Sorry, but you do NOT have a true democratic result also and by far.

70m against 60m Votes still wasn't representative of a 100% list of citizenship with rights to choose.

The only way to call the numbers for what they are is to show complete & maximum expression by the population. Participation is a turnout rate (63%, btw). 37% waste is much bigger than a 10m gap between Presidency candidates considering the lazy millions who didn't bother to show up.

As an example, the Québec Referendum on Sovereignty (or as Federalists bluffed it; secession of a Province) in 1995, a record of 94% went to express that extremely important decision; Yes or No. Want the results? 50.6 vs 49.4 (that's a 54,000 margin gap, in fact) with rejected ballots amounting to 86,000 people!

And yet, we still didn't reach 6% of 5,000,00+ voters (300,000 missing in action!)... however, huge money was dumped in publicity scandals by Chretien's Liberals. And sadly, it proved that any results are paid even here.

Cool, isn't it? Even, freezingly skin tight -- to use, consequences rather than *A* valid decision.

Lol INTJ420
Took me a while to figure out what are you talking about...

Let me summerise all this what you said:

1. People should go from "me" to "we"

2. Then you pointed progress, which i fail to see the connection to the overall reply

3. TV vs people starving all around the world?

4. Then you pointed out that now is the time when big things happan such as big changes all around the world

5. You pointed out the "One Nation World"

6. and you said that your personal view on Socialism vs Capitalism is about buying 1 matress and not 20..

Tell me if im wrong about something...
anyways here is my answares:

1. people will never go from "me" to "we", that is why so many people hate socialism/communism
because in fact it forces them to go from "me" to "we", among some other things as well.

2. Progress will always be here, both with Communism and Capitalism
yet i think with communism the progress is much faster (see USSR progress Vs USA Progress during the cold war)
*USSR was the first in space(Uri Gagarin), first space walk, first space station (Mir), first sattelite (sputnik)
while it all was a major brake thoughs, how many of them we had with USA since USSR fall? almost none...

3. Well you pointed it out in a wierd way but i think i got the point
but it have nothing to do with people starving, it only effects progress
so having 40 inch TVs and having people buying them, will encourage to make a better and larger TVs
while if people wont buy them, then there will be no largerer TVs..

4. One nation world is a good idea but with all the greedy people all over, it will never happen :[
Unless a communist country will take over other countrys one by one (without force, mainly with colture)
and eventualy the entire world will join (and even that have no 100% succes rate)

5. related to 4

6. To have 1 matress (lets change it to cars shal we?), anyways it is always good to have veriety
the problem starts when 1 car is more expancive then another car, which creates frustration and unequality
in USSR we had a whole lots of different cars, but they all had preety much the same price tag
and that is i think the right way, the cars were also equaly good, some cars were as work horses
others were more for off road while others were for comfrtbility
* to point out how good the USSR cars were, even today in 2009 there are cars from the time of USSR
they dont brake every 2 months, very stable, and very easy to fix and change parts
good excample is the AK47 automated rifle, the most relible rifle in the world, and its a been a while since it was invented!
same as the Souz space rocket, even today they are beein used, because the production is cheap
the construction is simple, and they are safe! (how many times have you heard about a Souz rocket fails and explode?)

I'm lazy, not wrong.  Since it's too wet to do any work outside today I guess I can torture myself with this connection a little while.  I'm not about to go digging through pdf files though.  It takes hours to find shit on this connection when one strays into the horrors of pdf.

The Tax Foundation is nice, but they don't give much context in their information.  Expenditures should be broken down by type.  Defense spending is not social spending, although I'm sure the liberals would like to change that by making employment in the military a workfare program like it is in the UK.

Per capita welfare spending by state. Myth one shot to hell, that's a decidedly blue upper half eh?

Defense spending by state.  Yeah, it's uneven, funny thing military bases, they tend to be big and close together for joint operations and shared land use.

So we take the first red state on the list, New Mexico, I'll pretend that it's not a blue state and has been for a while.  That whole split party congressional members and democrat governor thingy.  $5000 surplus in 2005.  New Jersey, the bottom of the dog pile blue state, about a $3200 deficit.  NJ gets a little over $800 in defense, NM $3000.  The gap shrinks.  Then we look at who's running the show in the Senate, where seniority is everything.  Dominici has been in since the early 70's, Bingaman since the early 80's.  What do you know, them old timers are raking it in at twice the rate they're paying out these days.  When only one of them was an old timer, it was only half again.  They've got one foot in each party too, so it doesn't matter which side is in power.  For poor NJ, Laughtenberg left and then came back in 2003, Corzine was only in since 2001.  NJ has never had a 30+ year Senator, let alone two at the same time.  Then we look at the House, where one party rules and the other whines about being ignored.  Republicans had the majority, republicans did whatever the hell they wanted to in 2005.  Which one had the more Republican representation?  New Mexico.

