vuohi posted:

Tell me what's wrong in it. Bullet points are enough.

vuohi posted:

Tell me what's wrong in it. Bullet points are enough.

Ligur posted:

Bullet point / ranskalainen viiva:

- Your post did not feel like you support full socialism/communism right now, that was wrong with it. The massive success of countries like Venezuela supports the fact we need socialism instead of your neoclassical visual arts.

vuohi posted:

If you sell/rent things at a price lower than the market price, you don't get resources (apartments in this case) allocated in the most efficient way possible.

If someone who has a job with productivity of 100k rents an apartment for 1000e/mo, and someone with a potential job with productivity of A BILLION would desperately need to rent that apartment instead, in a situation with widespread rent control there would be no price mechanism to decide who should have that apartment.

Even if you care about nothing else, think about how much taxes you could get from that productivity of A BILLION.

Welfare loss caused by inefficient allocation of apartments is just as bad as the welfare loss caused by inadequate supply of desirable apartments. In my personal opinion it is morally wrong to allow either of these to happen. It might not be the exact same people suffering those losses, but lack of reasonably prices apartments hurt only people who need reasonably priced apartments, meaning regular and not-spectacularly-wealthy people. You know who we are talking about in the context of Hese.

It doesn't matter if public housing is available for "the majority". The only thing that matters is whether or not there is enough housing, a large enough number of suitable apartments.

Imagine if the city of Helsinki would now instantly socialize housing so that 80% of it would be owned by the city. Assume that no new houses would appear because of this. Now describe who would win if

a) rents were kept the same, but the city now received it
b) rent control was applied to 80% of all housing, with tenants remaining exaclty the same.
c) (make your own scenario, with your criteria for who you would evict)

Even with all that lost profit for landlords, the housing situation in Hese would be exactly as bad as it is now, except that the rental market would be vastly more rigid. Profit has nothing to do with it, and neither does the percentage of public housing. The only thing that matters is adequate supply, currently meaning increased construction.

Houses or apartments of roughly similar size and location are practically perfect substitutes to each other. It is meaningless to say that someone has "monopoly" on Asuinkatu 1, when Asuinkatu 2 is right across the street. What you are actually saying that "we can't all live in the most desirable address in existence", and that's true but also completely meaningless.

How has the supply of "land" increased in those places where housing prices are dropping? What exactly have "lands suppliers" done, say it in as concrete terms as possible, to ramp up competition against each other? You can't make more land and that is a classic issue in economics, but you can develop any land further. It is this development in Hese that has made land there more valuable than the almost identical land in Kainuu. Closeness to high development lands is what makes even undeveloped Hese land valuable than undeveloped Kainuu land.

You are looking at the issue completely rear end-backwards. The relatively sudden changes in market price in Hese and Kainuu are caused by changes in demand, not supply. The suppliers haven't had to change anything in their previous behaviour to cause this.

That would certainly be a nice 250 000 euro gift for my sister, but I am not sure if she actually deserves it more than someone else does. She is relatively well off, even though she is currently living on rent because of recently taking a new job. If she were to ever move to a similar apartment in a different city, she could probably pocket a price difference of 100k euros. Is that your definition of fair?


Because a market price is determined by supply and demand. That is the definition of market price. The government can't "determine the market price" by renting scarce apartments below the market price.

If you meant to ask: Why shouldn't the government take part in creating supply at the current market price, then nothing in my opinion. If there is profit to be made in it in the short run the government could do it, but in the long run it would be better if the government funded some other things (health care, schools, etc.) instead instead of having enormous capital tied to apartment buildings. (Why should the state not own apartment buildings, you ask? Well, imagine if the state now owned a ton of apartments in Kainuu.)


