Quote: (09-25-2015 10:34 AM)Steve_Jay Wrote:
Quote: (09-24-2015 11:55 PM)chagataev Wrote:
Absolute material equality is not a necessary goal of socialism. Plenty of mainstream facets of the civilized world like social security, universal education, labor laws, 40-hour work weeks, aid to the disabled among other things were brought about in part through socialist agitation, and all were decried by the reactionaries of their day as the greatest of socialist evils.
Socialism is also perfectly capable of recognizing and embracing natural differences among people in terms of ability and talent. Maybe some strains reject it but it's not an axiom of socialism that people must be regarded as uniform in intelligence, ability or anything else. This is an old and lazy straw man.
I disagree with your contention that socialism somehow brought about comforts of modern society. For example, children didn't stop working because of child labor laws. Children worked for thousands of years up until the industrial revolution. There wasn't even a concept of "child labor" because it was assumed everyone worked or you died. Child labor ended because capital became intensive enough and labor productive enough to allow the parents to make enough money to allow the child to stay home. This was brought about from technological innovation and competition brought about by free market capitalism.
Children not working was a new thing in Western History, and throughout most of the world to this day, children still work because they have to to survive. For example, in Bangladesh, they past child labor laws. According to reports, when children were forced out of sweatshops, they moved to child prostitution or died. So government just cant stop people from working. It doesn't work like that.
https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Child_Labor_Deterrence_Act
And that is without even getting into the failure of Social Security. And how we have tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities there.
You are right that for child labor laws and the like to "work" the material conditions have to be there. But there are two factors here: production and distribution. You can have the material conditions to support no child labor while child labor is still a practical necessity due to distribution of wealth. Through a combination of child labor legislation, resultant union agitation for higher wages to make up the differences, and legislation forcing employers to comply to labor's demands to some varying degree, organized labor affected the distribution of wealth and got a larger share while doing away with child labor. This is socialism, one facet of a very broad ideology with thousands of currents.