Two of the longest running Senators...  Nah, that couldn't have anything to do with it, it's them damn rednecks collecting welfare checks!  I've been watching it happen for a long time.  Anyone from Alaska knows exactly how powerful their representation was when Stevens, Murkowski and Young were all three long standing members with chairmanships.  It actually went down when the Democrats took the Senate back(you need a super majority to lock them out for long), and it went through the roof the last several years while the Republicans had both House and Senate.  Stevens brought home lots of bacon, the putz.  A slightly more justified putz than most, but still a putz.

The best thing is, them itty bitty population states have equal representation in the Senate!  When Stevens brings home a billion dollars, it's one hell of a chunk of change for 600k people.  When Laughtenberg gets something big in, there are over eight million people packed into the third smallest state in the union, lot of good it does his numbers.  Funny how most of the states at the top of the list are low population huh?

If you really want to get picky you adjust for highway spending too.  The highway system going through an expansive state like Wyoming, with no one in it, is necessary for the people that live in the states around Wyoming, and a hell of a lot more expensive than the one in New Jersey.  Of course, if I were to do that you'd start crapping about how I'm just making excuses because the highway projects include a lot of pork(which supports the claim that the party in power gets more money) and all the construction jobs benefit the states.  True, but it still costs more money to carry a national grid across a larger state, and it's not something the state can do anything about short of a revolutionary physics discovery.

Conflict increases the rate of technological breakthroughs, its a known fact. Don't matter what the sides are

If i were to simplify to the least perception over the ME-WE "situations"...

Liberty shared, meaning yours stop where mine start & vice-versa.

So, from that pov... Capitalism encourages the ME while exploiting the WE, Socialism favors the WE while encouraging the ME. But, both have the same flaw; the WE has more to lose than the ME.

Peace, brother.

Correction; state managed Income & Consuming taxes provide costly utitilies and public healthcare (NOT private, btw) to all without distinctions of social status in Québec and Canada. It's called investment in and by the workforce aiming for 0% unemployment rate until collective government spending deficits are cleared.

Interesting discussion.

Just my 2 cents: Socialism and capitalism are both ME systems.  With capitalism you are working to benefit those you choose to.  With socialism you are using the government to take from other people to give to you.

When I designed The Political Machine, I had to do a lot of research on demographics for every kind of issue. There's a lot of polling data available in the public domain (courtesy of your tax dollars).  

One of the interesting things I learned is that those who support socialism and the welfare state tend to be the ones who benefit the most from it. Those who are against it tend to be the ones who least benefit from it.

So it's not a me vs. we issue. It's a me vs. me issue. Just my 2 cents.

I'm not gonna read all the discussion . . . .

. . . but I will say that from what I've seen, most complaints about capitalism tend to focus on when it's abused or when a monopoly exists. It seems to work great when it's not abused and plenty of competition exists.

. . . and true socialist startes are kinda rare. In European countries, it just tends to be health care, but not the entire economy. Even in China, they allow some capitalism, even though the vast majority of their economy is state controlled.

The biggest problem with socialism tends to be incredible overhead and poor management of an economy.

I think at the very least we should be well aware of what doesn't work. What Russia did didn't work. They shoved huge amounts of money into cold war programs and they created work environments that didn't encourage people to work hard for their pay.

So there are some things I very much believe are useful to an economy and will defend:

• Hourly pay, or some other system of paying more for hard work. So far, nothing has proven to be more effective at encouraging people to work harder than some financial incentives.
• Minimal governement. A government that sticks its hands into too many things tends to mess them up.
  
• Free market economics. Frankly, it made the USA as powerful as it is. Are we in a recession? Sure. But I'm confident we'll recover. If anything, free market economics has shown that it's very resiliant and can recover from tough conditions. We recovered from the Great Depression. We survived the Cold War. We'll recover from this.

Government control of the economy should, IMHO, be more indirect than direct.  Direct control has too many chances to mess up.  The government should set up basic principles and ensure things tend towards stability, but not much more.

Yes. To some extent or another, I think it will always be a factor. I do not believe that social progress is quite as predictable as technological progress. In fact, I currently believe that social progress has been going somewhat backwards in recent years with respect to how much we value the lives of others.

Actually, the world seems to have moved away from a "we" mentality and towards an increasingly independent mindset in the past few thousand years. The ancient Egyptions had a very "we" mindset; that's how they were able to construct the pyramids, which are impressive structures even today.

If the trend of the past few thousand years continues, then the next few thousand years may see an even more individual mindset.

But of course the Egyptions still had major problems: Tomb robbery was a major headache. Technological progress was non-existant. Society was extremely conservative to the point where practically nothing changed over thousands of years.

