You are treating my statement as if the only way for a government to take steps to ensure the survival of its citizens is by giving handouts. Governments have clearly tried other methods, including land sales under specific conditions, handing out contracts for specific conditions, etc. The idea of, for example, building the transcontinental railroad was to increase trade with the west under the theory that such an increase would be beneficial to the people of the United States.cashto wrote:QUOTE (cashto @ Feb 7 2019, 09:06 PM) You're going to have to explain what your point is, since I fail to see how mentioning the Homestead Acts is a reply to what I wrote.
Indeed, one might notice that the main aim of Reconstruction, as it was seen by Northern republicans, was to, you know, "reconstruct" the south in a free-labor economy so that the working class of the South would be better situated.
So once again we go back to the preamble of the US Constitution, which gives a definitive "this is what we think a government is trying to do":
QUOTE We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,[/quote]
Specifically, the statement is that the people are agreeing to work together in order to make things easier/better. "Enough to survive" is the bit that you're hanging on to for some reason, but that's a sort of bare minimum. What could "promote the general welfare" and "provide for the common defense" possibly mean if they don't include in their meaning "at a bare minimum making sure people aren't dying?"
Communism is more of an extension of democracy. Part of the reason it has never been successfully implemented is because it has yet to be implemented through a democratic process, instead typically taking the form of various military coups which devolve into autocratic one-party governments. And if you disagree with this statement, take a look at some of the things that Karl Marx had to say about Abraham Lincoln and the democratic process which elected him President of the United States. He was ecstatic and felt that Republican policies at the time represented a move towards the communist dream he had.cashto wrote:QUOTE (cashto @ Feb 7 2019, 09:06 PM) I fail to see how that is particularly leftist. Surely you didn't mean to suggest that every democratic government ever is communist.
QUOTE Guaranteeing every person a certain minimum standard of living? Now that's an innovation. That's not something we had 200 years ago. That's all I'm saying, and I'm not sure why you're treating this as a very controversial point.[/quote]
It's definitely not something we had 200 years ago, nor is it something we have now. But a careful interpretation of acts like the Homstead Acts will show that the government made attempts to guarantee a certain standard of living for everyone who was willing to meet the government at some middle ground. The "innovation" that you're talking about isn't really an "innovation," it's just a change in which resources are distributed by the government. For the majority of human history, the distributed resource was land. You "earned" land from the government for doing things, say supporting the Crown against a usurper, a heroic feat in a battle against an enemy, whatever. And in exchange, you had a duty to that land and the people living on it to treat them "fairly" (whatever that happened to mean at the time). Unpopular nobles were often disposed of because when a noble fails to protect the serfs living on his land, the noble's land's productivity falls, and the King gets less in taxes.
What has happened overtime has not really been the "creation" of a welfare state, but broader interpretations of who is entitled to the safetynet of a welfare state. When you create a democracy, you are implicitly offering that extension to anyone who has a say in the government, i.e. anyone who has a right to vote. And it's important to remember that government has always existed to ensure the prosperity of the "chosen" group. A democracy is merely a government which chooses, as its group, all of the people.
(Well, at least the people you give a vote to, but then I would argue that if you do not give someone a say in a democratic government you are telling them that they are not a person.)
