Pointing out that your comparing apples and oranges?

Did the rest of my post not show up or did you miss it?

Please make your posts more refined, and wholly on topic.

Socialism can only work if 95% of the people are gainfully employed. You can use Sweden as a model.

You can't allow the benefits for not working to add up to a confortable living otherwise there will be a certain percentage of the population who will decide to not work.

You also need to allow the private ownership of property so people have an incentive to buy a house. The higher percentage of homeowners that y ou have the better off your country will be.

You need to make sure that there is an incentive for people to create a new business or product. You can't tax business to death.

Socialism can only work if 95% of the people are gainfully employed. You can use Sweden as a model.

You can't allow the benefits for not working to add up to a confortable living otherwise there will be a certain percentage of the population who will decide to not work.

You also need to allow the private ownership of property so people have an incentive to buy a house. The higher percentage of homeowners that y ou have the better off your country will be.

You need to make sure that there is an incentive for people to create a new business or product. You can't tax business to death.

Thisguyrighthere... Yes, other countries have been able to have insurgents. However, they have an advantage against the goverment forces, that you and I wouldn't have. The military forces don't know the land or area, in those countries you've suggested. However, they would very much know the local area around here. It's happened several times here already, where people holed them selves up, only to be shot to death by the police.. There isn't need to bring out tanks, or bombs. Remember that, while your stockpiling your weapons.

Df1... Yes, our elected officals don't have a reason to go off to a capital to represent us anymore. I don't understand why they still go off.

To all: Yes, i agree we need to get the unemployement rate down to practically nothing. The question is, how do we do that, and keep everyone happy with the career they got? Not everyone can be a doctor and lawyer. Would they have to relocate or can they work from home? Can they own their own house? Would that help?

I'm very intrested to hear everyones opinions.

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I am waiting for you to realise how hopelessly out of your depth you are by claiming things you clearly have no evidence to support. What advantage do the local Afghan resistance fighter have against a recruit from Kabul that a local Texan would not have against a new work city recruit?



It's called satellites and there are no excuses for not knowing the 'lay of the land' . Fact is you can prepare very well and when you are not it just shows you did did not care to. A Regiment recruited in New York state will be as confused by the terrain in Colorado as the terrain in Texas and there is not much difference between what could be known or what will be known.



Which does not constitute a national or a state wide uprising....



There will be a need to bring out all those if you wish to fight without massive casualties. Remember that large numbers of Americans have served in the American armed forces and they have the technical knowledge to form the core of a very very effective and well armed resistance movement if they have the support of the communities they fight in and around.



Because it's one way to ensure you can't track them down so easily and have those face to face conversations they so hate.



Allowing unemployment to rise is basically social engineering as it puts pressure on every worker in the work force by undermining his job security; American unemployment will keep rising.



Why do you want to keep them happy with the job they have? Why not create the opportunities and the trade barriers that will allow them to do what they wish?



And not everyone wants to be.



Frankly i suggest you do less typing and more reading as you have had good information presented on this thread.

Keep up the good work DF1 and remind that other guy to pack the weapons away for now and use 'the law' while it still works so well. Tell him that if the law works too well for him he will always have the opportunity to use the gun on whoever tries to run his car off the road or make you 'slip' in the bathroom.

Stellar

Stellar,

You actually think, that law abiding and untrained citizens would actually stand a chance attacking, us troops? You think they can actually succeed? Even if you had a huge amount of support on your side and experience, how do you think shotguns, pistols, and homemade bombs will compare to m16's? Have you thought about how to get past blockades, where would you get the funds to finance an uprising?

Maybe you should brush up on your history, an uprising has already happened... the Civil War. The US government won, end of story. Do you honestly think that history won't repeat it's self?




All the more reasons to pull them out of there offices, and bring them to the people.



Studies show, that the average person has several career changes in their lifetimes. That is usually because they have lost interest in what they were doing, or have become unhappy with what they do. In some cases, it can be as simple as they thought what they were getting into was something else. My question is, if a person decides to become an accountant/doctor/laywer/bus driver/etc and then after working in that position finds out it wasn't what they thought it was, how do we keep them happy in that position while a new recruit is brought in and they get retrained in something else?



