Politics_Observer wrote:@SSDR
Yes but what sort of quality of apartments did the citizens in the Soviet Union receive? Were they nice apartments? Or really bad apartments? I mean, I guess it's better than nothing but then you are back to "everybody living equal but in poverty" that I mentioned in some of my initial posts. How much did these jobs pay? What could you get with these jobs? You ended up just waiting in very long bread queues to get something to eat? So what good were those jobs if a lot of goods and services that are available in in capitalist societies aren't available under socialism?
Right now I have a very happy marriage. My wife and I do not have a stressful relationship. She works hard and currently, I work hard as a student utilizing my veterans benefits from my time serving my country. But guess what pays for those veterans benefits? A capitalist society. My wife is able to contribute to our household because of a capitalist society.
Sure, one could argue that veterans benefits are socialism I guess to some degree, but then my country wouldn't be able to afford to pay those benefits without the under-pinnings of a capitalist society and a strong private sector. Selfishness to a degree is not bad. Selfishness take too far IS bad. We see that today in American capitalism where we have too many people living under wage stagnation and in some cases having to pay a higher cost of living due to urban and rural gentrification in some areas. When you have too many living with too little while a few others living with far more too much, selfishness has been taken to an extreme and IS bad. That's why capitalism needs to be regulated to the benefit of all of society without destroying capitalism itself in the process.
I am not a religious person by any means, but moral and ethics are in people who are not religious at all. You can still live a wholesome happy life with good values and not be religious. Good values do not require one to be religious and can be quite useful in living a happy and fulfilling life.
Ohh yes, and the Russian mob is an example of selfishness taken too far. There is a healthy form of selfishness where you take care of your own needs without harming others and then their is the more extreme selfishness where you just take from others to the harm of others.
Humans can evolve but can also digress it seems. Humans do seem to have some fixed traits in my opinion. As far as feudalism, I mean how would you define feudalism specifically. I am sure even during the feudalistic times people engaged in trade and commerce which really is captialism. My understanding is that academic scholars do not have an accepted definition of exactly what feudalism is. I quote an article from Ancient History Encyclopedia here:
https://www.ancient.eu/Feudalism/
References-
Cartwright, Mark. "Feudalism." Ancient History Encyclopedia, 22 Nov. 2018, http://www.ancient.eu/Feudalism/. Accessed 4 June 2019.
Some of the apartments in the Soviet Union were of lower quality than the apartments in Germany, Sweden, Britain, or Norway. But there are two reasons for this.
One, the internal standards of the Soviet Union (Russians, Ukrainians, Turkic people, Georgians, etc.) were different than standards in Sweden or Germany. In general, the people in the Soviet Union were more extroverted, family oriented, and loved noise. Lower standards meant lower quality of material and goods such as apartments. Why were the standards different? Some say it's eugenics, some say it's religion, some say it's culture and standardized social norms.
Two, Eastern Europe had always had a lower standard than the First World. The Russian Empire was more poor than the German Empire. The Kingdom of Romania was more poor than the French Republic.
You can believe that the Soviet Union was 'poor' probably because you come from a wealthier, American society where more people are fat, and where cars are bigger. The Soviet Union was not as poor as the previous, CAPITALIST Russian Empire. Titoist Yugoslavia was wealthier than the Kingdom of Serbia. Socialist Poland was wealthier than the pre World War Two Kingdom of Poland. Socialism improved the standards of living for most working class people of Eastern Europe. It was still more poor than the West due to internal standards. If Germany or Sweden were socialist, it would be more wealthy than how things are now in the European Union capitalist dominance.
People were also bigger, fatter, and more healthy with socialism. The average Body Mass Indexes were higher in socialist economies than they were before their socialist economies.
BEFORE SOCIALISM:
DURING SOCIALISM:
Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker, and Wilhelm Pieck were all bigger than Otto Eduard Leopold, Joseph Goebbels, or Edward VIII. Just watch the movies from the 1920's and 1930's, and see how skinnier the people were before socialism. Then watch the movies from the 1950's and after, and see how much bigger people have gotten.
BEFORE SOCIALISM:
DURING SOCIALISM:
Look at how bigger many of the people have gotten.
Your stereotypes of what some of the conditions were like in socialist societies were lies created by American capitalists to make you support American capitalism.
Your second paragraph is giving useless opinionating statements, since it is in a capitalist viewpoint. It's like asking "If there is no currency then how is one going to pay for food?" Nothing is payed for. Everything is free from value and currency since in socialism, it does not exist. Those "veterans' benefits" are economically transcripted in capitalist exchanges since it has to due to what the economy enforces. It's like saying one has to get their capitalist wages to eat. In socialism, economic benefits (welfare or whatever), wages, and the medium of exchange do not exist. Your second paragraph is in a non socialist context.
Your third paragraph is also in a non socialist context. What you said was that capitalism is needed to motivate the majority of the people to work hard to produce the benefits (food, shelter, utility extraction, health care such as emergency medical services, nursing, or medicines, outdoor services such as shoveling snow, etc.) for the disabled people who don't have the abilities to do those activities due to their physical or mental disabilities. You're claiming that private sector enterprises motivate their workers enough to produce those benefits, which in a socialist context, is completely false. In a pure socialist society, where everyone is truly a socialist by the heart, capitalist economics are not needed to motivate the people to PROVIDE those benefits to the disabled people that you are talking about.
The minimum wage not being livable, and the huge gap between the rich and the poor has nothing to do with personal selfishness. In socialism, personal selfishness is allowed more because people are free from wage slavery, money and its corruption that it causes socially (the love of money is the root of all evil), the family institution, religious rule, and slavery. Complaining about the economic gap also has nothing to do with socialism because if the capitalist employers pay their workers the same as themselves (profit sharing, corporate welfare, progressive taxes, etc.), the workers are still ruled, even with labour regulations, because money and the concept of value still exist, and that everything is money driven, keeping the people fake, and socially corrupt. Nazi Germany's gap was far lower (and one of the most equal in the world during the mid 20th century) then the United States was ever, yet Nazi Germany was far from socialism.
Russian mobs are capitalist scumbags who rot society. They're almost as terrible as the Kulaks.
There is no fixed human nature. Societies always change.