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by max129
............. 10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10 .............
[far left].................................................[far right]
If social/political position is plotted along a scale where "far left" is a 10 and "far right" is a -10 anyone with a score magnitude greater than 8 in either dimension tends to dismiss the rest of the spectrum. So "Yes" very far left wants just as much "control" as very far right.
It's kind of funny how people react to the word "socialism".
In my experience, we have had a multi-century experiment in what human endeavors are best managed by a free market, which are best managed in a highly regulated market, and which are centralized/socialized.
I have not heard a lot of clamor from Libertarians to turn over air traffic control to the "free market". And it is part of the Libertarian credo that the military and the courts "must" be centralized.
An example that everyone on the forum has likely lived through is the birth and growth of both search engines and social media. In the beginning, anyone who says that Alta Vista or early Google should have been regulated is full of it. What was there to regulate? Who knew enough to regulate?
And yet, in the span of 23 years (for Google) and a mere 12 years (for Facebook), these sectors have grown to the point of needing serious regulation - at least in the personal privacy realm and likely far more.
Anyone here want to "deregulate" Banking? Read the history of unregulated banking and you will change your mind.
There are many very socialist persons on this forum; I have not seen a cry out to regulate Brownells.
This experiment of ours is messy - it is currently an actual overall mess. Thus the legitimate pressure on Democrats to propose a better higher education system, a better healthcare system and more.
One sign that an area needs to be "regulated" or even "centralized/socialized" is the degree to which it can be run in a free market without too much corruption or monopoly.
Semi conductors and Operating systems were all the rage for "regulation" back when the "WinTel" monopoly supposedly existed. And there were some significant anti-trust actions, but mostly minor skirmishes. The market corrected the monopoly quite handily. Between AMD, ARM and Linux the monopoly looks pretty weak today.
Even communist countries manage to allow farmer's markets and transportation for hire.
Healthcare? A free market failure in most of the world. Customers lack knowledge and market power. In the 1980s an 1990s we were trying to have "managed health care" in the United States. Basically, in an attempt to avoid national health care, we adopted a lightly regulated free market solution for all healthcare. What a failure. We have the highest worldwide healthcare costs by about double and 80% of the average rich country results. And be careful what you wish for as a solution. Since healthcare is almost 20% of our economy, any attempt to control costs will clearly have an impact on GDP. This single fact will drive most political motions on healthcare. You simply cannot lower costs drastically in a sector without a GDP impact when the sector is 1/5 the economy.
Financial Services? Interesting study area. As someone who at times wrote math code for financial services firms, I had front row seats in the early 80s to see that the financial services space was inventing new instruments partly because the new ones were thus far unregulated. When the CBOE opened, the total regulatory oversight fit in a thin 3 ring binder. And the new instruments always cause a melt-down -- always.
[Back on topic]
People who shoot up Mosques and Synagogues and AME Churches are not in any way warriors in the Free Market vs Centralized/Socialized spectrum. They are angry elves who have worked themselves up into a mental frenzy. They adopt the clothing of left/right politics, but they are not political.
It appears that humans are very receptive to self-brainwashing. They find some area of (initial) "interest" to themselves (hate to say it, but there are semi-legitimate gateway concepts into all the extreme groups.) Then they consume and obsessively consume media and ideas with an ever narrowing point of view. The people around these folks often note some change in them, but in the end, many close acquaintances and even family claim they had no idea the person would go kill others.
In the early 1980s, I wrote device drivers for the BBN Butterfly. I was a core code contributor to BSD 4.1 (networking stack). I have at least some street cred in helping evolve the Internet. We really believed that the Internet would be a great end result; funded by DARPA or not. As it turns out, we way underestimated the benefit of the Internet. But we also seriously underestimated the extent to which it would be a vehicle for the development of terrorism (never hear a single debate within the W3C or the IETF on the topics).
Now with the debate about suppressing the (very evil) video by the latest nut-job, we are handing the keys to media control over to the Internet giants. People on this forum are justifiably concerned that New Zealand will impose draconian gun laws. Perhaps of more concern: there is a worldwide effort to make sure that Google and Facebook and Twitter can take down and stop propagation of any terrorist content within minutes (not hours.)
OK, good luck with that. Once that is all in place, how will the rest of us control what is considered "MUST REMOVE" content. Child Porn, Terrorist Videos: Check. Watch out for what else makes it onto the "MUST SUPPRESS" list. The uprising in Egypt in 2011 could easily get classified as "Terrorist" activity.
And SOME of this is exactly what Terrorist want! They weaponize our freedoms. Freedom to own arms, freedom to express almost any point of view, freedom to move about and form groups, freedom to publish. This is what the hate groups are attacking. The excuses they use (Muslims) are just that. They hate most of the rest of the world. It is not politics; it is pathologic.
Last edited by
max129 on Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.