I have read what was said on this thread... I am asking for more information. How do we get there? It's one thing to just say something, but to actually have it all worked out, is another.

You have spent alot of time responding to this thread, and yet offered little towards the topic. I would love to hear your thoughts on how we could make all these ideas work.


[edit on 30-3-2007 by JessicaS]

[edit on 30-3-2007 by JessicaS]

They would kill a few and wound a few and if that happens a few hundred times a day all over a nation of 300 million it becomes very significant as occupation forces throughout history have discovered.



Weapons are just tools and a handgun is perfectly deadly given employment in the right circumstances and suitable close quarters. You do not 'succeed' in these uprisings because you kill more than they do but because they lose control of the economic functions which they are so dependent on for their own power.



Unless all economic activities are shut down ( not possible in a modern society) there must always be a currency for means of exchange and while there are such some of it can and will be diverted by those who lead double lives and want more than they are currently getting.



Always brushing up to do but i can assure you that i am quite familiar with quite a large number of formative events...




The problem with that scenario is that there were two sides with clear power structures and areas of control and in such one must eventually win. In a true civil war there are unlikely to be entire America states that will rebel ( the federal government have strategic bombers that can make such large scale centralized resistance rather hard to do) and the fighting will be localized to towns and cities all over the country. The type of decentralized resistance which is possible with modern communication methods is quite unheard of and i think it is in fact getting easier to resist governments now than at any other time in the past.



The laws and systems of control are in fact in place for use by the public but if the public does not think things are so bad....



I don't see how the issues are connected but since few people have the knowledge to understand what they want to do with their life at 16 or 18 it's not very surprising that most change jobs a few times in their life. Since most people work their way up the remuneration scale most will go where the money is and as their general skills improve so will the jobs they are able to job.



I don't understand how this is related to the primary discussion. The only way to ensure that the state gets back the money it poured into the education of any individual is to sign a contract for a pre-determined number of years worth of service in that area. In the end it's not the government that pays ( it's the tax payers) and i think the tax payers should demand service for their investment in others. At this stage western countries steal tens of thousands of trained professionals from the third world who had to educate them at relative great cost to their tax payers only to lose them to foreign state subsidised institutions. The British NHS is a offender of note.



We don't want to get to anything socialist as it's fundamentally a idea that suits those who want control over others.



There is not much to be said in defense of a very bad idea. Please just read what DF1 had to say if you need more detail than you think i have supplied.



Get 'freedom' to work? Well i suggest no more socialist tendencies than we are already 'experiencing' so far.

Stellar

How to get socialism to work?

You don't. Simple as that.

Can I just chime in. I don't want to get involved in this discussion because... Well... I believe in personal freedom and that doesn't go well with socialism. But, our Federal government doesn't print any money.... The Federal Reserve is private.

To get true Socialism to work would require a large majority 90%+
of the population to have the psychology to support it.

That is work to better yourself and humanitry as a whole.
Live comfortably not luxuriously.
Do not take more than is required for a relatively comfortable life.


For it to work on a single country level you would have to create a
country with the majority (as I mentioned) having a psychological
preference to it.
You would also need the country to be completely self-sufficient.

I think that you have to address at least two issues to make socialism work. First, you need an incentive for people to go above and beyond mediocre. Why will someone want to spend all the time and effort required to say become a doctor if they get the same reward as a cashier at a mini mart? That doesn't mean that a doctor should get $500,000 per year but I still think that you need incentives for achievment.

Second you need to address the slacker factor. A certain percentage of any population will just as soon do nothing if they are being taken care of by the government. That's right , we have slackers. What do you do with people that just want to work the system rather than work at a job?

You can still have socialism per say, but it would have to have incentives for hard work and a kick in the rear for the slackers.

In addition to your incentives and slackers argument, it's the fact that a single entity controlling everything is a government monopoly... And that never works.

