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Because free healthcare, college and housing have nothing to do with socialism.
Socialism refers to collective ownership of the means of production. Social democracy/democratic socialism refers to a capitalist market economy supplemented by welfare programs, labor protections, and public services. The two terms are not interchangeable despite frequent misuse on the internet. You are describing and advocating for social democracy/democratic socialism not socialism.
The GI bill also effectively pays you to take classes. The money is designed to be used for housing but it's distributed as cash into your bank account. If you fail a class, you can re-take it as needed (though eventually this counts against you for academic reasons). They really pull out all the stops.
Don't forget about the free socialized grocery stores the military gets to shop at too
Who is “U.S. Democratic Socialists?”
anyone thinking about signing up to the military should talk to some vets, see how they are treated on the other side with lifelong injuries both mental and physical or both.
Pretty well, speaking from direct experience. VA has taken care of me medically. Got my degree paid for. Got a zero down home loan. Gave me connections that have supercharged my civilian career.
Virtually everyone I served with has the same experience. The Marines were nothing but good for my life. Just sucked while I was in lol.
I know there are vets out there with the opposite experience. But the ones I personally know with that experience were shitheads before the Marines and shitheads when they got out/got kicked out.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
I hate talking points like this. They don't "own" anyone. They just expose a simpleton world view every bit as disingenuous and damaging as the trickle down economics crowd.
No one, and I mean no one, isn't a supporter of socialist policies because it is handing out free shit or more accurately put, shit obtained using money gathered from the masses, they are mad because that "shit" is not something everyone can easily produce an infinite supply of. Every argument against socialist policies lead back to the same fact that root cause, scarcity of resources.
You want to solve hunger, homelessness, etc come up with a way to feed and house people that can't do for themselves without taking from the masses in a way that ends up in massive corruption, debt, and market collapse.
The root issues are limited resources and a society that preaches individuality above all else in every situation. Until those 2 things are no longer issues then socialist policies are just deferred pain and more debt, just like conservative tax cuts.
This Jefffrey Epstein Class Supporter/Member talking point is so old and bad. Those rapists and killers LOVE it when they make you think it's a scarcity problem, but it is not, it's an administration problem, and it's so easy for people to see that, here are some:
There are currently over 14 million unused housing units in the USA, and around 770k homeless people. This post is literally a few posts above from this one, "Sen. Warnock's ban on private equity firms buying single-family homes becomes federal law" where a socialist (or democratic socialist, I don't care about semantics like that, people already know what you mean) policy stopped a greedy corpo from owning more than 72,000 homes by outbiding families with cash offers and then raising home prices/rents significantly for everyone. That's literally what people want: affordable housing. There is no scarcity here. The top 1% bought all the homes and they want you to work much harder to get one, otherwise, die in silence.
We all can see how the USA made it a law to NOT FEED the homeless. You see restaurants take out massive bags of trash full of good food, just to throw them to the trash bin, or worse, the government puts spikes on places the homeless sleep on, to shoo them away instead of investing in something to help them properly and humanely. There is absolutely NO SCARCITY OF FOOD OR WATER. There is more than enough. It's just that the top 1% can control who gets access to it, and who doesn't, and that's what they've been doing for so long, especially to Africa and Cuba right now. Israel is doing it to Gaza and Lebanon while I type this too. A lot of Palestinians and Cubans are blaming their own government for it too, which is the goal of these blockades and violence, to "conquer" the people and land through displacement and financial pressure that does get millions of innocent people killed in silence; indirect kills, through starvation and heavy psychological depression. In Mexico, the USA arms and benefits the cartels the most. The Iron River, George Bush's Operation Fast & Furious/ATF Gunwalking Scandal, Project Gunrunner, the guns they use, their biggest customers, all American. It keeps us in fear, and we do cheap labor to get out of here. We get exploited under the threat of being deported, and then we die in silence, after living a very mediocre and poor life surrounded by racist assholes who got taught for their entire childhood that we are the bad ones. That Cubans are the bad ones. That black people are the bad ones. That illegal immigrants are the bad ones. Women, LGBTQ, DEI... Nah, dog. None of them decided wages or wars, people with capital did, and they love it when we fight sideways instead of looking up.
