[QUOTE=Enhasa,Jan 13 2004, 04:25 PM] Those behind the
Manifesto for a Socialist Canada are already well along the path to establishing a socialist government in Canada.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, that's pretty damning stuff. But look at this:
http://sp-usa.org/Apparently, political diversity is an aspect of Democracy and Free Speech (but don't worry; it won't be for long).
QUOTE
Canada’s socialist economic traditions and government policies have failed our country and its people. We are a nation with a 60 cent US dollar and an approximate $550 billion national debt. We have a socialized medicare system that is in serious trouble, as is our socialized education. -- Electricity Today
QUOTE
Your friend should check his facts.
The Canadian dollar is about $.77 US. The national debt figure your guy quotes is close enough. This is something like $22000 per Canadian. At $7 Trillion, the US national debt is something like $28000 per citizen. The trouble with socialized medicare is a matter of opinion. I imagine that opinion figures as well in assessments of the national school system. I understand that in the US everyone goes to private school, and things are pretty good? No socialism to worry about?
[/QUOTE]The second is that socialized health care kills progress in medicine.[/QUOTE]
Literally, this doesn't make any sense. It costs way more to research pharmaceuticals than anyone could possibly hope to profit from them. So too care measures like radiation and chemo. Cancer victims are poor; AIDS victims are poor; polio sufferers were poor (when there used to be polio sufferers). The US government helps out the pharmaceutical companies (most notably by destroying the pharmaceutical industry of Sudan with bombs); this is a socialist measure, and it sure helps the hell out of the people who get to buy the medicine that is the result of the research. Trust me: you would not want to live in a country where your tax dollars did not go in some measure to medical research (you might prefer one that didn't bomb its competitors so much). If the pharmaceutical companies had to run only for profit, and got no help of any kind there would never be anything better than Viagra and Nyquil. Now: if government money goes to help the pharmaceutical companies, should the pharmaceutical companies be allowed to charge whatever they want for the products they dispense?
[
[/QUOTE]Not only that, but our government seems to think that America is the global police force. While the places it decides to police (or in some case overthrow) are genuinely horrible places under horrible leaders, Americans cannot afford the burden.[/QUOTE]
Your government doesn't believe that at all. The attacks in Iraq, premeditated and having nothing to do with 9/11/01, are to enhance business interests. The US government is interested in protecting US business (and thereby, so they say, the economy), which is a sort of "liertarian economy," but one where competitors are killed with armies and bombs. The US didn't intervene in Indonesia because there was no profit in it. The civil wars in Africa are not about oil, so no worries there, either. But a load of Egyptians fly over from Saudi (and cross the border from Canada, so shame on us) and hijack planes and do all that they did, and suddenly the US claim that Osama bin Laden ordered those attacks from his post in Afghanistan (no evidence) and that, mysteriously, he is friends and fundamentalist church buddy with atheist Saddam Hussein. Much profit for Dick Cheney's former employers. Jesus, this isn't even suspicious behaviour. It's supported in State of the Union addresses.]
But yeah; the above bit in the square brackets is off the topic of whether Canada is a socialist state or whether the US is a police state or which is "worse." Fact is, it sucks in either country to be a minimum-wage worker, and it rocks the house to work for the government or to be a filmmaker. And yet all of the important industry is entirely dependent on minimum-wage workers. Why is it only the CEOs get the bonuses? And why does the government work so hard to protect the people with all of the money and do so little for the people who are paying all of the taxes?
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PS: Ayn Rand's entire "philosophy" amounted to straw man arguments. Rather than producing works of philosophy, she wrote novels and created spineless characters who would hold the ideals she wanted to oppose. On the other side she'd place a powerful man so bod and noble that otherwise sane women would desire to bve raped by him. Then she would stack the deck against him before showing that by sticking to his guns he will come out on top. in THE FOUNTAINHEAD her hero is acquitted of vandalism and reckless endangerment because he makes a nice speech to the jury that while including a full confession, also says some completely irrelevant things about cavemen and fire-gathering. In ATLAS SHRUGGED her hero is a guy who convinces all the rich people to walk away and leave all the worthless grubby socialists to kill themselves, which they do, of course, since they don't have any skills or brains, those worthless grubby socialists.