Individualism is actually respinsible for much of our technological and societal progress. The ability to free up ones mind and dare to think differently is what makes all of this change possible.

I would push towards a happy medium, not for one extreme or another. Either extreme can have dangerous consequences.

- hourly pay - or rather a payment scheme that rewards higher effort/ input - is indeed a very effective system to motivate people to work and one great advantage over fixed salaries

- government should meddle if the market cannot reach a publicly acceptable decision. in economics there is something called market failure which describes how a free play of supply and demand need not always result in a good result. now, good result is relative, you may argue that some outcome is efficient, but it may not be socially preferable. however, in some extreme cases, market dynamics would even cause the market to be destroyed altogether, that means even though there may be demand, there will not be any supply. check out for things like information assymetey, external effects, signals, public goods and much more.

bottom line for me here is: free market should be the base model and where we find that it does not produce desirable results, government needs to step in and correct. now when exactly this is the case, that I think is up to the population or for voters.

- lastly: I hope you do realise that free market failed horribly, horribly, horribly in the great depression. ex post, one of the biggest mistakes by the government(s) was to trust in the self-healing, self-corrective powers of the market to restore balance. it didn't and only massive governemnt intervention and the eventual boost in production via world war II finally ended that particular crisis. after all, there is a reason why keynesianism rose just at that point in time.

now, I think another user voiced that two companies producing the same things is waste, right? don't forget though that competition results in better products, whatever their origin. monopolists or in general companies that are not in much competition tend to slack, not work as efficient or be as innovative as they could be. uhm, let's see for examples ... well, in video games I think it shows a bit. think of sports series, you have EA who do more or less all major sports on a yearly basis. what do you think is better for us gamers? if EA is the sole supplier for the genre and can just make do with marginal improvements or if it is under pressure to be better than a rival studio? I remember how the fifa series (soccer) stagnated for a while. then PES came along with an entirely different feel and dominated. then PES stagnated a bit and fifa came back again. such dynamics are just not possible, or at least highly unlikely in a situation without competition.

so, multiple companies doing the same thing is a waste? not at all, because it makes sure everyone is working hard to provide the best solution and be rewarded for it.

ok. minimal just sounded like fairly little intervention, but I guess that is a matter of interpretation. I guess discussing when exactly intervention is appropriate and when not amounts to threadjacking already, so I just leave it at that. set the conditions for the markets and intervene in a) special times of crisis and b ) in certain cases where privates would not provide (sufficient) coverage and quality.

As did the USA. Many times over, to subdue and control for THEIR own interest.

Did you happen to attend an education system worth it's salt?

Individualism, as opposed to collectivism.  A self deterministic society where people choose for themselves what they want to do with their life.  They make choices based on their own goals, with their own existence paramount.  The lionshare of scientific progress, including genome decoding, has been done by individuals that decided on their career choice themselves and took the steps to get there.  Not many of them were given their roles by society, or work without self interest.

Collectivism is the communist utopia we can't seem to find.  It has jack diddly to do with elective cooperation for mutual benefit.

Wrong, as already stated, the fractional reserve banking system and free market capitalism are two entirely different things.

Ignore your highschool education on the depression, you should probably ignore your college education on it too, but occasionally someone intelligent becomes a professor.  Keynes himself didn't even say what's being taught, and he was wrong to begin with.  He gave an either or, either run deficits to increase government spending, or cut taxes and maintain government spending.  After it didn't work, and it didn't, they decided the problem was that idiot FDR just didn't spend enough.  The real problem is you can't spend money that doesn't exist.

The great depression was caused by debt.  When a stock market falls, nothing happens.  Production is entirely irrelevant to investments.  The company already has the capital from the stock, the stock itself isn't being spent on anything.  The crash wiped out the global economy because no one actually owned the stock they had, most of it was bought on margins, the banks "owned" the stock.  In a world not run by crazy people, the banks would then have lost a significant percentage of their capital.  Bad, but not the end of the world, life would go on.  With the fractional reserve system, they lost more money than they had.  We came out of it because WW2 got rid of the debt, not because we spent a bunch of money.  People lived in a more frugal manner well below the levels they were producing, instead of above as they had during the 20's.

It's probably a necessary evil, but it's a horribly flawed system.  Seasonal bank runs really bite.

No - and by far -- it was a result of individual ambitions.

Psychoak - that post ignored so much economic history it's pointless to try and unravel it.

There is a great conservative mantra that merely gaining an education doesn't a person smart, which is rather like saying that using a ladder doesn't make a person tall. Technically true, but has no practical application to the fact that, regardless of how tall one is, climbing a ladder enables one to reach heights not otherwise attainable.

I suggest you find a college economics, ah . . . ladder, and start climbing.

- Jonnan