Youshutup wrote:
And it's always the same argument gbaji, because you believe socialism to be incompatible with liberty, and economic and political liberty to be the same thing. Nevermind that this should have been a discussion about the French belief that secularism is the best way of ensuring freedom and that these angry immigrants want help that could only ever be provided by government involvement..
Hehe. Um... Because I do believe that socialism is incompatible with liberty. And I happen to believe that's a good chunk of what's causing the problems in France right now. It's a textbook case of the flaws of socialism.
You start with the promise of "free benefits" to citizens. All is good. But then the costs to maintain those start to rise. Immigration becomes a problem because people will want to come to your country to enjoy those benefits. Over time, more of the population will become stratified as each "group" believes that the others is taking more then their fair share. Unemployement rises, increasing the need for those benefits, but making no one particularly happy. This begins a process of social warfare, not so much between classes, but between any group that can claim more "right" to goods and benefits then another. They begin to use lobbying for legal changes that give their group more advantage then others. Over time, an underclass will develop, made up of those groups scapegoated into being at fault for whatever the problem of the day is. That underclass will be subject to arbitrary legistlation from the majority to make it's life as hard as possible as punishment. This will eventually result in rioting and violence by that underclass.
That pretty much it?
Look. There are a host of problems with socialism. One of them is the simple fact that you've now made the government at fault if there's not enough "whatever" to go around. You've also made the government the legal process, not only by which benefits are provided but also through which complaints must travel. This works great as long as the people as a whole trust the system and believe that it is fair. But when people decide that it's not fair (right or wrong), the result is civil unrest aimed at the government itself. Because they see the government as the instrument of oppression against them. It's not exactly the ideal that some would like to paint it as.