I believe America had it's own similar human liquidation program leading up to industrialization as well.
I fail to see what the ugly part of the American past has to do with the current thread. Your comment feels a lot like Whataboutism[0] to me. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Can someone explain to me the downvotes?
I can only derive from them that someone thinks that what I wrote is wrong. Maybe I am missing something and I just do not know.
eh, You can have a very strong welfare state that provides minimal food, shelter, medical care and clothing to everyone who needs it without having a planned economy. They really are different issues. there's a big difference between a welfare state and full out socialism; the difference is largely about power... Socialisim is about giving the workers control over the means of production. The welfare state is merely…
Socialism is state (in some sense the public if it is also a democracy) owning the means of production. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Workers owning the means of production is syndicalism.
Wikipedia page on socialism: "Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity."
they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty Those who weren't outright killed during or in the wake of the revolution and pogroms, anyway. But many who DID survive did so only because of famine relief from the USA and Europe as farm collectivization went sideways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia...
Pogroms were definitely not a Soviet phenomenon. Many of the party leaders were Jewish. In that article, it shows that since 1947 no famines. I think the original post is making the argument that they started making progress later. 1950-1970 they really did make progress in almost every concretely measurable thing. USSR went tits up in the way that maybe a chilled out company (albeit with a weird corporate culture) w…
Pogrom, meaning specifically persecution of Jewish communities, was not a Soviet phenomenon. Otherwise, there were a number of ethnic persecution campaigns in the USSR, with the Holodomor being the largest, but there were also many others. There were lots of people killed.
The road out of poverty is through what is called "exploitation" in Marxist theory - particularly, international trade.
As British economist Joan Robinson put it :"The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all."
Which handing out blankets infected with the smallpox virus certainly quickened.
90% of the pre-Columbian population was already wiped out long before Jeffery Amhurst may or may not have tried doing that. Regurgitating trite myths and legends is not particularly helpful in increasing knowledge.
Citation needed. The estimate of pre-Columbian population itself is highly debated, I fail to see how you can so confidently state a number that must be derived from that estimate.
> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that t…
They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2. GNP: Country 1890 1900 1913 1925 1938 Russia/USSR 21 180 32 000 52 420 32 600 75 964 Germany 26 454 35 800 49 760 45 002 77 178 Britain 29 441 36 273 44 074 43 7…
> Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2
What? How is having all your industrial infrastructure destroyed and 20 million of young, able-bodied males killed an advantage?
I like your reasoning, and I agree that we need more effort toward social programs that provide basic needs for the population. One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there…
1) Higher income is already associated with lower fertility. Only people who are already pretty rich decide that they’re not rich enough to procreate. 2) If the market honestly has nothing for someone to do (or it’s of such low value that it falls below minimum wage), is it really a tragedy if they don’t work?
It is if they fill their time with making babies and this results in catastrophic population growth.
Governments shouldn't take care of people. People should take care of people. (Over course, we should take care of ourselves first but that doesn't always work out.)
Strange, is the government somehow not made up of people? This line of reasoning is so strange, like government is some sort of alien being, not an institution of the people, for the people. Taxes are how you buy civilization. Voting is how you decide what sort of civilization you want.
And what happens when the people minimize paying taxes and stop voting? See: the US.
Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. >“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel. His company makes a mobile app called FreshEBT t…
Having worked in nonprofits for years, I have truly learned the hard lesson about how hard it is to raise funds for altruistic endeavors! It's so much easier to raise funds from someone who expects a return to their life in one form or another.
We have the wealth on earth, yes, but fundamentally people are selfish. I think this behavior is largely driven by fear of losing everything, even for those most privileged.
90% of the pre-Columbian population was already wiped out long before Jeffery Amhurst may or may not have tried doing that. Regurgitating trite myths and legends is not particularly helpful in increasing knowledge.
Citation needed. The estimate of pre-Columbian population itself is highly debated, I fail to see how you can so confidently state a number that must be derived from that estimate.
It's a well established fact that 80-90% of the pre-Columbian population died from European infectious diseases, often before seeing a single European, since the diseases travelled faster than the people.
This was centuries before the germ theory of disease became mainstream in the late 1800s, and no one on either side had a clear understanding of what was going on.
Divine intervention was probably the most common theory.