Explain Like I'm Five

It gets really hard to make money and exploit people when they don't fear for their livelihoods.

At the national level it’s because they(the federal government) is taking your tax money to pay someone hundreds of miles away for existing. At the local level it’s because “private charity already does that.”

Perhaps a comment against it could be something like “why should I pay for someone else’s health care?”.

I guess if your beloved leader has told you enough times that socialized health care is bad (communism?), then you won’t investigate what that kind of health care really looks like, and you’ll parrot the statement in belief and acceptance.

To be fair to liberals, liberalism is also a system to take care of your neighbors.

Liberalism is basically capitalism with patches. Public option health care, government contractors, food stamps, tuition assistance, bus vouchers, child tax credits.

Socialism is a capitalism replacement. Universal health care, government organizations, free government grocery stores, free education, free public transportation, free day care.

Both groups on the left care about their neighbors.

The entirety of civilization is based on socialism to one degree or another. Even dictators depend on socialism. The tipping point is where that socialism becomes leveraged for personal ambitions.

Because people have been repeatedly trained since the decline of Imperialism to believe that “socialism” is “when capitalism.” When the populace is afraid of the label, the label can be used as a blunt instrument to keep them enslaved to the parasitic Capitalist rulers.

Rich people are selfish sociopaths and poor people imitate the rich thinking it will make them rich, too.

https://lemmy.ml/post/39416509

I think most of the hate is from hard working people who are afraid "lazy ones" will get benefits that they themselves deserve.

I dont disagree. The amount of people on lemmy that say they just wanna sit on their ass and smoke weed is quite high, and im convinced if they had their way all our infrastructure would crumble in a week (no one thinks about the sewer/wastewater, the electricity, and the food plants that need to keep running for your comfortable lazy life)

We would need a way to keep people working crap jobs, while also supporting them. We cant all be influencers and movie stars. Someone has to shovel shit.

Hold over from Stalin and Mao era, the commies was the big bad. Like after 9/11 it was the Muslims

I think the standard thing at this point is to agree it's a nice idea, but also say it doesn't work in practice. Edit: And sometimes a certain kind of person will turn a simple disagreement into tribalistic hate.

A version was tried a few times from 1917 on, and it went poorly. So, if you're still for collective ownership of the means of production, you either need to be a denialist about that history, or explain why your version would be better.

There's also people who use a weaker definition not mutually exclusive with capitalism.

Are you an American ?

There used to be a country called the

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

It was built on the principles of socialism

It turns out that actually living in a socialist state is oppressive to the point where millions upon millions were starved because that was what was needed to give socialism the chance to take off in a capitalist world.