail out the banking system in 2008 and would not approve of the debt monetization happening right now.
If the bailouts had not happened then economic inequality would be far better today than it is.
The very idea of Too-Big-To-Fail is antithetical to Capitalism.