It seems there is no scarcity of bombs, of death and destruction, right? That's fine to you? For the government to spend over 25+ trillion dollars in the military over the past decade, instead of doing it to combat something more meaningful like World Hunger? World Hunger only needs about 93 billion USD a year to fix it (it's the highest reported estimate I found). Over a decade, it'd be 930 billion, not even a single trillion. That means, we need less than 4% of the American military budget to fix World Hunger for a decade, enough for those third-world countries to develop the tech they need to become self-sustaining. But we don't invest in that, we instead invest in bombing children in the Middle East and exploit Latin/South Americans. For decades now, that's what Americans and many other countries have paid for with their taxes. This is global. This is the final stage of Capitalism: stomping the weaker to please the strongest. All that child labor used to make the phone or hardware you're using right now. All the people living like modern slaves in assembly factories just to please your whims while you play videogames in your cold bedroom, with snacks beside you and whatnot.
The USA only has 335 million people and it's already struggling harder than China or India, which have 1.4 billion people each. China has a land mass of 9.1 million km2, the USA has 8.3 million km2, and India only has 2.9 million km2 and still kicking America's ass in administration. The so-called "#1 country in the world" is losing to the Indians and the Chinese in administrating their land and resources? How come?
How about we look at how some countries managed Covid? Here:
How the fuck is America doing a worse job than India, Indonesia or China in managing their resources and people? There are so many other countries that also humiliate the richest countries just like this, so. These 4 are just the top 4 most populated in the world.
The USA, alongside Mexico, both lose 20,000 and 30,000+ people every year to gun violence/homicides. Unfair, violent deaths. While the majority of the outside world barely reach 500 people a year. Last time I checked, places like the UK, China and even Iran are 6x times safer than the USA, statistically speaking. Your chances of dying in the USA or Mexico are exponentially higher than most countries in the world. Is there a scarcity of bullets and stupidity? It seems not.
There is no scarcity of anything. Point one. Water? Rice? Food? Sand? Electricity? Air? None. Probably only oil, and that'd not be a bad thing imo, it'd finally push us to renewables. So, what exactly is the scarcity you two are talking about?
You do have a point, that planet Earth is finite, we will be forced to control our size and consumption. But as of today, that is not a reality yet. Overpopulation was a massive talking point during the early 2000s, but it turned out to be exaggerated. It is not the same as Climate Change either, this is different:
"The panic around overpopulation in the late 1990s and early 2000s was the peak of a mathematical scare that began in the late 1960s, heavily driven by a theory known as Malthusianism (named after economist Thomas Malthus). In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s because human population was growing exponentially, while food production could only grow linearly. When the world population crossed 6 billion right at the turn of the millennium in 1999, the media, global think tanks, and educational systems went into overdrive predicting imminent resource depletion, ecological collapse, and mass famine by the mid-2000s.
Why the Panic Deflated: The Green Revolution.
The overpopulation models turned out to be drastically wrong because they underestimated human innovation. Thanks to the Green Revolution, like advancements in high-yield crops, synthetic fertilizers, automated irrigation, and genetic engineering, global food production actually outpaced population growth. We didn't run out of food; we got incredibly good at manufacturing it at scale."
We just need to invest more in education and our health, not on wars to cull ourselves down and "make up room for others" like Capitalism has us doing right now. Teachers are heavily underpaid, most that stay do it for the love of the game. We need to incentivize them with money, though, not feelings. Capitalism sucks, and anyone who supports it in the current state of the world also sucks. They value Capital (money) over the Community or being Social. They are not human anymore.
Wow. That's... a lot. How long did it take you to write this, and why?
We live in a world of short-form communication. I'll be honest, I used an LLM to summarize what you wrote, not because I didn't try to read through it, but because I honestly couldn't fully understand the point you were trying to make.