Personally, I think that to get socialism to work you need one thing. You need the people to trust their government and politicians. Unfortunately, in this day and age, to many people blindly trust that their government has the peoples best interests at heart. My biggest question is... Why is their still such a massive push for it? Socialism is all around us. It works in some countries, but I don't think it will ever work here in the U.S.

Hell, it hasn't, it's been around since FDR. There is no denying that the "New Deal" was communism lite or socialism. You can even ramble off the 10 planks of the communist manifesto, this communism that we fought off so valiantly in the name of freedom here in the U.S. by the way, and see all ten of them in place here in the U.S.

Also, don't any of you find it ironic that socialism is basically unconstitutional? Seriously, socialism and the Constitution don't mix. Anyone else have any ideas on where people that enjoy freedom can go after we have our Constitution rewritten?

I don't think it'll even work if you have complete trust in the government. At least, not as well as capitalism, since you can define "working" as anything.

Socialism is not unconstiutional.

Nowhere in the Constiution does it say that Socialism is not allowed.

To be technical, there is actually some Communist (which is different
than Socialism) aspects of the Constitution, that is Imminent Domain.

It is unconstitutional to the extreme. It does not specifically say socialism is unconstitutional. However, the very ideas required to have socialism is unconstitutional. Yes, every social program currently in existence in the U.S. today is unconstitutional. Because the Constitution was never properly amended to have them at the federal level. The social programs could constitutionally exist at the individual states level though. The federal government is only supposed to regulate trade, establish postal roads, print money, control an army, and a few other things I can't think of off the top of my head.

In fact, i am one of those whackos that thinks every problem we currently have can be traced back to our federal government not following the Constitution.

Most people aspire to do well at what they spend most of the life doing but the capitalist system does not much care for such notions when there is not vast profits attached.



I would say that is a stupid notion to start with but you do seem to forget that some people WANT to be doctors and do not in fact do it for the money. If your playing doctor full time a few weeks of leave at Walmart will obviously be great for your health and general well being so it's not like we could not devise a system where everyone could do 'community service' or instead choose to pay a tax or reward others for taking their place. There are alternatives but it's impossible to attempt doing so in a world where there are nations with strategic bombers and ICBMs.



The historic records does not agree with you and i would say it proves that most people naturally aspire to excel when the pressures for doing so are great enough or completely lacking. As example people will learn to become expert hunters with enough incentive just as much as they will great inventors given the time to focus all their attention on that.



One does not have to punish those who are happy with little ( which is what happens under the current system) because you want them to do more work you can tax anymore than you have to reward those who naturally want to excel in what they do. The 'slacker' factor is largely invented as we all seem to be hunter gatherer slackers by nature. There is nothing 'natural' about working eight and ten hour days and that is in fact the illusion created to demonize those who still have a conception of what is in fact natural.



Which is pretty much our tribal nature and the only reason so many will work so hard, for nothing, is because the system have ensured that not doing so will lead to starvation or worse. With the technologies of even a hundred years ago we would have had a hard time to find enough slackers to exhaust the resources of this world.

While the government hides these technologies from everyone i can only have respect for those who in their massive wisdom have chosen to become slackers and exploit the system as best they can as they seem to know that they are doing nothing but taking from even bigger fools than themselves.



You congratulate them from getting what you have without working for it? There are obviously moral ways of achieving this and completely immoral one's but living on welfare or the like is certainly not nearly as stupid as working to enrich those who would only employ it to oppress you further.



Socialism is a very very bad idea as it rewards our slacking nature without apparent short term consequence while slowly destroying the hard work done by those who got us into a position to demand at least socialism from 'our' 'representatives'. I am all for safety nets but we should always seek to decentralize while educating ourselves and others as to the great rewards and VAST dangers that centralization tends to yield,

It is a fact that people do their best to resistant centralization but that is hard given the forces that conspires to drive nations into wars and economic competition that so frequently demands centralization for mere survival.

Stellar