Joku joka on käynyt taloustieteestä muutakin kuin peruskursseja saa halutessaan korjata tästä mitä vain, enkä luultavasti kiistele siitä.

uncop posted:

First of all, "efficiency" in economics is an academic term that is often used by neoclassicals in a misguiding way that makes it easy to attribute meaning to it that it does not have. A market will allocate resources efficiently, for a certain definition of efficiency. For example, international agricultural markets will not allocate food efficiently to people who are hungry, they will allocate it efficiently to people who want to and have resources to pay for it. So, for every market, we have to check whether the market definition of efficiency is the same as our societal definition of efficiency, and whether there's a cost in maximizing that value that actually makes it harder to maximize values we want to maximize. Nor will a market necessarily maximize for the efficiency of other markets that depend on the costs that market imposes on them. For example, labor costs depend on the costs of living labor faces, which is why Germany's housing policy creates cheap labor whereas American financialized housing policy creates the opposite in every growth center of theirs.

Market efficiency and general efficiency tend to align when we are talking about markets of means of production. The means will go to the people who have the most resources to convert using those means and we get greater overall growth as a result. Resources like food and homes have another nature, a social nature, that markets do not give a gently caress about. However, i will concede that saving 30 minutes from the commuting times of that theoretical person producing 1 billion of value is also valuable. So, we will accommodate that person as best we can.

Let's get to that example of yours where 80% of housing is public. That means the top 20% is market-allocated. 20% certainly seems enough to include enough homes that there will be something available in every relevant location of the city. Thus the person worth 1bil, being in the top 0,1%, will get his pick of a home in market-allocated housing. And he will get that home, because no matter the cost, the monetary value of those 30 minutes of his is greater than the differential between the costs of public and private housing.

How about the rest of the people, then? 80% of them will have cheaper housing than in the alternative scenario. 20% will be roughly in the same situation as before, but maybe they'll be envious of the people that don't have to deal with market prices. For things to be worse than the alternative, there has to be one or more of the following failures:
1) Public housing is allocated in a pants-on-head idiotic way with no regard to where the people want to live
2) 100% of public housing is always full, and there's a stalemate where nobody wants to move, because the options are too bad (the Swedish situation)
3) Somehow only markets can build houses, so we have less housing built than we would in a free market scenario

I personally regard 1) and 2) as theoretically possible but very unlikely in a world where public housing is actually treated as a service that adds productivity to the economy rather than just "eh, the undesirables need a place to live too". Much like the market does, the government can also decide on some sane vacancy ratio for housing so that it will not reach a stalemate. 3) is pure ideology and completely unhistorical. The actual expected result is that there will be less empty homes and less political resistance to building the amount of homes that people require. The quality is very unlikely to suffer either. See, when housing is not a market, the other relevant market is the labor market, and every city competes on the companies they can bring in (with low labor costs and a large amount of workers who like the cheap housing) and the workers they can bring in (because as long as there are jobs for them, the tax base increases). In a scenario where 80% of housing is already public, profit-driven landlord NIMBYism would be a politically weak force unable to successfully campaign against construction.

Now, about market prices of housing. For an infinite number of Asuinkatus, there's only a limited supply which you consider options if you actually want to work where you do. You can't simply pick the house you want in a vacuum, you can only go across the street so many times. In an actual perfect market where supply and demand rule, people would choose their houses with no regard to where they work, where their friends live, where their children go to school and so on. The housing market is completely unlike the markets for consumer items. The theory of perfect markets applies only partially (which is why i called it a pseudo-monopoly), and it shows in the statistics. In locations where the supply of housing restricts the amount of people who want to move in, the housing market takes them for all they are worth like monopolies do. If you increase property taxes, rents won't rise, because they can't rise. If you increase wages or subsidies, rents will rise to offset that. If you increase the amount people can lend, prices will rise and you also get an unsustainable bubble because they will never get the salary increase that allows them (as an aggregate) to pay those debts (because rents will rise every time their salary increases). Increases in housing prices are not a result of increased competition between landlords, only the demand-side competes. (However, it's a spectrum between a market and a monopoly: the effect is much weaker in Helsinki than it is in London.)

