[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

I suppose the discussion here in nordics is a little bit different. We've not had a serious party that'd support the idea of expanding the work force (the Marxist ideal of 'everyone' having a job) which was the core of local communist politics. I don't agree with socialism as a economical/political system, but I do see a point here. However, we've essentially split the field in two: the social subsidies' supporters (the left) and the others (the right). The right is concerned about the state of the capitalists, of course in it's due right. The left is, not as you'd expect, concerned on how to get unemployed people employed, or what the effective tax burden of a middle-class worker is (as you'd assume they'd be), but are the social subsidies sufficient to provide an idle pair of hands for a living. I'm writing in a sharp fashion, but it's there.

I'll work my way from the middle to the bottom and back to the top. It's my favourite dog toy I chew each time an artistic liberal feminist or arts student starts rambling to me about it. They consider "socialism" sancrosanct. In a double-standard fashion. They will blame to empirical failures of socialist systems mostly on corruption (which is unarguably true): the authoritarian Soviet socialism didn't fail because communism/socialism would be a bad idea, it failed because it was implemented poorly. Then they proceed to blame "capitalism" for the flaws of the current system. However, here they perceive capitalism or neo-liberalism as something that's been implemented "as it should be", unlike socialism which was implemented "wrong". Thus, capitalism is inherently bad: socialism is inherently good, but was implemented wrong. This is just confirmation bias and double standards - capitalism needs to be able to measure up against both the market as such and corruption as such, but socialism doesn't - if capitalism suffers from corruption, it's the fault of capitalism. If socialism suffers from corruption, people are evil and don't fund art enough.

(....)

It's shit. It's difficult to say whether it's like communism in the 70s Finland - popular, but once they all grew up adults they shrugged and laughed at their past idiocy - or is it a trend.

I don't think it's fair to use the opinions of random liberal arts students as the prototype for all left-wing politics. That said, I see your point of how capitalism's flaws are treated, compared to those of communism or socialism. I've certainly been guilty of that from time to time, and I'm sure I will be again.

What I will defend is that we as a people should care for those who are unable to work, who have retired after a suitable number of years in the work force and for those who were recently fired and are looking for a new job. I'm not sure if you were attacking that notion at all, though, so maybe I don't need to defend it at all.

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

The right doesn't care too much about the size of the labour force and the unemployment rate, and the left is more concerned about the subsidy level of the unemployed rather than how to get them employed.

Unlike Marxist theory, however, where the point was to underline the value of work, these people would prefer underlining the value of hobbies. A lot of especially the young political left (I've been there, sadly) aren't very keen on entering work force. They don't want to: they're arguing that they're doing productive work (ergo paintings, small-community hangarounds, voluntary work) but it's simply not being paid for since capitalism doesn't appreciate it. They're asking for a citizen wage system to fix this. This involves the fundamental flaw that Soviet socialism also met. All work just isn't worth the dollars. Nobody can afford to put grannies to guard every single painting of a museum with a reasonable wage without going bust. In fact, since the share of capitol income in compared to earnings income is so shy, the only reason to fund such citizen wage systems (or generally 'heighten' the level of the social security to a point where a person could go through his life without a day in the work force and still have a 'reasonable' living) is to do what Marx wouldn't have done.

During my last year in uni, I was definitely very unhappy about the prospect of getting a job. Not so much because I felt I was already contributing my share to society (I wasn't, not the slightest bit), but because I had a problem with essentially selling myself (or at the very least, renting myself out) to make rich people richer.

There are forms of employment that sit better with me. For example, working for the government would (theoretically at least) benefit society at large. A non-profit organization I believed in would be another possibility, as would an anarcho-syndicalist setup. Alas, here my apathy shines through: I'm currently working at a very ordinary public company, have done so ever since I finished uni, and am not actively looking for anything 'better'. I don't know if that makes me a hypocrite or just a lazy jerk. It may also mean I'm just not one of the typical liberal arts students you're so happy to chew out.

