Smaller banks actually compete with each other and offer better services accordingly, but massive banks run off of their size and brand recognition alone to cheat people out of insane amounts of money.

What, you think different sized banks aren't subject to different regulations which affect operating costs?

It's virtually impossible for decently-sized banks to offer 'payday' credit at reasonable prices.

Currently, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates banks, has such stringent underwriting standards that it costs more for banks to meet the paperwork-intensive requirements than they could reasonably charge for such small sums. Indeed, the regulations have in practice (though not in rule) banned banks from offering small credit to a broad range of people.

We should just break up the banks,

Don't be dumb.

I think you'll be hard-pressed to find anybody who disagrees with me

I think our disagreement is primarily terminological. The way I see it: things like public services and works provided by governments predate both capitalism and socialism as conceived systems. My issue with referring to them as socialist phenomena is that they seem to be more public phenomena, with socialism and capitalism jumping on the bandwagon.

Like medicine, education, infrastructure, and the basic needs of life. You shouldn't have to work for these things.

I'm still not quite sure what you're getting at here.

There are proposals across the spectrum--most notably the negative income tax welfare system by Milton Friedman--which works towards this goal. Many libertarians believe that the welfare system should be organised so as to give people on no income enough money to live according to some minimum standard we agree on (usually 100pc of the poverty level).

Secondly, it's possible to give everybody the option of benefiting from something with extensive private provision. Most universal healthcare systems have a wide degree of private provision, from Germany to Singapore, and they tend to be pretty excellent systems (with Singapore's being the best in the world). Infrastructure, too, is largely funded by the government but again provisioned by private actors. Privately provisioned but publicly-funded education also tends to beat straight-up public school systems.

Proposals which include I) guaranteeing some basic standard of living and II) the efficient distribution of "public services" like healthcare and education can be found across the spectrum.

If I'm misunderstanding your point again, I apologise, but I would like to nail down the principles behind this discussion.

And what is the typical size of developed governments?

The top eleven countries on the HDI, with their government sizes, are as follows:

1. Norway: 43.6pc
2. Australia: 25.8pc
3. Switzerland: 29.4pc
4. Denmark: 49pc
5. Netherlands: 39.8pc
6. Germany: 41pc
7. Ireland: 30.8pc
8. United States: 26.9pc
9. Canada: 32.2pc
9. New Zealand: 34.5pc
10. Singapore: 14.2pc
11. Hong Kong: 13pc

As an aside, dirty regressions of HDI and Economic Freedom Rankings return a R^2 of >0.5.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on April 11, 2016, 10:22:02 AM

Quote from: challengerX on April 11, 2016, 10:20:26 AM

Why do you say "pc" instead of %?

I picked it up a few years back and it just stuck.

I do it so quickly and without thinking now that it's just not worth typing the actual sign.

But the sign is there on your keyboard, you don't need to type it.

I know, but just typing "pc" is quicker for me than having to hit shift-5. Especially since I had to double check which key the sign is on.

Also, is your definition of socialism (paid for by the government, benefiting literally everybody) the exclusive definition?

Can something not operated by the government, and not benefiting everybody, be socialist to you?

The first person to really try and put a number on the optimal size of government was Milton Friedman, who estimated it was somewhere between 15pc and 50pc of GDP.

What does the research say? Karras (1997) puts the optimal size of government for the representative European country at 16pc, with variation 3pc either way. Gunlap and Dincer (2005) find that it is 17.3pc (again with 3pc variation) for transition economies. Peden (1991) pegs the historically optimal level of government expenditure with respect to productivity growth at 20pc. Scully (1994) finds the optimum to be between 21.5pc and 23pc. And finally Gwartney et al. (1998) find the optimum to be just 15pc.

This is the research I'm aware of; I'm open to other literature.

Now, I'm no serious tankie, but even I know that was just western propaganda.

You could end up in the gulag by being late for work, making jokes about government officials or simply stealing potatoes from a sovkhozy.

So it's a lot closer to the truth than any other piece of propaganda I've seen.

A socialist policy is a socialist policy.

If that's the label you want to attach to such policies, that's not necessarily an issue. The problem is with the suggestion that enacting "socialist policies" makes an individual meaningfully socialist.

It doesn't. Welfare states and public ownership have existed since before socialism was even a properly-formed ideology, and to apply the label "socialist" to anybody whose end goal is ultimately not the total collective ownership of the economy is at best confusing, and at worst dishonest.

And Lenin never did anything as evil as the Great Purge.

Only in terms of magnitude.

He still ordered the Red Army to conduct arbitrary executions, the seizure of peasant property, the suppression of political enemies etc.

I mean, come on, Lenin was the one who shut down the Constituent Assembly when the Bolsheviks lost the election.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on April 10, 2016, 05:47:14 PM

Quote from: SecondClass on April 10, 2016, 04:45:15 PM

Quote from: Mehtta on April 10, 2016, 04:42:28 PM

Like, Stalin literally put DemSocs, or the equivalent at the time, into Gulags.

Fixed...

Not true.

Stalin's policies were a logical extension of Lenin's. The first Red Terror literally happened under Lenin, after the first assassination attempt.

Stalin went corrupt with power, he wasn't an idealist like Lenin or Trotsky. He cared about himself, he didn't give a shit about Communism or the USSR.

While true, that doesn't actually have anything to do with what I said.

Ideological or self-absorbed. . . A tyrant's a tyrant.

As an aside, it's probably worth noting socialists have historically not had a great relationship with welfare. The modern welfare state is invariably the result of either old conservative notions of hierarchy (or, in the case of Bismarck, conservatives trying to cut off socialism's appeal) or liberals like Beveridge and Keynes seeking to extend some form of social justice into the government's function.

Common ownership of the means of production is not advocated by Democratic Socialism

Yes. . . It is.

Ralph Nader got less than 3% of the vote in 2000--Votes which could've easily gone towards Gore instead.

Libertarians mostly take away votes from Republicans anyway, so at worst you're probably going to be contributing to a Hillary victory over Trump while also signalling dissatisfaction with the establishment parties.

And, even then, voting to influence the outcome isn't particularly rational. Voting is better seen through a lens of signalling.