After going through it, I think the core disagreement comes down to a misunderstanding of what scarcity means in an economic sense. Scarcity is not simply whether there are enough homes compared to the number of homeless people, or whether there is enough food or water in the world.
Scarcity is the reality that we have finite resources: energy, time, labor, money, materials, and production capacity. Every economic or political system, whether socialist, communist, capitalist, or authoritarian, has to decide how those limited resources are allocated. Some systems handle that allocation better than others, and some fail spectacularly, but the underlying issue of scarcity still exists.
I think what you're actually discussing is distribution and access to resources rather than scarcity itself. Those are related topics, but they are not the same thing.
I also have no idea why Epstein was brought up at the beginning of the response or how it connected to the argument being made.
If you'd like to continue the discussion, I would appreciate keeping the responses a little shorter and more focused so they're easier to engage with. I'm doing this entirely from my phone, and extremely long responses are difficult to work through.
Couldn't agree with you more.
I often take this tack under posts like this, or from people who espouse socialist ideology when they themselves don't actually know what the word means by definition.
The primary, fundamental issue is scarcity. We have a finite amount of energy and resources on this planet. For one large, amorphous population of people to enjoy an abundance of food, energy, and housing, another large, amorphous population often has to bear the cost through poverty, hunger, or homelessness.
Ultimately, though, that point is wasted on someone who doesn't actually know what socialism means.
People who conflate things like free housing, free college, and free healthcare with socialism don't really have a leg to stand on when discussing these topics in the first place.
This Jefffrey Epstein Class Supporter/Member talking point is so old and bad. Those rapists and killers LOVE it when they make you think it's a scarcity problem, but it is not, it's an administration problem, and it's so easy for people to see that, here are some:
There are currently over 14 million unused housing units in the USA, and around 770k homeless people. This post is literally a few posts above from this one, "Sen. Warnock's ban on private equity firms buying single-family homes becomes federal law" where a socialist (or democratic socialist, I don't care about semantics like that, people already know what you mean) policy stopped a greedy corpo from owning more than 72,000 homes by outbiding families with cash offers and then raising home prices/rents significantly for everyone. That's literally what people want: affordable housing. There is no scarcity here. The top 1% bought all the homes and they want you to work much harder to get one, otherwise, die in silence.
We all can see how the USA made it a law to NOT FEED the homeless. You see restaurants take out massive bags of trash full of good food, just to throw them to the trash bin, or worse, the government puts spikes on places the homeless sleep on, to shoo them away instead of investing in something to help them properly and humanely. There is absolutely NO SCARCITY OF FOOD OR WATER. There is more than enough. It's just that the top 1% can control who gets access to it, and who doesn't, and that's what they've been doing for so long, especially to Africa and Cuba right now. Israel is doing it to Gaza and Lebanon while I type this too. A lot of Palestinians and Cubans are blaming their own government for it too, which is the goal of these blockades and violence, to "conquer" the people and land through displacement and financial pressure that does get millions of innocent people killed in silence; indirect kills, through starvation and heavy psychological depression. In Mexico, the USA arms and benefits the cartels the most. The Iron River, George Bush's Operation Fast & Furious/ATF Gunwalking Scandal, Project Gunrunner, the guns they use, their biggest customers, all American. It keeps us in fear, and we do cheap labor to get out of here. We get exploited under the threat of being deported, and then we die in silence, after living a very mediocre and poor life surrounded by racist assholes who got taught for their entire childhood that we are the bad ones. That Cubans are the bad ones. That black people are the bad ones. That illegal immigrants are the bad ones. Women, LGBTQ, DEI... Nah, dog. None of them decided wages or wars, people with capital did, and they love it when we fight sideways instead of looking up.
