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Last edited by cajuncocoa; 07-28-2016 at 01:12 PM.
this is from JBS, so your friend might not be as open to it, but it is an eye-opener
Overview of America - Public Service - DVD
http://www.freelythinking.com/The_Law.pdf
If they can read this and make a cogent argument against it, I would like to see it.
Or you can read it and form your argument based on it.
Or he could be so far gone that he will not make the effort (it's a 2 or 3 hour read, tops, and it's FREE!)
"The journalist is one who separates the wheat from the chaff, and then prints the chaff." - Adlai Stevenson
“I tell you that virtue does not come from money: but from virtue comes money and all other good things to man, both to the individual and to the state.” - Socrates
Collectivism kills.
Its theft, and the same people that can give you everything can also take everything away.
If you can't find the obvious flaws in it, then even you haven't been convinced. The philosophy of communism is the ultimate tool for tyrants to maintain power over the masses by promising to remove the inequities and uncertainties of life...and to be fair, historically it is very good at making everyone equally poor. Meanwhile, the tyrant(s) live in lavishly appointed residences, eat caviar, drive Mercedes, and watch American movies and porn. You can't find one communist/progressive thinker who lives what they preach. Just look at Al gore. Yet, you can't find a single rich, self-made capitalist who doesn't live their core philosophy.
Last edited by mconder; 02-24-2010 at 03:29 PM.
"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." - J. Edgar Hoover
Communism necessitates that all men have an equal ownership of other men and resources of the earth. In practice, a person cannot receive consent from every individual on the planet in order to use a common resource, so for the sake of practicality, a select group, let's call it "the government", will oversee this.
This is really all you need to know, because any idiot can see how a single group controlling the means of production is not a classless society.
You die from shortages of the most basic goods that sustain life. This causes you to attack your fellow man to survive.
"People want to own stuff" - Frank Zappa
Out of every one hundred men they send us, ten should not even be here. Eighty will do nothing but serve as targets for the enemy. Nine are real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, upon them depends our success in battle. But one, ah the one, he is a real warrior, and he will bring the others back from battle alive.
Duty is the most sublime word in the English language. Do your duty in all things. You can not do more than your duty. You should never wish to do less than your duty.
Ask him if he believes that people seek reward and avoid pain.
If he says no, somehow find his address and go personally kick him in the nuts.
If he says yes, then explain to him that money is a reward for work which is pain.
In a communist society, the expectation is that human nature no longer seeks reward and avoids pain. They expect people to be willing to take more pain for less reward in a way that does not balance out.
The only way that communism can work is by threatening more pain if the person does not comply. So it becomes a society of fearing a pain greater than the pain that they seek to avoid on a daily basis without reward. But when you're taking more pain than you're being rewarded for, you tend to find ways to avoid the pain...whether through shoddy work, finding holes in the system or fleeing.
The only explaination I've seen to sufficiently explain communism is that the true communists believe that socialism creates enough of a transition period where human nature will actually change to the point where humans will not fear pain and will no longer seek reward, at which point communism can finally exist.
Definition of political insanity: Voting for the same people expecting different results.
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Last edited by cajuncocoa; 07-28-2016 at 01:12 PM.
Communism works fine if your goal is eliminating poverty. Where it doesn't work so well is in innovation, effort, growth, or really anything beyond just getting by with the bare minimum.
Originally Posted by me3
I guess if everyone is equally impoverished, there is no poverty..
I compare it to education. When your standardized test is set up so that 50% of people are always below average (like IQ) it doesn't make sense to complain that too many people are below average. When you define rich as the top 5%, it doesn't make sense to complain that 5% of people are rich and 95% are not.
Can 10% of the population of a country guess the values, wants and needs for the other 90%?... and supply each and every person with those needs and wants at the exact time they are requested? the answer is No. That is why those who wish control of something support the push for univeralization. If each want and need can be made the same they can just produce those few items... Communism was a lost cause of delusional psychopaths, it just so happens that the idea is quite popular with the current crop of delusional psychopaths.
Last edited by awake; 02-24-2010 at 04:17 PM.
