I’m just curious for the new or existing people? Lemmy.ml has taken a hard turn to the right since the reddit exodus. There’s been a lot of pro-imperialist propaganda being posted on world news, and a lot less diversity of opinion. It feels more neoliberal and neo-con to me.
Does anyone want to share what their political leanings are?
I’ll start; I’m anti-imperialist pro-state regulated capitalism. I believe we should have usage based taxes (toll roads, carbon tax) and luxury taxes, and I disagree with wealth taxes for people with less than $250 million. The state should spend more money on consumer protection in all industries (environment, health, finance, etc.) I believe in multipolarity vs. US hegemony.
I have no idea what box I fit into.
- I am generally anti-capitalism. The current system does not benefit human. We are constantly exploited in the name of profits
- vital industries and services need to be nationalized. Capitalism is a race to the bottom when it comes to providing the bare minumum, cutting corners etc.
- people should be free to do what they please as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. To this end, I am pro-inclusion of all walks of life, except for bigots.
- we are rapidly running out of time to prevent an ecological apocalypse. Everything must be done to avoid it
we are rapidly running out of time to prevent an ecological apocalypse. Everything must be done to avoid it
I think we more or less are either too late to stop it or are unable to stop it. I think we should instead be focused on planning mitigations for the future. I expect at some point in the next century or two there will be large migrations of people from the equator going to the north (places like Russia or Canada).
Both will be necessary but it’s worth noting that the more we’ve emitted, the more damaging each additional unit of emissions becomes. So arguably it’s even more important to focus on emissions reductions because it’s too late to completely stop warming at this point. Even a small reduction in emissions may have cause a meaningful reduction in human suffering.
Depending on if you think Capitalism should be totally abolished or not, you could be a Social Democrat all the way to a Libertarian Socialist.
Edit: gotta have a state to nationalize things. So could be Dem Soc/Market Socialist to as far left as ML. But MLs typically are a little less pro-individual liberties, so probably not ML.
I agree with this. I tend to be more of a “California hippy” as my far more conservative friends tell me.
Necessities need to be taken away from people who profit from them. At the very least. Realistically, probably less things should fall under capitalism, but if we start with transportation, medical, housing, education, fuels, electricity, etc we would be doing much better.
I agree that people should be able to do as they please, with a caveat. As long as it doesn’t affect other people. Guns are a pretty good example here (I’ll get back to this).
The environment is screwed, and I truly don’t think we can stop the spiral, but agree we need to try.
I’m waiting for all the angry replies to this one. Guns need to go away. Not completely, but we need to move to where they are only kept and used by highly licensed and highly insured people, or at highly regulated and insured clubs/establishments. Everyone having guns doesn’t work. Just look around.
And while I’m at it get all money out of politics. Bye bye lobbying. Close loopholes for all government officials that use their insider info to benefit their bank account.
Social Democrat.
Lots of anti monopoly pro consumer regulations. But freedom to have private enterprise. High income and corporate tax. Free healthcare & education. Even rare diseases and university. Corporations can only lease and never own land. Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas.
I get the reasons for most of your points from a perspective of moderate “leftist”. But why “Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas”?
You seem to somewhat believe in private enterprise, so why prevent it from providing those services at competitive cost/quality?
Markets work best when there are a number of firms that must compete with one another. For some goods and services, that level of competition is impractical or impossible because of the high amount of infrastructure required. It wouldn’t make much sense for each company to build a completely separate set of water purification and distribution systems—it would be very expensive and take up a lot of space.
In many areas of the US we have a bizarre setup where there is a government enforced monopoly where a single company can reap all of the profits. This often leads to poor service because the company has very little incentive to provide value to its customers. Government owned services can be flawed as well but at least they are directly accountable to their citizens instead of a board or shareholders.
As I said in reply to other person, in my country there’s private businesses providing those services for cheaper price than the government alternative. Infrastructure for the most part is provided by 3rd party.
Also I keep hearing this talk about “government accountability”, but what mechanism of accountability does government have? Private firms at least can go out of business or sued. Government in worst case will just pay you some of its “tax money”
I’m not the person you replied to and this isn’t well thought out. Just trying to think this through myself.
How would something like an electric company offer competitive cost or quality? There’d have to be at least two options serving an area in order for there to be some kind of competition. So do each of those companies build their own infrastructure, power stations, power lines, etc? So a neighborhood would have two sets of power lines? That seems wasteful and would get pretty ugly as more competitors came in. So maybe instead the government builds the infrastructure and the competing companies lease the usage of the infrastructure. But then what are the companies going to offer as a competitive advantage? I don’t know. They need to make some kind of profit in order to justify their existence. And they have to pay for the usage of the infrastructure. And they don’t want to lose money. And let’s assume the government doesn’t pick favorites and charges each of them the same. So we end up paying them more than what it costs them to lease the infrastructure. So why can’t we just cut them out, i.e. cut out the middle man, and pay the government directly. I guess this all just assumes that there’s nothing extra an electric company can offer on top of the electricity being supplied.
What you’re describing kind of exists here in Portugal, the transmission lines are owned by the state but the actual electricity generation / internet service / whatever is left to private companies. So you can go onto a web portal and change your supplier to a different electric company or ISP or whatever, without needing to physically do anything at your house. Just maybe exchange a router or something like that. But no builders coming out to the property or whatever. And where I live near Lisbon there are like 8-10 available suppliers.
In my country private companies provide their service much cheaper than government alternative. And, yes they use shared infrastructure.
In practice, I’m a common social democrat.
At heart, I’m an Anarchist. I don’t have enough knowledge and confidence to believe it would work but I believe it would be beneficial for us to try to make it work, even if it ends up failing
Some of my friends think I’m an idealist but I’d argue that’s the point. I vote for whatever would allow us to get to the Star Trek: TNG version of earth. A Post Scarcity society where humans want to better themselves and their communities through each individuals pursuit of their interests unrestricted by any “system”. To get there, I care about improving the lives of the entirety of humanity equally while doing away with the disparity inequality we see. It is undoubtedly true capitalism did raise the average QOL of many many people of the entire world, however, others it put into modern slavery.
I like this idea, but I disagree with the last sentence. The improvement in the average quality of life does not come from the capitalist system, but from technological and scientific progress.
But was that also spurred at least in part often times for the pursuit of profit? I don’t disagree, you have a good point!
Uhhh…
