Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: I never knew

Taiwan is an example of distributism working in practice. Of course- they need to US Navy to keep them safe from Chinese invasion.

Meh

[Captain Splendid]

From what I've read on the subject, even without US protection, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is not as easy as it looks, given its island status, compact size, high population, as well as the Chinese not having the most competent or technologically advanced forces, even if they have the numbers.

TLDR: China wins the fight against Taiwan, but nowhere near as easily as you might think.

two problems

[Bill Dog]

1) Distributism shares the same show-stopping (to me, morality-wise) characteristic of Socialism and Communism of forcing something on people to effect a particular outcome.

2) The comparison against capitalism is unfair because it compares against the extreme, laissez-faire version of it. This is essentially a straw man tactic because precious few are actually for zero regulations. (The biggest capitalists love govt. regulations because it means legalized monopolies and higher-to-impossible barriers to entr

Re:

[Bill Dog]

One more thing: Distributism is essentially just communism renamed (unsurprisingly, since communism has gotten a bad name for itself). China allows for the illusion of a free market in their economy, but the govt. can take anything at any time, so it's not really real. Distributism may claim private ownership, but when things grow too far out of balance the collective steps in and takes and redistributes. So one's property and wealth and means of production really are all communal, it's just that the collec

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The difference between distributism and communism is ownership. Under communism, the state is the owner, kind of like the government having a capitalistic monopoly over everything. In distributism, there are no non-owners, just some that own less than others. There is a floor on ownership- and because of that floor, the welfare of a communistic/socialistic state is utterly unnecessary- because even the lowest man on the IQ pole has enough productive property to feed his family. There's no ceiling in dis

Re:

[Bill Dog]

I don't think there's necessarily a ceiling on wealth creation, but there's definitely a natural limit to how much the slothful or incompetent or unlucky can lose to their opposites -- when the uncompetitive fritter away their means of sustenance, there's no more they can transfer to the successful.

And this is why I'm not buying the "ownership" stuff. It seems to be that as soon as things get too out of balance between the haves and have-nots, a redistributist "correction" is forced on the participants in t