The locations where housing markets work are ones where there exists more housing than people actually want, because in those locations the average landlord has a chance to have their property go empty against their will, much like an industrialist always runs the risk that their product is not bought. When property goes empty in a growth center, it is practically always either a case of the landlord not finding a candidate they are willing to settle with or the property not being livable. And the higher the prices, the emptier they tend to go, because investors have a much higher price ceiling than actual people. When housing prices rise faster than the median income, either people are going into unsustainable debt or the rise in prices is driven by investors investing in rising prices rather than rents by actual people that would live in those homes.

Also, I did not mention lost profits to imply that they were good or bad. I mentioned it because there are many people who will get mad if you touch those profits, and also because unlike industrial profits, rentier profits are an unproductive force in the economy. Every euro taken away from financial profiteers is some cents more that will produce something after being spent. This is not any sort of socialist analysis, it's analysis started by Adam Smith, continued by classical economists, rejected by neoclassicals and resurrected by demand-side economists including the Keynesian and Post-Keynesian traditions. In fact, the pre-neoclassical definition of "free market" meant a market free of rentier profits. The state is one of those rentiers, but neoclassical economics conveniently dropped private rentiership from their theory on a purely ideological basis.

I can provide as much statistics that contradicts neoclassical theory regarding housing markets as you want, but that's a lot of effort that may not be worth my while in an internet comedy forum. Easily hours of work if it's supposed to not be just for show like internet references tend to be.

uncop posted:

Let's get to that example of yours where 80% of housing is public. That means the top 20% is market-allocated. 20% certainly seems enough to include enough homes that there will be something available in every relevant location of the city. Thus the person worth 1bil, being in the top 0,1%, will get his pick of a home in market-allocated housing. And he will get that home, because no matter the cost, the monetary value of those 30 minutes of his is greater than the differential between the costs of public and private housing.

quote:

How about the rest of the people, then? 80% of them will have cheaper housing than in the alternative scenario. 20% will be roughly in the same situation as before, but maybe they'll be envious of the people that don't have to deal with market prices. For things to be worse than the alternative, there has to be one or more of the following failures:
1) Public housing is allocated in a pants-on-head idiotic way with no regard to where the people want to live
2) 100% of public housing is always full, and there's a stalemate where nobody wants to move, because the options are too bad (the Swedish situation)
3) Somehow only markets can build houses, so we have less housing built than we would in a free market scenario

I personally regard 1) and 2) as theoretically possible but very unlikely in a world where public housing is actually treated as a service that adds productivity to the economy rather than just "eh, the undesirables need a place to live too". Much like the market does, the government can also decide on some sane vacancy ratio for housing so that it will not reach a stalemate. 3) is pure ideology and completely unhistorical. The actual expected result is that there will be less empty homes and less political resistance to building the amount of homes that people require. The quality is very unlikely to suffer either. See, when housing is not a market, the other relevant market is the labor market, and every city competes on the companies they can bring in (with low labor costs and a large amount of workers who like the cheap housing) and the workers they can bring in (because as long as there are jobs for them, the tax base increases). In a scenario where 80% of housing is already public, profit-driven landlord NIMBYism would be a politically weak force unable to successfully campaign against construction.

quote:

Now, about market prices of housing. For an infinite number of Asuinkatus, there's only a limited supply which you consider options if you actually want to work where you do. You can't simply pick the house you want in a vacuum, you can only go across the street so many times. In an actual perfect market where supply and demand rule, people would choose their houses with no regard to where they work, where their friends live, where their children go to school and so on. The housing market is completely unlike the markets for consumer items. The theory of perfect markets applies only partially (which is why i called it a pseudo-monopoly), and it shows in the statistics. In locations where the supply of housing restricts the amount of people who want to move in, the housing market takes them for all they are worth like monopolies do. If you increase property taxes, rents won't rise, because they can't rise. If you increase wages or subsidies, rents will rise to offset that. If you increase the amount people can lend, prices will rise and you also get an unsustainable bubble because they will never get the salary increase that allows them (as an aggregate) to pay those debts (because rents will rise every time their salary increases). Increases in housing prices are not a result of increased competition between landlords, only the demand-side competes. (However, it's a spectrum between a market and a monopoly: the effect is much weaker in Helsinki than it is in London.)

