Anti Socialism

My opinion is that socialism is founded upon the denial of man's fundamental nature. All but a negligible percentage of men will:

Strive to gain as much personal advantage as possible
Perform to the best of their ability only when rewarded and sabotage effort that is punished

Thus socialism enforces corruption, waste, poverty, inefficiency, incompetence, and tragedies of the commons.

Socialism makes intelligence and ambition a liability, and stupidity and laziness an asset by inverting rewards and punishments.

Well, that was a bold assertion. The voluntary sector, combined with all artists and writers, is not a negligible percentage of the population. You also clearly make the assumption that the respect and admiration of peers is not a potential reward. -- MikeAnderson

This is not a contradiction with the Voluntary sector. You can work and do volunteer work. You can value art/writing/respect over a practical job. That is why the wording is 'personal advantage', not 'money'. But under Socialism, there may be no demand for your art (no one wants to buy it), so why should you have an art job? That is a waste and inefficiency under Socialism. Likewise you may be the next Matisse and able to sell art for millions in taxable revenue, but the central planners decided they don't need art. That is also waste and inefficiency.

You shift smoothly from agreeing that artists are motivated by non-monetary reward, to saying that they would not choose to be artists in a Socialist society because there is no monetary reward.

Being wasteful or inefficient will lose you the respect and admiration of most people, which is a loss of personal advantage. Moreover, most people don't like to see waste and inefficiency in others, so they derive personal advantage from eliminating it. --MikeAnderson

There is no advantage of eliminating waste in socialism. You are REWARDED for wasting since the government mandates waste (by regulating supply above or below natural demand). Go make 4000 extra acres of corn since the government's socialist subsidies reward you, while it all goes to waste on non-users of Ethanol.
- To be fair to socialism, the ethanol will at least be consumed eventually (by car or by human). Meanwhile, in contemporary capitalist economies, farmers receive rewards for not being as efficient as they could be, and food reserves are often destroyed to keep prices artificially inflated, helping to ensure that the poorer folks can't afford to purchase their own food, driving many to look for hand-outs. So, neither economic system is without its warts.
  - You are wrong on both counts, both of those are socialist. The 'rewards for not being as efficient' are subsidies, an exclusively socialist idea. The destruction of food was due to government intervention (socialist idea) via taxing (socialist idea) food processors to subsidize (socialist idea) farmers who followed government-mandated crop reductions during FDR's term. To get more free government handouts via crop reduction, why not destroy your crops?

Socialism pretends that a community can magically mystically control its resources without any tokens of exchange. AntiSocialism, the tendency of people to behave in a way that does not serve their common interests, is the result. Its extremum is the TragedyOfTheCommons.

Capitalism pretends that a community can magically mystically control its resources by driving the above two properties of men to its extreme. AntiSocialism, the tendency of people to behave in a way that does not serve their common interests, is the result.

Capitalism perfectly controls its resources. It is millions of people making massive parallel economic and resource decisions to the best of their ability. Every millisecond under capitalism, prices and supplies of millions of resources are finely tuned and adjusted. That is why Sears' stopping of printed catalogs was a cause of the demise of Russian Communism. They based all of their commodity prices on items in the Sears catalog since they were making such horrible resource decisions that millions of people died in the Holodomor and elsewhere.

The opposite obviously doesn't work either. A social order that is to be stable (see ReachableUtopia) obviously has to take human nature into account and not depend on idealistic members on any position.

Redundant discussion about the TragedyOfTheCommons (shifting the BurdenOfProof back and forth) moved and to AntiSocialismDiscussion? (to be deleted later) the one provided link moved to TragedyOfTheCommons.

It's not redundant, it's misleading. Socialism, whether you think it works or not, is about centralized, possibly corrupt, control over resources. The TragedyOfTheCommons occurs when there is no control over resources. In a corrupt Socialist society, the commons would be reserved for the party faithful, not a free for all. [NB. Socialist not socialist] -- MikeAnderson

Reference to death caused by communism removed too, as that may be historically correct, but irrelevant.

