Cheesecat wrote:But the German Nazi Party were also at times called the National Socialist party or the German Workers party which implies Socialism, which is contradictory as Nazi Germany was anti-socialist.
The Nazi party wasn't always the thing it ended up as. It was in large part a collection of nationalist, anti-semitic movements, and many of these groups had genuine socialist beliefs. Though even then you have to note how massively socialism can vary - the spoke a lot about the rights of workers for employment and a good wage, but at the same time were clearly anti-internationalist and opposed to the state planning of communist, and their most clear enemies were the Social Democrats and the Communists.
There was for a long time considerable debate between the socialist and anti-socialist factions of the party, and the left wing element formed around Otto and Gregor Strasser, under the doctrine of Strasserism (which was basically a kind of socialism that assumed all the evil capitalist were Jews). This group was one of several who competed with Hitler for control of the party.
Hitler eventually resolved the issue by killing Gregor Strasser and other rivals like Rohm in the Night of the Long Knives. This effectively ended any kind of socialist argument within the party, but by that point the word was in their name and it wasn't going to change.
So DakkaDakka what does Socialism mean to you and is it a term that still has meaning?
Socialism was never more than a catch all phrase for a wildly varying collection of policies, many of which only made sense in the context of the economic conditions of the time (and often not even then). As a term that can be used to describe anything from the social safety nets of capitalist countries to the state planned economy of the USSR it's kind of a useless descriptor.
That various groups have tried to villify the term has only made its use more problematic. Better to just use more specific terms.
Automatically Appended Next Post: 
Agent_Tremolo wrote:Ah, my homeland. Proof that you can have a crippled economy regardless of the "red scare". Bad governance tends to be colorblind.
That was a great post, and the last sentence was brilliantly put. Thanks for that.
Automatically Appended Next Post: DAaddict wrote:Realist... "Hmmm 300$ in total income. 220$ in total payouts. What happened to the 80$?"
Government... " Well you didn't expect me to do this for nothing did you?"
The government guy makes 105$ a day.
The cost of administering welfare is about 2-5% of the amount paid out, depending on the specifics of the system. So your example doesn't work, basically.
Automatically Appended Next Post: 
djones520 wrote:The problem is mankind in it's current state is incapable of it. You have people who will mooch the system. You will have people game the system. And you'll have people who provide to the system, and get angry at the others, and then want out.
Until human nature becomes cookie cutter, it's not going to work. And... since that will never happen, it will never work.
Only if one assumes socialist means a state planned utopia ie Marx' vision for the final state. But given the term means so much more than that, your argument just becomes hopelessly vague.
Automatically Appended Next Post: DAaddict wrote:Socialism's goal of helping the least is an acceptable and laudable goal. Personnally I am glad for it. However I do not "blanket trust" the altruistic government to hand it out either...
The old Bush point of helping people through private charity is a better ideal than building a government infrastructure to hand it out. However -as is human nature- this tends to be inadequate.
Such welfare is not only inadequate but in many cases way less efficient.
I mean, yeah, with groups like Doctors without Borders where you can benefit from high skilled people volunteering or taking a massive pay cut out of altruism then private charities are brilliant, but in most cases that just isn't possible.
And when you look at the cost of levying tax at a fraction of 1% of the amount raised, while a charity is exceptional if 10% is lost to fundraising (and about standard if 40% is lost to fundraising), then government becomes clearly the most efficient method of doing the kind of boring, day in day out stuff like poverty relief.
So we are left with a pragmatic approach where we want to help people who are in need but we also don't want to give a government cart blanche to institute a fully socialist society.
Truthfully I think it is the one thing where our democray works. We have liberals and conservatives in an ongoing struggle between socialist straight-jacket helping and capitalist hard-and-uncaring freedom to succeed.
I agree that democracy works very nicely in balancing the ship, election to election. But I don't think it's so much about balancing 'trust in the government' against helping people in need, it's more about how much we want to pay vs how much we want to help, quite frankly.