quote:

The locations where housing markets work are ones where there exists more housing than people actually want, because in those locations the average landlord has a chance to have their property go empty against their will, much like an industrialist always runs the risk that their product is not bought. When property goes empty in a growth center, it is practically always either a case of the landlord not finding a candidate they are willing to settle with or the property not being livable. And the higher the prices, the emptier they tend to go, because investors have a much higher price ceiling than actual people. When housing prices rise faster than the median income, either people are going into unsustainable debt or the rise in prices is driven by investors investing in rising prices rather than rents by actual people that would live in those homes.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

Umm... you're going to have to define what you think "markets work" means. Economics is the study of infinite wants and scarce resources, you can't just assume a lack of scarcity. Anyway, as it stands, Finland has more housing than people want but this does not change the fact that Central Helsinki (+ some other areas) real estate is about as built up as it can get. So now the market allocates it to people who want to pay for it, which is what markets are meant to do. I don't see how government ownership solves the "Central Helsinki" problem in any way.

endlessmonotony posted:

Economics is the study of infinite wants and scarce resources if you've got extremely bizarre ideas of how economics and the world in general works.

There isn't an infinite demand for apartments in the Helsinki region. There isn't an infinite demand for anything, because there comes a point where markets saturate.

If you think that even remotely applies in any branch of economics, it might explain a bit about your really dumb posting.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

You're assuming the top 20% will choose market-allocated homes when a cheaper public option is available. The top 20% in theory could get homes on the private market, but they will also be competing for the 80% of public housing stock. But anyway, that's still a minor issue. You still haven't given an answer as to how to allocate the 80% among the 80%. Who gets the Kallio apartment? The student or the cleaner or the arts professional or the elderly? Who gets the family home in Tapiola?

You mention (1) but you don't actually address how the government would go about solving it even though it's the biggest problem with public housing. Public housing in Finland (Helsinki area) is currently a contest for who can deal with bureaucracy the best. What kind of public housing system do you have in mind that makes an efficient decision when allocating a scarce resource (housing in the best locations) for below market price? #2 is just a consequence of #1 btw. Some people are allocated a good deal once and they are unwilling to give it up and even forego otherwise good decisions. And the solution is not "just build more housing" because the problem isn't the overall amount of housing but the limited quantity of certain housing that cannot be increased (in Helsinki you can build up, I guess).

What vuohi said is 100% correct and you didn't really disprove that here. Yes, it's true that housing prices rise in high-demand areas. But you can't just jump from that to "there's a lack of competition between landlords". The impact of increased demand is higher prices regardless of market structure.

Umm... you're going to have to define what you think "markets work" means. Economics is the study of infinite wants and scarce resources, you can't just assume a lack of scarcity. Anyway, as it stands, Finland has more housing than people want but this does not change the fact that Central Helsinki (+ some other areas) real estate is about as built up as it can get. So now the market allocates it to people who want to pay for it, which is what markets are meant to do. I don't see how government ownership solves the "Central Helsinki" problem in any way.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

What an insightful post from the guy who wants Juche in Finland. Clearly shows a high level of understanding.

In a way though, you are correct, I should have framed my post differently. I was writing for uncop, who seems to have taken a few courses in economics at least and would probably have been able to focus on the "there is a fixed amount of land in Central Helsinki" part, which was 95% of the part you quoted. I'd forgotten that barely literates such as you were reading this thread, and accidentally said "infinite wants". Let me clarify for you, even though this in no way changes any of the message of the post (which is about scarcity): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_problem

endlessmonotony posted:

Might want to try insults that aren't easily discovered as faulty by anyone who cares (which I freely admit is nobody).