Why is that irrelevant again? The deaths caused by socialism were not, for the most part, incidental murders taking place from the actions of madmen. Typically, the deaths were caused directly by the economic policies. This has spanned centuries - consider the horrible plight of Haiti and the horrible plight of Zimbabwe. Both countries starved/are starving because of the socialistic redistribution of farmlands. Socialist policies in the Ukraine alone directly caused the deaths of 3 million people.

Consider the 15,000 elderly that died during a heat wave in France in 2003. The populace was conditioned to think the government should solve all problems and take care of people from cradle to grave. In America you take care of your parents (or they take care of themselves) and ensure they have heating/cooling. This scenario is completely unthinkable in a society that feel personal (over governmental) responsibility. THOUSANDS of deaths (more than 5x the deaths of 9/11) were directly attributable to socialism in a modern european country.

Maybe someone from France would care to comment on this. It seems to me rather facile to ascribe an event such as is described to a political philosophy. Compare with the great smog in London in 1952. (see http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/secondary/students/smog.html). I do not know the U.S.A. well. Is everyone there in a good state in a cold winter or a hot summer?

Care to explain why a French woman let her aunt die over the course of 3 days in a room knowing that it was 122 degrees in a hospital and 2 nurses told her to get her aunt out of there (http://www.globalaging.org/health/world/holocaust.htm)? Do you think that is considered a normal mindset in America to count on other people so much that you would willingly let a family member die?

Yes, we place our elderly in expensive private care facilities if they cannot provide for themselves and we work our butts off to afford it if necessary. The capitalist mindset is to provide for your own (instead of hoping the state does) so we ensure they are taken care of. Many more heat waves than this have occurred in the U.S., including hotter ones, and you would have to search hard to find the deaths within a thousandth of the ones in France.

I do ascribe it to political philosophy. Socialism creates a different PERSON than capitalism. One who is devoid of many responsibilities, who does not feel they need to act to control their destiny (the state will take care of everything and besides I'm punished for acting). They feel entitled to things (such as a non-firable job) instead of actually earning it.

You are entitled to your opinions even when you are talking perfect nonsense. I think this is mainly because you have a very strange idea about socialism, and ascribe to it a mysterious power to change people in a way that I find very strange. There are plenty of problems in the world. Enron? New Orleans? The Texas City Oil Refinery?

You cherry pick the distant localized negative events and ignore the hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty by capitalism? Care to compare how an American's day to day life was affected by Enron compared to the pervasive crushing taxes of the U.K.? You have an 83.5% tax on petrol and a poverty-level average standard of living according to the US! I'd rather have 100 Enrons than that.

Were these problems caused by socialism? Try looking up humility in a dictionary before blaming the evils of the world on other people. Neither socialism nor capitalism create people, and neither are absolutes. People create people and ALL make mistakes. Margaret Thatcher claimed there was no such thing as society, only individuals, and even her political successors would not agree. There are many things which most people participate in either because it makes sense, or because they have to. I belong to a pension fund, have a bank account and insurance policies - I have to have car insurance by law of the land (U.K.). All these things are a mixture of collective and individual. There are many people who voluntarily participate in collective organisations, acting to control the destiny of themselves and others, e.g. churches, political parties and trade unions. All of these are built up of people.

I would like to say beyond the scope of your economic issues is the nature of nature. In a communist or lets say socialist view point one is only protected by the commune soldiers i.e. police, national guard. However, in time of crisis those actors are not there for everyone. They start out protecting what is vital to the community: electricity, water, communications and the people who govern. However, in a capitalist world i.e America we protect our own kin and don’t have to wait 4 to 5 months for someone to come and give us protection. We bare and keep our own arms for our protection. However, in a Communistic Socialistic world i.e one and the same niceties aside not even people who have been raped, robbed, or had a crime committed against them can even use pepper spray to protect them-selves. I do apologize but it is simple. Socialism gives all the power to the state more or less the people who run the state. If one is not on their side then it is not in their interest to protect you. However, in a capitalist world it is each individual for their own protection. This leaves no misnomers about waiting to be hurt or criminalized by a crook while the government handles their priorities first.

I fear everyone who says 'it's simple' has committed the 'OverSimplification' fallacy. Anyway. This belongs to TheAdjunct.