I just want to hear some honest, informed opinions on why you think socialism is so horrible. Please bear in mind that socialism is not the same as communism, fascism, or nazism. Let's just stick with socialism for now.

2 questions:

What do you think socialism means?

And

Why do you consider socialism "bad"?

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A government big enough to give you everything you want, makes Santa Claus pretty much obsolete.

dude, don't start a fire.

In theory it sounds like a nice ideal. But I suspect the main problem people would have with it (aside from people automatically, and often wrongly, associating it with horrible dictatorships) is that it gives the government too much control over our lives, and a lot of people don't trust government - with good reason.

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Socialism isn't totalitarianism, either. You can have democracy AND socialism together. Adopting socialist ideals doesn't mean throwing away the Constitution, which actually has a socialist influence in it already (all men are created equal).

There are lot of socialist aspects to our policies already (taxes, welfare, etc). It seems universal health coverage is the only thing we haven't embraced.

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A government big enough to give you everything you want, makes Santa Claus pretty much obsolete.

Socialism is government control of the citizen through Liberal giving of Money and Assets that once belonged to someone else. Socialism is Anti Property rights, Anti liberty, Anti Common Sense.

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It is far easier to ignorantly control others than it is to wisely control yourself.

I agree, though it has been in cases in the past.

When I say that people are nervous about the gov. controlling too much, I'm referring to the many social programs in social democracies... free education, free child care, and the gov. having much greater involvement in improving living conditions all around (environment, equality, etc.).

These all sound good, but would mean the gov. having its hands in more aspects of our lives than they already do. It's hard to trust them not to fuck it up.

Personally, I'd like to see universal health care. I can't help wondering how every other developed nation has it, but somehow we can't manage it...

But, I look at countries like the Scandinavian ones, where quality of life seems much better than here in many ways, and I have a hard time imagining us getting to that point. They're managing nations practically the size of one of our states. With the sheer size of our country, the huge variety of widely varying beliefs and cultural identities, I picture a social democracy here just being too big, bloated, and unwieldy.

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i will be the first one to admit that i know next to nothing about government and politics, but OBVIOUSLY democracy isnt working so...

they can afford it because they don't spend hundreds of Billions of dollars on war. war war war. How many "Skirmishes" have we been in the last 30 years? We don't actually have "Wars" anymore, not officially sanctioned ones declared by congress and constitutional anyway.

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It is far easier to ignorantly control others than it is to wisely control yourself.

and endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

which pretty endows me with the right to be as different as the next guy, the pursuit of happiness I take to mean the ability to be your own person and find happiness as an individual, not the way government of todays regime want's it to be.

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Are you saying that since Jan. of this year you are no longer able to be 'as different as the next guy' or pursue happiness as an individual?

There's a lot wrong w/ our country, but I'm still pursuing my happiness about as well as I was a year ago.

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