Actually I don't get my UK state pension until I'm 66. But leaving that aside, it is the capitalist system which provides the funds for a state pension and the all the necessary resources for me to (hopefully) reach that age. What we need is a bit more capitalism.
You don't discuss ideas at all, you throw out a bunch of quotes from books we've all read. Which adds nothing of any value whatsoever, that's why you don't see the rest of us throwing out Keynes or Hobbes, or Locke, or Rousseau or Ralph Nader for that matter, despite the fact that like you we've read them (you have read them right?). When you've got an original thought happy to hear it, until then yes, if it makes you feel better I am running away from a bunch of mindless regurgitation on your part!
You do know this is not a politics thread. You have quoted Ayan Rand in the past without much understanding of who you are quoting I suspect. Without her biography also to give perspective.. Rand literally died alone for a good reason. She was a horrible person. A hero (Randian) capitalist character in Atlas Shrugged boasted about how he had defrauded the Mexican government and built worker housing so cheap & deficient that on the first earthquake presumably hundreds could be killed. Rand believed only the most selfish and greedy were the smart ones, that Russian born lady was quite sick in the head. Hence her admiration for a real serial killer who she enshrined in her books. The guy kidnapped a little girl, held her for ransom, killed her, chopped her up, put the pieces back together to swap the corpse for ransom throwing her mannequin corpse out of his car at her father driving away with the cash. Rand figured that was a great single-minded focus. She would have loved Pablo Escobar. https://www.thoughtco.com/ayn-rand-sociopath-who-admired-serial-killer-3975225 Again and again, some insist on the handful of extremes when the preponderance of advanced countries have struck a balance. Brazil is a corrupt semi-failure so NeoTrader is a man with a hammer and everything wrong is 'socialist'. It is populism that destroys things, the greed getting too naked and the government coffers empties. The Nazis had 'socialist' in their title because it was a popular idea and would fool people about their corporatism/fascist agenda. Self given labels mean nothing, look at the actions. I live in Colombia, next to Venezuela and I know a lot of Venezuelans. This place is full of them trying to make some living and there is great sympathy for their plight. Venezuela is a perfect example of an oversupply of elites and subsequent collapse when an economic nutcase populist took control, Hugh Chaves. Professor Turchin has some interesting stuff on this, relevant to other oil rich counties as Venezuela was like the UAE etc. and possibly the USA in part. As the Bloomberg article is pay-walled: http://nationalpost.com/opinion/pet...production-and-lawyer-glut-could-ruin-the-u-s
And the German Democratic Republic was Democratic, it was in the name see? The statement "socialism is a transitory condition en route to communism." is pretty empirically false. You did a good job of listing communist countries above, can you let us all know which ones "transited" to communism through socialism? Yep, that's right, none of them (Venezuela isn't communist, it's just a failed populist dictatorship). They all either had a violent revolution or had communism imposed on them after WWII, and no reasonable person, especially one who lived there, would ever argue that socialist West Germany was only "cosmetically different in title, of no real significance" from communist East Germany or "transitioning" toward it. You've got to get this narrative out of your head that it's solely a choice of pure capitalism, or else you start taking care of the old, sick, poor, and children and you're on the slippery slope to the North Korea folks! It's just not reality, which I know you know deep down given that you conveniently left off all the prosperous socialist countries in Western Europe where the "wretched ordinary people" are a good deal better off than many of the "wretched ordinary people" in West Virginia.
ayn rand was not a sociopath. she was a love-lorn woman, quite a bit of a difference. as to her accepting medicare it is not hypocritical. the health market in the US has been so distorted by government regulation and payments which raise prices. one does what is best for their own circumstances.
I always like to bring up Somalia when the pinheads of the world feel the need to introduce Venezuela as a model socialist country. It's the utopia of conservative ideals right? No evil central government, no evil social programs or even the faintest whiff of socialism, no taxes, no gun control if you're into that kind of thing. And as a bonus it's a theocracy, although how fundamentalism is conservative has always been baffling to me. Surely we must hold it up as a bastion of conservative ideals, right? Obviously given a choice of Somalia or Venezuela pretty much all of us would pick Venezuela, even NeoTrader, so it highlights the nativity of the "pure logic" extremist economics his type espouse. Clearly the extreme of Venezuela or Somalia aren't something any rational person supports, but it sure makes it easier to have that burning conviction that you're 100% right always and forever when you can paint the other person as a moron who loves Venezuela's socialism in your mind. I have yet to hear a good counter-argument, they either shuck and jive to another topic or in NeoTrader's case puke up a bunch of random quotes from their favorite conservative authors.
She was extremely disturbed and I'd recommend anyone look at her biography. The same style of distraction argument can me made for Stalin, he was not a psychopath, he was a mourning father and husband. There is truth to that, but.. the death of his wife and child becomes a very small thing the the larger picture. Rand was utterly deranged and her libertarianism has the same faults as communism, people are dicks.
How is life better in a socialist state than a communist one? And some examples would be a help. Don;t forget it wasn't just me that said socialism is a milestone on the way to communism, it was Lenin first. Thing is, once you've got socialism you can never get rid of it and you will be subject to communism sooner or later. As for Venezuela not being communist, it would be great to have some examples of their pro-capitalist policies. I'm sure capitalism doesn't care for the non-productive members of society. That's where a democratic society necessarily steps in and diverts some of its GDP for exactly this purpose. But it is capitalism that generates the funds to do this. It was capitalism that has made the countries of western Europe and the USA and Japan as rich as they are. In fact, please go ahead and name any country that became rich under socialism. Of course, material wealth isn't the only parameter. We might talk about the millions who died in socialist societies, and the millions who didn't in capitalist ones. Meanwhile, its stimulating to be chatting on a computer via the internet on this subject on a traders' forum of all things. I know how I paid for my PC and how I pay for my internet/phone access and for my trading, and it certainly wasn't through socialism. I would be glad to be proven wrong but I doubt we will be joined in this discussion by any traders from North Korea or Venezuela or Cuba or China (well, just maybe Hong Kong).
Don't forget Yemen, pure capitalism & back-to-basics conservative ideology (or something else that just looks a bit like that) Black and white thinking, man with a hammer. All of western Europe is semi-socialist, the GDP matches the US (despite the Babylon of languages) and people are healthy and happy. Even though people get social welfare when not working, the employment figures match the US pretty closely. This is because educated able bodied men and women actually want to work, humans need purpose.