The problem here is that not only is your post(ing) poo poo, so is the thinking behind it. The basics of economics won't get you far when you add in problems such as "nobody has perfect knowledge" and "individual good and common good aren't the same" and "people aren't perfectly rational". And a few dozen other factors that come into play when dealing with something as complex as city planning.

I mean I could go into more detail. But either you believe the poo poo you post or you're just super committed to a gimmick, and either way any significant effort seems pointless.

quote:

Every mainstream science which touches on political or religious ideology attracts more than its fair share of deniers: the anti-vaccine crowd v mainstream medicine, GMO fearmongers v geneticists, creationists v biologists, global warming deniers v climatologists. Economics is no different, but economics cranks differ in that they typically make false claims about the content of economics itself, as opposed, or as a prelude, to false claims about the way the world works. That target sometimes making it hard for non-economists to differentiate crankery from solid criticism.

quote:

Frames critique in terms of politics, most commonly the claim that economists are market fundamentalists.

quote:

Claims economists think people are always rational.

quote:

Misconstrues jargon: “rational.”

quote:

Misconstrues jargon: “efficient” (financial sense) or “efficient” (Pareto sense).

Andrast posted:

I also think that the free market is perfect and will always result in the best outcome for everybody

Geriatric Pirate posted:

One thing I love is that many D&D posters use Burkina Faso as their best example of successful socialism

Geriatric Pirate posted:

http://chrisauld.com/ (scroll down to 18 SIGNS YOU’RE READING BAD CRITICISM OF ECONOMICS)

Ligur posted:

No, you are an andrast and a D&D poster (ie. mostly left wing to the core) who thinks everything is black and white, 100% or 0%.

Socialism has a terrible track record as gub'mint policy, and it devastates everything it touches in that regard. There is not a single success in recorded history. Communism or socialism have never worked anywhere. Is capitalism and free markets the besterest? Well probably not, many faults here, but that and liberal democracy still have a far better track record than anything else we have.

Also I can imagine some posters going batshit right now and starting to type "holy poo poo holy poo poo hitler omg he said socialism isn't teh best omg wtf..." If you are one of those posters, please post a list of socialist national ventures that have been a success.

Bullet points will, yep, do quite nicely, like vuohi said while discussing something else altogether.

HerraS posted:

kiva tietää näin kolmelta aamuyöstä

Geriatric Pirate posted:

http://chrisauld.com/ (scroll down to 18 SIGNS YOU’RE READING BAD CRITICISM OF ECONOMICS)

Geriatric Pirate posted:

I'm not even saying the housing market is efficient (although it clearly is quite), it's just that the market is by far the best way to translate people's preferences into prices and therefore allocations. You keep saying the market is not efficient but you haven't articulated a way in which your suggestion is objectively better than the market. Market efficiency means that, in housing, you roughly end up in a situation where houses that lots of people want to live in are inhabited by the people that really want to live there and houses in less desirable locations go to people who don't care that much about location. I do not think you have done anything close to disproving the idea that this is (approximately) the case in a housing market.

More importantly, you haven't explained how a system which elicits people's preferences in some other way than willingness to pay will get them to reveal their true preferences and lead to an allocation that's somehow better (you didn't really define better, either). Even your proposed solution of 80-20 will either leàd to random outcomes which are not efficient or will converge to a market system. A simple example:

Let's say that under your system, there is great demand for apartments in Eira, so the planner raises rates for every single apartment in Eira so that within Eira, the number of people matches the number of apartments. And let's simplify and consider two apartments and two people:
There is a 7th floor apartment with a view of the sea on Merikatu and a 3rd floor apartment on Pietarinkatu.
Person A values the 7th floor apartment at 2000 per month and the 3rd floor at 1500. Person B values the 7th floor at 1700 and the 3rd floor at 1400.
If you stick to the government pricing every apartment in Eira the same and the price is at or below 1400, then the decision is a coinflip, which can lead to someone who values an apartment at 1700 getting it instead of a guy who values it a lot more. Even worse, if the price is between 1400-1500, Person B will only apply for the 7th floor apartment and Person A (who values the 7th floor more) will apply for both.
If you start making further adjustments to the price, you will still have coinflips until your pricing system is so exact that it produces the same outcomes as the market.

