As I read this article in Seattle’s The Stranger about the Democratic Socialists of America, this passage leapt out at me:
In general, DSA advocates for taking basic needs like housing and health care off the market, empowering workers to organize and control their workplaces, and weakening the influence of corporations, all toward the long-term goal of abolishing capitalism.
I wonder if they’re aware there are only two known methods of allocating resources: a command economy that is inherently authoritarian and a market system?
I welcome any organization that has the goal of breaking the stranglehold that the present establishment Democrats and Republicans have on American politics. I think that an organization with the objective of ameliorating the worst effects of a market system is healthy and benign.
Market systems can lead to some people not having enough. Not enough food or housing or health care or whatever and that’s something that needs to be countered. But command systems always create shortages. The experience of the last couple of hundred years is that mixed economies are best despite needing constant tinkering.
I don’t look as favorably at having the objective of “abolishing capitalism” in the short, middle, or long term. That inevitably leads to murdering your neighbors.
The biggest problem with “abolishing capitalism†is that the monetary system that supports and is supported by capitalism would collapse. The socialism of Europe does not “abolishing capitalismâ€. Their socialism is still capitalism, but it is state controlled to varying degrees.
Today’s capitalism requires today’s monetary and financial systems, and these systems are separate in theory, only. Lady Thatcher’s quip about socialism does not apply to a monetary system based upon credit creation, but to abolishing this capitalism, the monetary system supporting it and supported by it will need to be abolished as well.
Venezuela has problems because their monetary system cannot be supported by their economic system. The Europeans have retained a constrained capitalist economy, and their monetary system has not collapsed. Also, they have/had a large reserve of wealth to sustain the system for a long time.
The wealth generated by the monetary & financial systems is used to support the monetary & financial systems. Confiscating and/or limiting the uses for that wealth will eliminate or lessen most of that wealth, but that wealth is what socialism needs to sustain itself.
It is the credit backed goose that produces the debt backed dollars used to finance the standard of living demanded by the capitalist abolitionists.
But, what do I care? Burn this bitch to the ground.