cry of the banshee wrote:
You want to live in an entirely socialist country?
Having everything provided for you by the goverment? Being entirely relaint on government? sad, very sad. Liberals are like children that way; they think everything should be given to them on a silver platter. A nationwide welfare state... ooohhh, how appealing.
Any government big enough and powerful enough to give you everything is a government big enough to take it all away.
V, allow me to agree with you in some ways and disagree in others.
As a matter of fact I agree with you entirely about the 2 party system. It is the same here (except it's more like a 3 party system, but the third bunch are puny emo runts with no hope of getting near power) I do not support any of these three parties, in fact I really have to say I despise them all, although in days of old I would have been a labour party supporter before they sold out.
I believe very, very strongly in proportional representation. i.e. the number of representatives a party gets is based on the percentage of people that vote for them, rather than the number of constituencies they win or electoral college votes they get, or some other bullshit. PR is a much purer form of democracy. As it stands, in the UK, 10% of people could vote for a socialist party, and yet there would be NO socialist representation in parliament whatsoever, because that wouldn't win them a majority in any individual areas. So, unless you support someone that is big in your own neighbourhood, your vote is COMPLETELY WASTED. Under PR, if 10% voted socialist, 10% of representatives in parliament would be socialist. I am sick of being so disenfranchised under the current system in the UK.
You talk about liberalism being about the welfare state and the government being the "protector". As a matter of fact, I agree with this, to an extent. IMO liberalism- by which I mean the "big government" liberalism of Roosevelt/Keynes etc. is a
compromise between the capitalist establishment and socialism. Socialism in its PROPER sense, rather than the weakling liberal sense or the mentalist Stalin/Mao sense is about government being run collectively by ordinary people directly- they don't elect "representatives" or pick between parties, they just get together in their local area, and discuss and vote equally upon what to do. Then they go ahead and do it themselves.
Now, this applies both politically AND economically. In fact, IMO the latter is even more important. The way in which companies are run- what they make, what is done with the profits, how wages are divided up between people, who is hired and fired, should be done collectively by the people that work for that company. As soon as someone joins the company, they are not just trained to do a low skilled grunt job, but they begin to be trained by the other people there to do a wide variety of jobs. This means that they can immediately begin to genuinely contribute to it, and subsequently, as soon as they begin to learn about it they are ready to start taking responsibility for the company like everyone else does and have an equal say in how it is run, and how profits are divided.
So, far from encouraging people NOT to take responsibility for themselves, like liberalism does, it actually encourages them to take more- just in a different way than they have to in a capitalist business. People are expected to pull their weight, but they are more willing to do this because they actually have a real stake of ownership in the company, and therefore also in society as a whole.
Understandably, these types of ideas scare politicians and businessmen shitless. This explains where liberalism comes from. Liberal politicians say, hey, if we give people welfare and a load of free stuff, then that will throw them a bone and they will stop getting above their station. Anyway, for the most part this has worked pretty well- it is no coincidence that socialism began to lose the mass support it once had after the liberal dawn of people like FDR and Keynes.
Anyway, just my opinion on the matter. Having said these things about liberals, I am still glad Obama won, because he is at least closer to my views than McCain, although I am still a long way away from him. In the absence of an actual socialist alternative, we have to make do with the liberals