So in short: You haven't defined an objective criteria by which your system (which results in "coinflips" (not literal coinflips) and outcomes where the person who values something most doesn't get it) beats the market. Any system of underpricing apartments will lead to a shortage of them. If you have a shortage, allocation decisions come down to, essentially, a coinflip. You'd need some pretty insanely clever bureaucrats working with better data than Google and Facebook to be able to figure out people's true preferences for housing and then allocate them to their best desired houses. Or then you need to be able to give a reason why you think the coinflip beats housing markets as they stand right now.

You also mentioned empty homes. I do not think that is a big problem in Finland, but whatever. Here's a question for you: If the Helsinki housing market results in high prices per square meter and your system aims to lower them, what do you think that will do the amount of space per person that people will want? Since you would lower prices to below market prices, that means there would be scarcity of space. People who would under a market system settle for 40 sqm will demand 80 because what's stopping them? Once again, you would need Facebook+Google level data to be able to figure out which people really want a lot of space because every single person is going to mark down on the form that they need the biggest house possible (within reason etc etc). It's cool that you brought up London earlier as a "failure" of housing markets even though London and New York are actually super efficient at saving space because lots of people share apartments. Some people just really prefer being central vs having a lot of space to themselves. But once again, that's a feature that a non-market system will have a lot of trouble picking up because of course everyone will write down on their apartment applications that they want a lot of space AND to be central, and for some people that's true (under a market system, they would pay a lot).

And that's all theoretical. That ignores all these practical problems that currently exist in Helsinki-owned housing (not to mention even more regulated ones).The system is a lottery right now. And you haven't really provided any explanation on why your system will not be a lottery. Or why a lottery beats the markets.

uncop posted:

The others who responded basically got it. Efficiencywise, it does not matter who gets the upper floor apartment and who gets the lowest floor one, Rolling the dice between the people who want it is exactly as efficient as giving it to the person who will pay the most, because homes are not means of production and the wealthier person will produce no more using that otherwise equivalent apartment than the less wealthy one. Public planning would have to gently caress up the big-picture locations where people get to live, causing excessive daily travel times for people. Having a city-wide lottery for housing that serves an economic purpose would be idiotic, of course.

quote:

The idea that houses go to ones that value them most is in denial of reality. How much a person will pay is a function of how much they value a thing and how much money they have. When everyone can afford that thing, great, the one who values it most will probably get it. When only the top 10% can afford that thing, the valuations in the bottom 90% don't matter. A middle class person valuing it at 50% of what they earn does not have a voice over rich people who just need a place to look more presentable or who want to indirectly invest on land, and buy it, ending up losing no income because it was a profitable investment.

quote:

And now we get to the question whether inner city housing in London and New York is allocated to people who need it to produce more things or people who have it as their 10th home for the times they travel to that city on business and need a place to impress their business partners. And do they actually close more business in London because of that apartment than an office worker that works every day of their life in inner city London produces by having more time to either rest or work overtime. Do keep in mind that the business tycoon has no problem staying in a hotel and renting a private meeting room if that housing wasn't available to him, so he is going to lose a mere fraction of the value of the deals by that place not being available.

I'm not strawmanning about rich people, I admit it would be a problem if rich people who actually need that inner city apartment found it impossible to get one. However, the market allocates London apartments to people who do not actually produce much at all in London before people who spend their entire lives there.