Ayn Rand in one of her novels likened the act of cigarette smoking to man's capture of fire, as though to say even that disgusting habit of hers was somehow a premeditated act of embracing a noble ideal. She refused to deal closely with anyone who did not consider her a philosopher worthy of Aristotle, and any of her closest friends who disagreed with her on even a minor point (like what they were going to do with their own spare time, say, going to church) was disfellowshipped by her cult-like circle of friends.
Ayn Rand has been embraced by many wealthy Americans (like Alan Greenspan) and several not-rich-wannabes as a champion of laissez-faire competition. Meanwhile, she advocated violence against enemies of business, and testified against communism during the famous McCarthy-inspired hearings on un-American activities. Her novels and later philosophical works were essentially little more than propoganda for the cold war. Yet she still holds some followers today, despite the wild romance and zero substantiation of her theories. For one whose rhetoric always demanded that "A is A," she never bothered to condescend to the level of facts or anaysis, preferring instead to write in the form of novels and short opinion pieces.
Ayn Rand on Corporate Environmental Responsibility:
"If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States:
1900 - 47.3 years
1920 - 53 years
1940 - 60 years
1968 - 70.2 years (the latest figures compiled [as of January 1971])
Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent "Thank you" to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find."
[the self-titled philosopher is actually trying to claim that pollution is increasing life expectancy]
AND
"Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death." ("The Anti-Industrial Revolution," The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution)
Ayn Rand on Capitalism:
"When I say "capitalism," I mean a pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism - with a separation of economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as a separation of state and church." ("The Objectivist Ethics," The Virtue of Selfishness)
[this from a woman naive enough to believe that a community of a few thousand industrialists, artists and scientists could set up in a little mountain town and build a fully-functioning modern capitalist society, complete with a mining industry and a railroad, free and away from all the pesky masses (read ATLAS SHRUGGED)]
Ayn Rand on Government:
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force." ("Galt's Speech," Atlas Shrugged)
[again, Rand believed that trucking companies would have paid to build the system of interstate highways, if Eisenhower had not spent government money to do it for them, and that the only science wotrth having was that inspired - and funded - by industry]
[additionally, it is a nonsense statement. If a man with a load of money and/or intelligence is to be allowed to do as he pleases at the expense of those without money and/or intelligence, even to the extent of polluting his environment or killing all of his cattle or slandering him or libelling him, why should the government have the special right of stepping in to defend individuals from violence? Why is that *specific* form of attack to be singled out for collectivist treatment? Wouldn't a pure laissez-faire society just let the strongest man/gang/army win? Ayn Rand doesn't have the courage to accept even her own convictions, and waffles with this whole "no murder" thing, while at the same time championing the industrialist's use of police violence (and murder) to end general strikes in the early 20th century]
Ayn Rand on exactly what is wrong with a social contract where capitalism is unchecked:
"When "the common good" of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals." ("What is Capitalism?" Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)
[exactly, honey, all creepy religious hyperbole aside. We have allowed violence to establish land ownership and we have allowed the business model to be as it is, and to be protected by violence or the threat of it. Now to suddenly strip away all government except the police and the army would be to give the poor no recourse of any kind (no schools, no hospitals, no capacity to compete against the corporations). To strip away all government entirely would at least give the poor the opportunity to take what they wanted by force, as the capitalists did before them.
Ayn Rand on Wishful Thinking:
"To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion." (The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," Philosophy: Who Needs It)
AND
"Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others." ("The Moratorium on Brains")
[Again, I am reminded of the healthy community of type-A individuals and their friendly, compatriate efforts to destroy one another in that little secret grotto in ATLAS SHRUGGED. I hope it wasn't like, really important to her that this little dream be true.]
Ayn Rand on Random non-sequiters:
"I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important."
AND
"Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perptrated by disciples of altruism?"
AND
Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost." ("The Fountainhead")
AND
"In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." ("The Anatomy of Compromise," Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)
edit: named wrong president responsible for national highways
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 21 May 2005 - 07:46 PM
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).