"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. "I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
Are you seriously confusing support for these measures with support for ending the market system in the United States? Can you see what a fantastical stretch that is?
>Upgrading all existing buildings and building new ones so that they achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability.
How is a directive to upgrade all existing buildings, anything but central planning of an entire industry?
What is the problem with that? It's already a thing, just not nationally. You get that pro-jobs angle for contractors, provide a stop-gap when new construction slows servicing existing owners looking to reduce costs.
You're reading the proposals with an ... impractical eye.
Most major countries have some kind of scheme in place to fix agriculture prices. In the case of the US there are subsidies that everyone pays, via taxes.
Canada was not founded by religious extremists and evangelical Christianity has no hold here. That's probably the biggest difference and it accounts for a lot, I'd say.
Canada was home to a large number of devout Catholics and Protestants, and has had many important internal conflicts between the two. Read up on Louis Riel for a good introduction.
What we lacked was homogeneity in the religious extremism; thanks to an early balance between French and English settlers there was never long a period when Catholic or Protestant were dominating.
We also enjoyed being the home to English loyalist refugees during the American war of independence... And the destination of the underground railroad.
Indeed! Just as those in the States are asking for policies that aren't socialist, but democratic socialism. There is a difference!
No one is advocating for Venezuela, just the rest of the first world.
Regarding US government incompetence in benefits: Not everywhere has distributing benefits been so inefficient (see: Denmark or Germany, among others). It's almost like a decades-long program of cutting funding and introducing tons of red tape undermines public confidence in social spending. I'm sure that's unintentional!
Vs the large diverse cultures of the US (where I'm from) and Russia (where I now live). After living in Russia, it's no surprise that socialism did not work here. Forcing socialism onto cultures when they're not mature enough won't work. Even worse, it leads/would lead to massive oppression and corruption.
However I agree that US food production is already highly centralized, at least where big ag is concerned, with the characteristic that profits fill private pockets while losses are subsidized by the people at large.
Carl Bildt (former Prime Minister of Sweeden) said "Bernie Sanders was lucky to be able to get to the Soviet Union in 1988 and praise all its stunning socialist achievements before the entire system and empire collapsed under the weight of its own spectacular failures." [0]
Lars Løkke Rasmussen (former Prime Minister of Denmark) said "I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy" [1]
Seems like they both reject the idea of them being socialist countries. They are both non-socialist countries that have market economies. They just happen to have a larger welfare state than a lot of countries. Having a large welfare state has nothing to do with socialism though.
[0] https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/1100039769810235393 [1] https://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-...
We certainly don't have central planning, and if that was inherent in the word socialism I guess Lars Løkke wouldn't have had to say "far from a socialist planned economy". It is far from that. It is also, as I see it, increasingly far from a social(ist) system, but we did use to have more of that, and in my opinion (not alone here) it was better.
I am fairly well educated and have had a good salary when I was working (voluntarily not working right now because I have lots of money and prefer to do other things), but like many others around here I prefer that my money gets spent having a functional society to having more pocket money to buy luxury items.
And I know that from a Liberal/libertarian pov I don't have the right to decide that for others, but from my point of view that kind of exaggerated individualism is dysfunctional and individuals don't exist any more or less than groups. We need both rights and pragmatic optimisation of general wellbeing. Everybody is better off when there is less poverty and misery around.
Seriously though, Scandinavia is proof that you can have a free market and social programs at the same time and have it work well. It's when bureaucrats get their fingers into planning the economy when things end up very poorly.
"Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.[1][2][3] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support free markets, free trade, limited government, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), capitalism, democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion."
In the US, the overton window is so far right that liberals are considered left of moderates. But liberals are not leftists, i.e. people who would support socialism. It's like
left --------------------- liberals --- moderates ---- right
^Scandinavian moderateAnd US liberals and European liberals have quite different ideas about taxes, immigration, climate change, law and order. Europeans would not call Biden or Warren liberals. (Who would Europeans call a liberal? Maybe Paul Ryan, or Bloomberg).