London and New York are failures because they waste a ridiculous amount of man-years in unnecessary travel times for people who work absolutely necessary jobs there, in favor of Chinese investors and whatever. Both the housing costs and travel costs increase the salaries businesses have to pay. The costs of homelessness caused by the ridiculous situation is thrown on the lap of the regular taxpayer. Stockholm is a failed housing market in a similar fashion, and rent controls are not the cause of the market failure, they are a failed solution at solving the problem caused by market forces in an environment where market rules don't apply properly. They are a small case study of a planning failure within a prime example of a market failure.

quote:

I do not see replicating market results as the goal for this public effort, much the opposite. The public should plan housing the way it plans roads, to minimize the time people need to get to the places where they need to go to produce and consume things. The government does not decide where to build a road and how wide it should be by drawing lots. And some people decide to live in inefficient locations like your example person who wants to live away from town and commute, that's absolutely fine and not hard to arrange. If Google and Facebook happened to have data that would help planning for all that, the government, unlike private landlords, can buy it, fund scientific analysis of it, use it and use that as a basis to start collecting their own data. They aren't gonna go "Neener neener, we only help private business, go stick your money up your rear end" like in some Randian fantasy.

endlessmonotony posted:

Whoa what a link.

But you forget, I'm not criticizing economics, I'm criticizing your posting which relies on a very cursory reading on economics, and which has been again and again proven insufficient by actual economists. You twist and turn the economics until it says what you want it to say with no regard for how the world works nor how economics as a science (generally) works.

Also you seem to believe we want efficiency in the economic sense out of the system. Meanwhile, given that we're desiring neither with efficiency nor allocation based on wants, but rather least suffering and most functional society, we can handle quite a lot of inefficiency, though not as much as the current system has. The current system would be beaten by a lottery because it is a bunch of individual actors unable to predict the consequences of the actions of other actors and choosing to take no action over risky but overall profitable action. People don't have infinite time and do quite often cash out before attaining maximum profit.

You keep loving this up because your "understanding" doesn't allow for enough unknown variables to actually replicate real-world conditions. Arhinmäki's plan would work despite not being the most efficient plan because the city has multiple ways to benefit and some benefit is better than nothing, which is what happens when you discard all plans that aren't optimally efficient.

HerraS posted:

kiva tietää näin kolmelta aamuyöstä

His Divine Shadow posted:

It's funny because most good things we enjoy in the western world came around because of governments and policies that were pretty socialist at heart. National Health care, infrastructure, the space age, lots of research that lead to things like the iPhone started as public investment into R&D, even WW2 was an example of massive government spending boosting the US economy out of the depression. The whole boomng post war economy was heavily dependent on government and regulations etc, we had a postwar boom because workers got money for their jobs, which by large where stable. Because with the red boogeyman in the east, leaders of western countries had to offer the working class something or they might get sent to a gulag some day.

Basically no whch way you cut it the western world wasn't built on some free capitalist market wank bullshit, it was built on government and government policies providing a stable economy and functioning and regulated market.

That's why when we started trying out those kinds of free market wank policies and globalization crap, things went to poo poo and now the populists are taking over....

Ligur posted:

I find this a good system but it has very little to do with actual socialism.

Ligur posted:

You are horribly confusing market forces working within a set of rules with socialism/communism.

The Nordic welfare states (or Scandinavian, if you don't want to count us mongol Finns) are, or at least were, probably the most succesful socities created within recorded history. They are the most egalitarian ever seen on the face of the planet, individual rights are highly respected, nobody is treated differently under the law despite their surname, even the poor are well off compared to most of the world and we used to have poo poo like almost complete employment and good schools and free and efficient health care and so on.

None of this came about because of ~socialism~ and Marx and Lenin and Mao.

Business in these countries has always been mostly private, operated by the private sector not state controlled, despite an Alko here and Systembolaget there. It's just that at the same time, the taxes have been ginormously high and thus private business has funded several services provided by the state (which possibly causes an American conservative to shout "big state, communism!" as a reflex, but Nordic posters shouldn't be that foolish).

I find this a good system but it has very little to do with actual socialism.

uncop posted:

I'm noticing this is going farther and farther away from Finnish politics though, I think I should go pick fights about markets in some more housing or economics focused thread.

His Divine Shadow posted:

I didn't say socialism or communism, I said governments and policies that where socialist at heart, not that we implemented full socialism / communism. But then again you are a dishonest strawmanning idiot that nobody needs to engage seriously.

