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Santa and Socialism

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Hattip to Instapundit.

The differences between Santa and  socialism.

  1.  Santa gives away his own stuff.
  2.  Santa is only a red due to his choice in clothing.
  3.  Santa gives things away rather than taking things from others.
  4.  Santa knows the State isn’t Santa.
  5. Santa understands the difference between naughty and nice.
  6. Santa operates an unregulated business.
  7. Santa has better music.
  8. Santa doesn’t spy on people as he enters their homes.
  9. Santa’s elves don’t belong to a union.
  10. Santa isn’t a grinch like many socialists.
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Don L
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 4:22am

Santa uses local elf labor and doesn’t get his toys from China or Mexico. One has to ignore the rumor that Rudolph is an undocumented reindeer though.

James Charles
James Charles
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 7:03am

Santa gives things away rather than taking things from others. This is quite a contrast to Capitalism who take plenty of money from comsumers. Santa doesn’t spy on people as he enters their homes, that’s already been done by the state and many workers don’t belong to a union.

Philip
Philip
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 7:27am

The link provided, a sad commentary by Steve Coleman, does epitomize Grinch..and then some. The socialist utopia is hell on earth, yet they never own their history. Amazing bottom feeders, and Steve Coleman is one of the best.

I love Santa and Mrs. Claus. No gender identity problems at the North Pole. Male Elves are male and female elves are female.
Simply because nature is found in God’s handiwork, and it’s respected.

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 8:10am

Wow. I imagine that if Scrooge and Old Man Potter could procreate together, the result would be Steve Coleman. You can’t help but feel sorry for someone like that.

pengiuns fan
pengiuns fan
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 8:37am

The Grinch had a change of heart, or do we all forget that part? 50 years later and I still love to hear Boris Karloff sing about what a rotten soul the Grinch is. “A toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce. “

Philip
Philip
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 8:45am

@ penguins fan.

🙂

Of course were speaking of pre-conversion Grinch. Potter, Grinch and pre-conversion Scrooge….now that makes for a colemanoscopy.. 🙁

Stephen E Dalton
Stephen E Dalton
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 9:23am

I couldn’t read the entire Coleman article. The first two sentences were so mean spirited, I had to quit before I spoiled my whole day!

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 2:41pm

In Capitalism James people exchange money for goods and services. In Socialism the State pretends to give “free” goods and services to some by robbing from others.

In ‘capitalism’, production, management, distribution, and finance are commonly distinct functions performed by different parties (not that they cannot be jumbled, just that in the enterprises which have the largest output, they are not). Voluntary exchange is a characteristic of market economies, whose producers need not be ‘capitalists’.

As for ‘socialism’, in the form of a command economy, the state owns the productive enterprise and the real estate; the state allocates capital according to plans drawn up by public agency; the state conducts foreign trade through monopsonies; and all wages, prices, and rents are administered values determined by public agencies, with rationing achieved by queues or by connections. In western Europe ca. 1965, it meant different things in different countries. Austria and Britain had large inventories of industry, Sweden did not. Rent control and large inventories of municipal housing were the norm (with concessionary rents). Provision of medical services through public agency was to be found in Britain. Other countries had insurance schemes. Actuarially unsound pension programs have been the mode (especially in France).

You wouldn’t say ‘robbing from others’ unless you were an Ayn Rand acolyte or were seeking to be inflammatory. Public schools, state asylums, state sanitoriums, state workhouses, and city hospitals all existed in Calvin Coolidge’s Massachusetts. They weren’t financed with voluntary donations.

Pinky
Pinky
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 5:56pm

Santa has better music than socialism – but Bruce Springsteen wants them both to come to town.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Sunday, December 4, AD 2016 9:55pm

Could it be Santa likes distributionism.

Don L
Monday, December 5, AD 2016 4:47am

Santa is a socialist ,at least a liberal, because everything he gives you, he covers up so that (in Pelosi-speak) you have to open it first to see what is really in it.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, December 5, AD 2016 3:06pm

There is not a Socialist party on Earth Art that has renounced the ideas of taking over businesses to be run by the State or extortionate taxes. That the State does it makes it no less theft.

