I get the basic idea from right-leaning political theory that the more things you make primarily the responsibility of government, the more power government will have to potentially abuse; and the more power government has that could be potentially abused, the fewer defenses there are against that government becoming tyrannical. Sounds sensible on the surface. I'm certainly not interested in nationalizing Silicon Valley, as state ownership of all tech companies would indeed offer the government far too much abuse potential for no clear benefit. And to make an actual representative country comparison here, China has shown us how such a thing can be (and is being) abused to authoritarian ends.

But it seems quite bizarre to say that any expansion whatsoever of the responsibilities of government deepens that abuse potential in some similar way. It's reasonable to be wary of nationalizing the tech sector, but it seems totally silly to worry about giving people free healthcare or housing vouchers. There are any number of complex cultural, social, and historical factors unique to each country that independently influence whether a country is going to go down the road of authoritarianism, so it seems like quite a leap of logic to put "generous welfare state" high on the list of causes without--as I've said--extraordinary evidence of that being a major causal link. So many other factors seem so obviously more significant. And for what it's worth, as far as I know from the political science I've read, it's not considered a mainstream opinion that "generous welfare state" ranks high on the list of risk factors for a country to descend into authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, it's quite odd how those who fear tyranny resulting from expansions of the role of government never seem to worry too much about the tyranny of concentrated wealth we have today. The fact that the rich are able to extract exploitative amounts of labor from the poor en masse is real, existing authoritarianism that exists today in otherwise "free" societies, but rather than worry about that, the right prefers instead to worry about hypothetical authoritarianism they fantasize would result from giving the poor free healthcare. If anything, the opposite is true. If everyone had free healthcare, free college, or even a universal basic income provided by the state, then people would be free to work for whomever they want rather than being locked into the workplace tyranny they presently endure. In this respect, an expansion of government would reduce the authoritarianism of society. It would expand people's freedoms, not curtail them.

It's mystifying to me how right-leaning people have developed a kind of political psychology that invests in status quo bias so much that people proposing that we make things better is somehow seen as a greater threat than actual suffering that exists today.

Imagine the left/right divide playing out fixing a toaster.

L: "I'm'a fix this toaster."

R: "No! What if it explodes and kills us?"

L: "Any evidence that it will?"

R: *non-representative analogies*

R: "And that's why trying to fix things is worse than leaving them broken!"

Setting aside toaster politics and moving back into the world of real politics, there was a thread on r/personalfinance (on reddit) today about some new parents who just lost a child and are now burdened with thousands of dollars of medical debt from the death of their kid. Those parents would have been delighted to have had the NHS you're failing to appreciate right now. It seems pretty absurd on its face to argue that giving them free healthcare would somehow increase the odds of a dictator rising to power. But if you actually believe that, then you're gonna need to do a lot better than, "Well correlation does sometimes imply causation!" You're making an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence. And until extraordinary evidence is provided, it is reasonable for the rest of us to assume the claim is baseless.

Re: threading, it continues to work after 10 levels. Use the permalinks.

Re: the rest, I find this semantic debate tiresome. It ought to be obvious that when people use the term socialism in opposition to capitalism, they're using it as a shorthand for "economic system of regulated markets with a generous welfare state funded by taxes." Not some Marxist/Leninism authoritarian command economy. Just as the colloquial use of the term capitalism does not automatically imply unregulated capitalism nor the total abolition of the welfare state. We're all just debating whether or not we want the economic scale to move a bit more to the left or a bit more to the right when we throw around those terms. To continue to focus on this terminology nitpicking over the substance of the argument is precisely the bad faith you're projecting onto me. Since I presume we all agree that high scores on the Democracy Index are a good thing, making comparisons to countries that are more authoritarian is a bad faith argument, since nobody wants more authoritarianism.

Unless of course you're seriously arguing that the more generous you make your welfare state the more likely your country is to somehow implode into authoritarianism, in which case I repeat my request for some actual evidence that will convince me Scandinavia is on the path to collapse into authoritarianism. And no, repeatedly pointing to the existence of Venezuela is not evidence. That's a simple correlation is not causation mistake. You would need to show evidence that generous welfare states cause authoritarianism, not merely some authoritarian states also happen to have generous welfare states.

Firstly, you'd know which of those two replies was meant for who if you took all of a minute to learn the (admittedly not great) threading system Slashdot uses.

That said, for all that you're insisting on getting the labels right, you're doing a great job of butchering them. It's idiotic to equate socialism with fascism, because they're on two entirely different axes of the political compass.

The axes:

1. Political freedom axis: libertarian vs authoritarian.
2. Economic system axis: socialist vs capitalist.

You're referring to the second axis as "left vs right," which is not wrong, but it's also not terribly precise, because "left vs right" can refer to either axis.

Scandinavia leans left on both axes. That's what the modern American left is praising when we hold them up as a model.

Also, some light reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... On the list is Hungary.

Why are you so completely unable to recognize that political freedom and degree of market freedom exist on separate axes? There are four corners to the political compass. It's not a simple left/right spectrum.

The four corners:

1. Authoritarian left: No elections or nonfree elections with a socialist-leaning economic system, e.g. Venezuela.
2. Authoritarian right: No elections or nonfree elections with a capitalist-leaning economic system, e.g. Hungary.
3. Libertarian left: Free elections with a socialist-leaning economic system, e.g. Scandinavia.
4. Libertarian right: Free elections with a capitalist-leaning economy system, e.g. the U.S.