Ligur posted:

What is it with the many D&D posters who have to either start or end a post by making a long list of attempted insults at the person they are replying to? It's just weird to me. What do they get out of it?

Andrast posted:

Ligur posted:

Hmmm.

I presume you make no difference between saying "your political views are not similar to mine, and I presume you think like so and so" or "I think the better solution would be X not Y" with "you are an idiot and a strawmanner and a hitlernatsi and I hope u die" but there actually is a difference.

Having different views and cursing and hurling (personal) abuse are ~not the same thing~

uncop posted:

The unions and SDP were tamed very early into our independence and became labor-friendly capitalists, so their projects are not anti-capitalist but pro-labor-friendly-industry.

His Divine Shadow posted:

This basically fits with what I said, but just phrased as to try and reduce the for real big deal socialist policies and a strong government has played in building the nordic countries. Socialist aspects was a big deal even in a capitalist setting.

And now things are ever more hosed because the rich fucks aren't scared of dying anymore, in the long run they are loving themselves over.

"Democracy is asset insurance for the rich - stop skimping on the payments!" -Mark Blyth

Andrast posted:

Like half of your posts are strawmans about the icky leftists and dishonest arguments

Ligur posted:

What sort of strawmen, again, give me an example so maybe I can explain? I think there might be some misunderstanding involved.

As for icky leftists, this IS a left wing (sub)forum (not by any rule, but the vast majority of the posters support the left and a large portion furiously oppose the right) so no wonder it comes up that I don't often agree with their views.

But I really, really do not start or end my posts or replies here by listing various mental defiencies I feel other posters have or by calling them idiots etcetera as a rule, if ever, the occasional "gently caress off" in reply to insults notwithstanding.

Andrast posted:

Your first post on this page, for example.

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Also, it's not the fact that you disagree with people that is the problem. You constantly launch into tirades about the vihervassarit, scandipol, immigrants or whatever, often completely out of the blue.

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Then, when people disagree with your sweeping statements or straw man arguments about the subject in question, you get this massive persecution complex about how the mean leftists are calling you a hitlernazi.

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Contrast this with Geriatric Pirate who doesn't do that and (usually) gets much better replies. I think GP's opinions are often horrendous and I don't think I've ever agreed with him on anything but his posting is fine. Sure he also gets called an idiot, hitlernazi or whatever but he doesn't lose his poo poo about it. Everybody gets called mean things here. Honestly though, if you can't handle being called an idiot these forums are probably not the best place for you.

Ligur posted:

You mean the Venezuale post? It's not a strawman over here that people want socialism/communism to cure the ills of the world, and socialism/communism has usually brought only ruin when in effect. You can of course argue whether people are really into fullblown socialism or not but in general socialism/communism gets pretty good reviews over here. Am I just crazy? Try it yourself. Suggest capitalism (or classical liberalism) is awesome and see what kind of response you get. Have a go

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We're posting in a vihervassarifoorumi. It's not out of the blue.

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This is the weirdest thing ever for me. I don't really care if people call me a hitlernazi, I'm just pointing out it's stupid as gently caress to call posters with different views a hitlernazi even if they want and support liberal democracy and thus forth.

When have I lost my poo poo and attacked another poster for calling me a hitlernazi? Think about it for a while. If I was really, really sensitive about what people call me would I post here at all? Nope.

Look at my rap sheet? Mods need to probate me for having different opinions with other posters quite frequently these days. Or for posting "poor latvia" jokes (what the hell?). A hint: it's not ME who is reporting my posts or who feels offended. That should give you a hint about who is actually freaked about different opinions and who isn't, and who is hurt by opposing views and who is not. I have to my recollection not reported anyone during the past 15+ years of posting here for having a different view (or for any other reason).

If I was so touchy as you think about what people post, say or write, I would not post here at all, or then I would be machinegunning reports about wrong views. Which I never do.