I’m not keeping track of European party platforms. As far as I can recall, no Labour ministry in Britain in the last 50 years has extended the ambo of state enterprise or sought to reacquire enterprises sold off during the Thatcher and Major ministries. During the Kinnock years, the Labour Party had a line in their manifesto about ‘social ownership by a variety of means’. Jeremy Corbyn may want something along those lines, but it’s difficult to believe he’ll ever be Prime Minister or that he’ll have good discipline in his caucus; they don’t respect him because he’s dopey. The French Socialists had plans 40 years ago to nationalize 200-odd enterprises and did take over some in 1981-82. I’m not sure anything along those lines has been done since. The two places I can think of where there was a program of re-nationalization would be Russia and White Russia. The comparative size of the private sector is still larger by many multiples than it was in 1988. The big problem in France is too much re-distribution, hopelessly sclerotic labor markets, and huge inventories of public housing.

The problem with complaints about ‘extortionate taxation’ is that it fails to address the primary concern. The proper level of taxation is that which delivers the revenue to pay for your projects. The question at hand is, what are the projects? I got into a back and forth like this about 6 years ago with a retired political science professor. He gives me a list of dozens of ‘wasteful’ programs, and I’d agree with him on the substantive point that they were nearly all things outside the ken of the central government, not merely here but even in places two small to have a level of regional government. The thing is, they were all small programs. The National Endowment for the Arts is a bad agency; it’s also an agency with a nine-digit budget. You can wipe out dozens of free-standing federal agencies which were the pet project of some long departed member of Congress. It’ll likely safe you about $15 bn. That’s not bad, but it won’t reduce your tax bill by an appreciable amount.

You have large expenditures in the federal budget on the military, Social Security, debt service, a miscellany of means-tested benefits, unemployment compensation, subventions to important sectoral interests (e.g. higher education and agriculture), and public medical insurance. You cannot welsh on debt service if you know what’s good for you, The military cannot be devolved (and military expenditure is sensitive to external circumstances).

You can see Margaret Chase Smith’s remarks on Social Security here. (http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1964). The advent of social insurance schemes in Germany (to take one example) dates from the Bismarck ministries and antedated any Social Democratic ministry by more than 30 years; Friedrich Hayek was at home with this sort of social insurance (of which unemployment compensation would be another example) because it did not contravene certain core principles. You also have various sectoral subsidy programs (for groceries, housing, and utility bills) you might unload which incorporate the perverse incentives you see in means tested programs. These sorts of means-tested subsidies to mundane expenditure may be unsalutary. Their addition to your tax bill (around 1.6% of discoverable personal income) are not extortionate if imprudent. Milton Friedman suggested long ago that they be replaced with something he called a ‘negative income tax.’ You could go full George-Barton-Cutten with regard to all these programs. I wouldn’t recommend it myself. Cutten wasn’t the most capable rhetorician (and neither are people who trade in homilies featuring Davy Crockett).

Taking higher education and agriculture off the dole (and that’s about $150 bn a year or thereabouts) sounds like a great idea. The impediment, with regard to the latter is a status quo bias on the part of the public that can be easily exploited by demagogues. The problem regarding the former was manifest in the Iowa caucuses this year, wherein if I”m not mistaken, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz were the only candidates to advocate ending ethanol subsidies. Rick Santorum, usually pretty square, was even plumping for the ExIm Bank, which has a much smaller clientele (though one AM McConnell was happy to kow tow to). I think ‘crony capitalism’ is a more precisely descriptive term than ‘socialism’ to describe this sort of thing.

Restructuring the finance of medical care and long-term care is a vexed question; maybe there’s some wonk at Heritage or AEI who has come up with a plan which might address certain problems (which replacing Medicare with vouchers does not), maybe there isn’t. Yes, I’m aware there are rude libertarians (the one in mind is a lawyer in Los Angeles) who fancy you can treat medical care and long-term care like an ordinary consumer item; I’m sure there are also people who want cheap air fares achieved by the suspension of gravity. You’re not going to have a plan that’s cheap, whatever you do. Medical care in our time simply isn’t.

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