I've actually given the notion of guaranteed minimum income some thought from time to time, and generally like it, but don't have the economics wherewithal to know whether or not it's viable (yet). That mostly comes from a deep-seated dislike of boom-and-bust, which continues to plague our current global economic system. It seems strange to me that we continue to require "growth" (whatever the hell that means), when we're already as rich as we are. Intuitively, it seems just stupid that we're all getting our panties in a twist over what, that we're now back to a early 00s level of prosperity? Late 90s maybe? Did we really have it so bad then?

Of course, I do realise that the problem is not that we're now slightly less rich than we were 10 years ago, it's that we are afraid to spend money. Consumers are afraid they'll lose their job, so they want to save up in case that happens. Investors are afraid to because they no longer believe that spending money will give them a ROI.

My take on it is that at some point, we should be so rich, and so technologically advanced, that we could actually reduce what we now call jobs to hobbies, by giving everyone a flat minimum living wage and instating a flat income tax. Whether we've reached that point already, I don't know. It would certainly not perform as well on the classical economic indicators like GDP, but then I'm not really a fan of those anyway.

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

I don't see what this has to do with the idea of "everyone having work and getting paid reasonably for it". One of socialism's failures (apart from the obvious ball of corruption) was the inability to put people working into jobs that'd been productive. We're headed the same way, just taking a different path.

The truth really is, no matter how much general adoration across the globe is put on the nordic model of running things, it's all pre-emptive. The model hasn't yet lasted through a single generation, let alone two. Until it does that, it's not very purposeful to be admiring it since it could equally well just be another bubble waiting to go bust.

It really doesn't have anything to do with it. I would not characterize any European (and certainly no Dutch) political party of the past 20 years as Marxist. All of our parties, from the liberals to the socialists basically accept capitalism, and basically accept that unions are a fact of life. What they fight for are basically fringe issues. We already have a fairly decent middle road and there really isn't anyone over 30 who's up for either a workers' revolution or a oligarch one. We are all too satisfied to go crazy like that. So instead, we focus on questions like: do we get to retire at 65, 67 or after 40 years of job experience? Do we get 2 years unemployment benefits of X, or a year's worth of 1.5*X? Should our highest tax rate be 50% at 50k, or 60% at 150k?

It's almost completely meaningless. No wonder people are disillusioned with politics.

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

The verb "feel" is a good one. Politics, the way I see it, is moving rapidly away from the "logical objective approach" where the reasonability of a system would be judge on how the ends meet (expenses, incomes, incentives), not how it would "feel" right and humane. To me, politics is just a system that makes the work of field experts more difficult than it should be: it's not much more than a hindrance. Modern democratic decision making is slow, clumsy, and prone to short term rend-seeking and fallibility to lobbyists.

Yes, I largely agree that the way politics has changed into a media circus is going to harm us in the long term (and quite probably in the short term too). For all of the left's flaws, here I lay the blame squarely in the court of right-wing populism. You have your True Finns, we have our Freedom Party and we're all in the business of some good old 1930's scapegoating.

Not that the left isn't tagging along, to an extent, but it's always easier for convinced liberal individualists to stir up fear and hatred, because it fits so well with the notion that a spontaneous order will arise from a society in which everyone is out for their own gain. If you believe in a more cooperative way of shaping society, it seems to me that it's much harder to justify empowering such (purely destructive) forces.

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

Oh, yes, an example of - to me - succesful ideas that aren't exactly capitalistic or communistic would be the national income policy agreement (which was eventually abolished, ironically aided by the social democrats, who also had their game in the removal of the wealth tax - more irony from the left). It consisted of an idea that wage-bargaining would happen in a three-way-discussion between the state, the employer unions, and the employee unions. I never had much to say about it; most of the critisism had again to do with how it treated people outside the labour force, but let's be honest, I believe that the state of the labour force regardless dictates the level on which we can afford to treat people outside it.

It may interest you that this is the system that is in place in the Netherlands. We call it the Polder Model. The recent surge in right-wing populism has put some dents in its legitmacy, at least in the eyes of the masses, as has recent internal trouble in our largest labour union, but it's still going strong.

You're not alone in admiring it, according to the Wikipedia article I linked, it's met with "universal acclaim". I never knew.