You keep conflating categories #1 and #3, and you really should stop.

Are you simply unaware the four corners exist, or are you trying to argue that category #3 always devolves into category #1? If the former, maybe read more? If the latter, I'm sorry to inform you there is like zero political science supporting that hypothesis. Either way, maybe read more.

First you argue there is nothing at all wrong with equating Scandinavia to authoritarian socialist states. Then you say Scandinavia isn't socialist, which is tantamount to conceding that there is something very wrong with equating Scandinavia to authoritarian socialist states. Thanks for conceding the whole debate to me...?

As for labels, I'm not hung up on them. I'm perfectly fine with your insistence that we not refer to Scandinavia as socialist, because you're right, they're not. It's a mixed economy. As I said before, we on the left are not pursuing some ridiculous command economy, we're pursuing a mixed economy that leans harder on the state than markets than we presently have.

It's a pretty cheap debate move and beyond cliched by this point to insist that the existence of bad socialist states proves socialism is wholesale bad and that talking about Scandinavia is just a distraction from some inevitable badness that is somehow immutable despite not happening there. It's not any different than if I were to blithely argue that you can't argue capitalism works because look at what's going on in Somalia. With no functioning government to get in the way, they have the freest markets one could possibly imagine! Wouldn't be great if America was more like Somalia? No? Owned, conservatard! ...except that would be a dumb argument. And "Venezuela disproves socialism" is a dumb argument for precisely the same reason "Somalia disproves capitalism" is a dumb argument.

It's easy to take the low road like that, but most on the left are not arguing for the authoritarian command economy caricature you have of us in your head. We're arguing for a mixed economy that leans harder on the state, and less on markets, but in general we like markets. We also like generous welfare states and high scores on the Democracy Index. You need all of those things for a healthy and resilient society. That's why authoritarian countries with command economies are not held up as virtuous by most on the left. They're both too socialist and offensively undemocratic. That doesn't check our boxes. Scandinavia is the closest thing to what we're arguing is ideal, so we hold it up is something to strive for, just as if you want to argue for the virtues of capitalism, you're going to hold up the United States as your example (or maybe Singapore?) rather than a failed state because you want to demonstrate how your model can work under ideal conditions.

Now you can argue until you're blue in the face that Scandinavia is unsustainable because they "sell stuff to capitalist countries," creating some silly illusion of the viability of social democracy that would be doomed to collapse if they weren't subsidized by "more capitalist" trading partners, but I see no reason at all why the entire world couldn't be made up entirely of countries governed by the Scandinavian model all generating wealth for their welfare states doing whatever it is their local economies are good at.

It seems you take it as a given that such a thing couldn't scale globally and could never work. But when I conceptualize that, I see plenty of avenues for even greater global economic output than we have today. Think of how much more productive economies would be when you remove the waste created by the corruption of countless authoritarian regimes, or the waste created by millions of people unable to contribute usefully to the global economy because they endure crushing poverty.

Just the act of reducing corruption through greater democracy and reducing poverty through more generous welfare states alone would increase global GDP so much that all those welfare states would pay for themselves and then some. The rising tide lifts all boats. The world is not zero-sum. Don't allow yourself to believe that better things are not possible.

The existence of even a single country with both a generous welfare state and a high score on the Democracy Index is absolutely proof that social democracy need not devolve into authoritarianism. To refer to that as a "marginal success story" is to deny the existence of proof staring you in the face. If people had thought like you in the late 18th century, then the French revolution never would've happened. They'd have called the United States a "marginal success story," preached the inevitability of the collapse of republics into monarchies, and France would still be ruled by the descendants of King Louis today.

Perhaps instead of twisting yourself into pretzels trying to pretend Scandinavia doesn't exist, you might do better to study the differences between their free and democratic society versus the authoritarian ones you prefer to talk about instead. I'll give you a hint: it has little to do with how free the markets are and a lot more to do with how free the elections are. To put it more directly: the people of Scandinavia can vote out their generous welfare state anytime they want should their cultural preferences shift in the direction of freer markets. The people of Venezuela not so much.

When Scandinavia's social democracy devolves into the authoritarian hellscape you assume is so inevitable, then I'll buy into your slippery slope argument. Until then, it's merely a slippery slope fallacy. One that has been refuted thousands of times by people with clearly better media diets than you.

Flat taxes are actually regressive.

The percentage of someone's income that is disposable rises with higher incomes. It's reasonable to expect the wealthy to pay more in both absolute terms and percentage terms.

You guys really need to stop with the idiotic Venezuela trope. There is a huge difference between authoritarian socialism and social democracy. Do some reading. Educate yourself.

I'm glad Google is being generous, but we need sustainable solutions, not charity. Solving social problems is the purview of government, not corporate generosity. That money ought to be taxed away from the wealthy and spent through the democratic process, not undemocratically donated on the whims of wealthy.

Yes, the fundamental dynamics of Twitter should be rethought: It should be broken up into a dozen Mastodon instances.

Are you sure about that?

I love how cryptocurrency is like a history lesson for Libertarians with regressive economic attitudes. They get to learn the hard way why each discrete financial regulation we have today was enacted.