It seems there is no scarcity of bombs, of death and destruction, right? That's fine to you? For the government to spend over 25+ trillion dollars in the military over the past decade, instead of doing it to combat something more meaningful like World Hunger? World Hunger only needs about 93 billion USD a year to fix it (it's the highest reported estimate I found). Over a decade, it'd be 930 billion, not even a single trillion. That means, we need less than 4% of the American military budget to fix World Hunger for a decade, enough for those third-world countries to develop the tech they need to become self-sustaining. But we don't invest in that, we instead invest in bombing children in the Middle East and exploit Latin/South Americans. For decades now, that's what Americans and many other countries have paid for with their taxes. This is global. This is the final stage of Capitalism: stomping the weaker to please the strongest. All that child labor used to make the phone or hardware you're using right now. All the people living like modern slaves in assembly factories just to please your whims while you play videogames in your cold bedroom, with snacks beside you and whatnot.
The USA only has 335 million people and it's already struggling harder than China or India, which have 1.4 billion people each. China has a land mass of 9.1 million km2, the USA has 8.3 million km2, and India only has 2.9 million km2 and still kicking America's ass in administration. The so-called "#1 country in the world" is losing to the Indians and the Chinese in administrating their land and resources? How come?
How about we look at how some countries managed Covid? Here:
How the fuck is America doing a worse job than India, Indonesia or China in managing their resources and people? There are so many other countries that also humiliate the richest countries just like this, so. These 4 are just the top 4 most populated in the world.
The USA, alongside Mexico, both lose 20,000 and 30,000+ people every year to gun violence/homicides. Unfair, violent deaths. While the majority of the outside world barely reach 500 people a year. Last time I checked, places like the UK, China and even Iran are 6x times safer than the USA, statistically speaking. Your chances of dying in the USA or Mexico are exponentially higher than most countries in the world. Is there a scarcity of bullets and stupidity? It seems not.
There is no scarcity of anything. Point one. Water? Rice? Food? Sand? Electricity? Air? None. Probably only oil, and that'd not be a bad thing imo, it'd finally push us to renewables. So, what exactly is the scarcity you two are talking about?
You do have a point, that planet Earth is finite, we will be forced to control our size and consumption. But as of today, that is not a reality yet. Overpopulation was a massive talking point during the early 2000s, but it turned out to be exaggerated. It is not the same as Climate Change either, this is different:
"The panic around overpopulation in the late 1990s and early 2000s was the peak of a mathematical scare that began in the late 1960s, heavily driven by a theory known as Malthusianism (named after economist Thomas Malthus). In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s because human population was growing exponentially, while food production could only grow linearly. When the world population crossed 6 billion right at the turn of the millennium in 1999, the media, global think tanks, and educational systems went into overdrive predicting imminent resource depletion, ecological collapse, and mass famine by the mid-2000s.
Why the Panic Deflated: The Green Revolution.
The overpopulation models turned out to be drastically wrong because they underestimated human innovation. Thanks to the Green Revolution, like advancements in high-yield crops, synthetic fertilizers, automated irrigation, and genetic engineering, global food production actually outpaced population growth. We didn't run out of food; we got incredibly good at manufacturing it at scale."
We just need to invest more in education and our health, not on wars to cull ourselves down and "make up room for others" like Capitalism has us doing right now. Teachers are heavily underpaid, most that stay do it for the love of the game. We need to incentivize them with money, though, not feelings. Capitalism sucks, and anyone who supports it in the current state of the world also sucks. They value Capital (money) over the Community or being Social. They are not human anymore.
In a proper society with socialist benefits, you wouldn't need to join the military to receive those benefits.
Basically, those are employer benefits. Your employer happens to be the US government, and you get healthcare, college tuition and housing as benefits from your employer.
Basically, those are employer benefits.
No, in a socialist society those are anyone's benefits, provided by the state (by virtue of people paying taxes).
They're not provided by employers.
Stating the obvious but need to shout into the Internet:
It's incentive, turning desperate people into expendable weapons. War is good money for powerful interests with no qualms about human lives.
You could say the same about the orange pedo's recruitment of subservient goons into ICE, and even all his other appointments.
I want to say upfront that I don't subscribe to this argument myself, but the belief isn't that people don't want social programs. The argument is that society can't afford them. Supposedly, if people's basic needs are met by government programs that don't require any work from them, then enough people will stop working that tax revenue will fall below required levels for those programs and the whole system will collapse. Therefore people blocking or otherwise countering these programs are actually saving people from themselves.