Best argument against communism :
Read a history book.
"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."
-Abraham Lincoln, April 6, 1859
Jefferson Davis murdered 600,000 people
Tell him to read The Black Book of Communism.
This
"It's absolutely astounding...the Tea Party is one of the biggest movements in history, and every one we've been to has been FERTILE ground for our ideas." -TheTyke
Oh, I don't know. You could ask all those Soviet citizens who routinely had to stand in line for, say, toilet paper and a loaf of bread how well their poverty was being eliminated.
That was hardly full on communism. More like militaristic dictatorship under the guise of a communist government.
Ask how many socialist/communist dictators he can name. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Hitler (leader of the National Socialist party), Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jon-Il, Hoxha, the list goes on and on.
Then have him list all the capitalist dictators. Pretty hard to do. Capitalism and free markets thrive on liberty. Socialism/ communism depends of oppression.
--------------------------------------------
First step to ending the income tax: end payroll tax withholding.
Require each American to write a check to their state and federal governments every month.
we have tried it in America and it sucks.
That has alot of strawman arguments laced throughout it. You could have a collectivist dictator who lives an austere lifestyle. Al Gore probably doesn't personify every progressive or communist thinker, although the two are DEFINITELY not interchangeable. And there are plenty of capitalists who do not live their "proper" lifestyle... Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead would probably provide a pretty great example of this.
Rather than say liberty is best, it will automatically devolve into life versus value to life. Is it worth living without having autonomy? Maybe. But why not fight to give your life value while you are alive? Having the ability to choose is key.
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First, don't call him a nitwit.
Second, equating socialism and communism won't help your cause either.
For others:
Calling it theft isn't good; unless he is for anarchy as any gov't of 3e8 people and 3.7e6 square miles requires taxes to continue.
If 10% don't know what the other 90% wants then democracy is not a good gov't form.
People standing in line for food has happened for thousands of years from all different types of gov't and people, not the result of communism/socialism.
What board is this?
Probably a leftist one I assume.
First thing I would say is don't waste your time debating these people. But, if you must, I'd ask him if he has read Animal Farm since that pretty much sums up my feelings towards Communism. If he hasn't read it, just recommend it. Though he probably won't read it since Communists are usually stuck in their own world and won't bother reading material that challenges their own views.
We've lived enough history since Communism has existed as a formal theoretical system to make judgements on it. One thing that needs to be said is that Communists begin all of their revolutions promising utopia and the world for the under-privelleged but, inevitably, every single one of these Communist revolutions end in tyranny where the people have less power and don't even improve their economic situation. I've taken a couple of economic classes at college from a Communist and they seem to brush off this historical observation that Communist countries are bad places to live by saying those Communist Revolutions happened too soon. The analogy my economic teacher used is it's like picking an apple that's not ripe yet. But I've read and thought enough to know that Communism is great on paper but is impossible to achieve.
Technically, I think for most of human history we've lived in small-scale Communist like societies where a tribe or family unit shares all the vegetables or wild-game killed. But that will work only because the people in them have an inherent incentive to share what they produce with the people around them since it will give them status and they can expect to get what others produce and it advances their own genes since they're all family. It could never work for large countries where no such incentives exist.
Last edited by merrimac; 02-24-2010 at 06:21 PM.
I hate debating today's self-described commies. They always try to weasel away by saying that every communist regime hasn't "really" been communist. Basically, anything that doesn't produce rainbows and happiness isn't real communism to them.
It's the effort that matters. Every Marxist revolution, at least in the beginning, was intent on trying their damnedest to produce a socialist and later communist society. Whether they reached Marx's delusional utopia or not is irrelevant. They were trying to do so, and produced nothing but heaps of bodies and tyranny in the process.
Umm... Chile is the number one example, where the economy was modelled on the Monetarist economic philosophy. Nobody remember Pinochet? Berlusconi in italy seems to be coming pretty close to that today, too.
It is possible to seize military control of a country and implement market reforms. It just is not very compatible to liberty.
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Wasn't Orwell a communist, just anti-authoritarian?
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