Without our social safety net in Belgium the vast majority of people would fall back into poverty, would be unable to afford medical help, would have no way of ever retiring.
Not only that, because of the way our social safety net is designed, it is beating capitalist systems of unemployment benefits, healthcare and insurance at efficiency too, with a lower average cost (for the state) of case handling.
A social safety net is not peak socialism but it is the thing that our socialist comrades died for in the past which is now preventing capitalist ghouls to completely destroy our society. The successes of this system get attributed to capitalist efforts to keep our Western European society at the top of the world in terms of living standards, while its flaws get attributed to lazy socialist profiteers.
It is socialism that made sure this country has some way of helping the poor and unfortunate instead of letting them die of poverty. It was the union who started this system by allowing their members to contribute a small part of their wage to distribute among the unemployed in times where unemployment meant starvation. It was socialist effort who made sure the sick got treatment without them being able to afford it.
Capitalism = unequal wealth except that the vast majority of the wealth is held by <1% of global society while the rest of us fight for bread crumbs. It is socialism who wants to abolish this barbaric system to distribute the wealth equally.
Pretty accurate description of the type. Pretty sure I've seen folks over at lemmy use this very "argument", dead serious
I've seen them use this argument when they get lost and wander over here too. How does the phrase go? "Ask an anti-communist why they hate communism and they'll describe capitalism."
Or they'll just start describing why famines are bad and leaders sought to end them forever.
They act like from beginning of time until 1917 Russia and Ukraine never had famines but as soon as ol J-Stal got in power he pushed the famine button to really stick it to those damn Ukrainians!
Or how China was famine-free until Mao came into power and he singlehandedly invented famine in China.
It's also just ironic as fuck for liberals identifying happily as capitalists (even though they own little to no capital......) to think capitalism hasn't had fuckloads of actually provably purposely done famines famously the Irish potato famine and also the Bengal famine. The list is incredibly long of historically atrocious famines done right out in the open solely for profit, meanwhile they point at (at worst) policy failures and general fuckups and conclude "aha! They tried to improve things and it didn't go perfectly?! Genocide!!!" Meanwhile they'll tell you the potato famine was "natural." "Well, there were too many Irish after all!" (Legitimate argument at the time by psychotic landlords and such)
And btw pay no attention to starving and malnourished people in the richest nations on earth living in the streets. That is clearly not a failure of capitalism as a system! That's their own moral failure! They should get jobs or be job creators like those beautiful stockholders that contribute so much to society and should definitely not be immediately sent to the guillotine!
I hate libs
All famines under capitalism are a result of people failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so they don't count as real famines. The famines that occurred every single week in every single socialist country forever (killing a million billion people each time, I might add) were deliberately done by evil authoritarian dictators. Why would they deliberately starve their own people? Because they were just so evil that they would kill off their population for no reason or benefit! It's just like a baddie in the movies!
Also the Dust Bowl, which makes some pretty neat comparisons to annoy capitalist bootlickers with happening at the same time as the Soviet famines in the 1930s
I was gonna say that too, but wasn't sure of the cause of it. I seem to recall from my high quality American public education ™️ learning it was natural, but that was a long time ago, and all I actually remember now is Of Mice and Men. Some might say my skull is like a glove. And my brain is like petroleum jelly that an odd man soaks his hand in to keep it soft. Something something rabbits.
Somewhere out there is some very nice animated graphs showing just how big a billionaires wealth is. It's still too big to be properly comprehended...
That just blows my mind. These people could go down in history as some of the greatest human beings to ever live, having used their wealth to eradicate disease and poverty for all. Instead they just...hoard it. Why the fuck do they do that? Like I honestly start to doubt these people are human at this point. Their obscene wealth isn't just obscene, it's absurd. They could literally do anything with that money and they just...don't do anything with it at all. I don't even have the words to describe how monstrous they must be. Even if they didn't want to help people, they still don't do anything with their money beyond just trying to accrue more of it. How the fuck can they exist?
The kinds of people who actually spend their money cashed out long ago and left only the true worshippers of C̶͔̕á̵̝p̴̛͍i̷͓̔t̴̫̂ą̵͋ĺ̸̖
Worth noting for the libs that it’s not just these people — the U.S. government could be doing this too, and also actively refuses
At this point libs in the US seem to be under the impression that the government cannot ever do anything positive, and only exists due to "rule of law" or something.
Considering they can hire skilled authors to write their biographies (and skilled lawyers to sue critics) they certainly will write their own entry in the history books
Any one of the top like 30 richest guys could just end all world poverty and hunger. Every single day they wake up, and say "no, I don't think I will".
Guillotines are the only way to change their minds.
And most of that wealth is not even from producing commodities, but of being a mediator.
OK Dennis but redo the capitalism picture where most people have 1 or 2 coins and one has several million.
Fuck PragerU to death, it's blatant propaganda masquerading as higher education and I cannot put into words how much I hate the damage it's causing.