I don't think it's a good argument, but let's not build a straw man.
The most common argument I get from people is that their hard earned money would be taxed to go to the undeserving.
I personally don't mind paying my share of taxes as long as it's being used responsibly. I am a little upset that the ones with the most wealth don't pay their fair share.
The sad part is that people are conditioned by the media and lack of education/critical thinking into thinking the undeserving are the poor, instead of the rich.
Not only is it not a good argument, the real-world data shows a positive correlation between more generous social benefits and more people entering the workforce.
Tax revenues are already in the shithouse because the largest accumulation of wealth isn't paying tax. Tax all the billionaires properly and you get a couple of trillions in taxes. Suddenly society will be able to afford a lot of things.
let’s not build a straw man.
walking in with a couple of button's for eyes and a straw hat
"oh... okay..."
Capitalists want a workforce that is desperate and does not have basic needs met. So the argument is that if people aren't desperate enough they won't work? Think about medical care. If you owned a factory wouldn't you want workers to show up, healthy and fed and ready to work? Sure they do, but they would rather have desperate people who have no choice but to work for pennies, who can't afford to take time off to vote or strike.
While thinking about this some time ago, I looked into health care and how much it costs a country related to what the people actually get. Most European countries spend around 20% of their budget on healthcare, and get almost free healthcare in return. The US also spends around 20% on healthcare, and we all know what that gets you. So society can easily afford it, it's just that in the US healthcare funds don't go to the people, they go to the rich.
The second point, where people with needs met will not work, is not true. After 1 year of paid unemployment, life becomes extremely boring and dull. Even if you are housed, clothed, fed and healthy, you'll want more things from life. You'll want money to do fun activities and go places, buy a nicer house, car, phone, clothes, etc. I literally know a UK guy that would get £200/month less if he would work (which is a different problem) but he's still considering it because he feels like a leech and simply has too much time on his hands.
To the point of the meme - can we talk about how much of a struggle our military currently has at recruiting? Those benefits do not get them the head count that they desire.
Mostly because those benefits have been constantly under attack by the people most of the usual recruiting pool tends to vote for.
We'll give you everything if you go die somewhere far, over bullshit reasons made up by people who've avoided service apparently isn't as appealing.
Why aren’t people rushing to commit war crimes for senile Caligula?
N.... No. What are you asking? Or what point would you like to make?
(Kindly. I don't think understand what you are trying to say.)
They are saying that they think recruitment in the US military is down because young people are seeing what Donald Trump (senile Caligula) is doing and don't want to help his administration advance its unlawful cause (commit war crimes).
Considering the US has been committing war crimes for decades, it's quite impressive how much of a fuck-up Trump is that even jar-heads aren't buying it.
Because even the executive offices are having brain drain. That’s why they’re hot for AI, they’ve lost the head count because it isn’t a good place to work.
And if those benefits were provided to everyone, they'd have an even harder time. The people who want to cut social spending are the same ones who want to spend trillions on useless wars, and they need people to be desperate enough to sign up to be cannon fodder for the billionaire war mongers to make money off of.
Yet another reason why we can’t have universal healthcare…to keep the DOD’s gullet full.
Why is this meme seemingly coming from inside Zohran's refrigerator?
POV: you're Zule
It's a cool place.
Fridge cam is best cam. Alton Brown proved that years ago.
Having a functional welfare state is not socialism
The schools on the military bases for the children are also the best performing in the country
Also, another reason why university/college may be spendy and loans are often offerred, they want you to go for the GI bill to keep their recruitment numbers up and hook John Q. Public with more DOD budget increases.
Obviously, it's because it's an offer made to an individual, rather than asking whether the individual wants everyone to enjoy those things.
Yeah, any individual that is "fortunate" enough to not have any issues that make them unusable for the purpose of Cannon Fodder.
I didn't know US Democratic Socialists was an org. Wonder why they exist when we have DSA