@Lash,
Lash wrote:
We’re discovering that Centrists hate Bernie more than they hate Trump . Since Trump voters are not motivated by hate, but ignorance, we’ve started engaging them about policy—with good results.
Many are switching to Bernie—because they’re desperate for those policies.
They are mostly afraid of ‘Socialism.’
I wonder if they understand that the problem of socialism comes not because the government wants to achieve things but because they end up putting so much money into doing so that it juices up the economy to the point of being unreformable.
E.g. if you jack up spending on health care, you will get health care, but in the process you will also get more of all the economic activities that cause climate change and other environmental problems/instability.
When the money starts flowing, people turn off their consciences and go with the flow of the rat race.
The rat race is capitalist, but it is capitalism-on-crack/stimulus, which is what socialism is. Socialism is actually just 'social capitalism,' where the free market is deemed insufficient to generate the levels of growth, revenues, jobs, etc. that unions want; so they jack up the economy with government stimulus and then try to regulate it so more of the proceeds go where they want them to go.
The problem is that there are economic privileges that are not good for the environment, climate, and future generations; and so when you stimulate the economy to provide those privileges to more people; you accelerate the environmental/climate unsustainability.
You have to reform economic practices and lifestyles to be more sustainable, but that only happens when people are motivated to put effort into making due with less because the economy is weaker. When the economy is strong because it's been stimulated by government spending/stimulus, people have more impetus to maintain the status quo that has made them money in the past than to reform to greater levels of conservatism that waste less.
Voluntary conservation of resources is a free market adaptation to recession that is taken as a threat by bull capitalists, and that is the reason such capitalists support socialist government intervention to stimulate growth, i.e. because they want to keep making money and doing so means they need to keep people spending/borrowing/investing/etc.; all economic activities that engender resource use/waste instead of more conservative budget management/planning that reduces waste in order to stretch money further.
