re: Has Socialism ever lifted large numbers of people out of poverty

"A lot of socialist policies pulled this country out of the Great Depression."

This really isn't true. In fact, the doubling down on more socialist policies likely helped lead to a deepening of the Depression in the late 1930s. One could argue that socialist policies ameliorated the effects of the Depression for some people, but it's a tough pull to show that socialism ended the Depression.

"Those kinds of policies aren't necessarily socialist."

You make a good point but some of the policies really were socialist, such as setting limits on how much grain farmers could grow and the installation of price controls.

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You make a good point but some of the policies really were socialist, such as setting limits on how much grain farmers could grow and the installation of price controls.

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Yes, and those were by far the policies with the most destructive outcomes.

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A lot of socialist policies pulled this country out of the Great Depression.

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No. Not really.

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the war effort helped tremendously as well

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Virtually all the economic gains can be tied to the war effort.

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TVA provided jobs to thousands of people

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The military put 9 or 10 million men under arms in the 1940s.

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the WPA provided countless jobs

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This was a pretty significant program. But, it was a lot of busy work. Better than nothing, but like a lot of socialist programs, more "feel good" than substantive.

Social Security (without this devolving into the merits, how the system should be structured, the cost-benefits analysis, etc.) didn't make a significant dent on poverty for 20 years after the New Deal.

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Nowhere in the history of the world has Socialism or Communism built a sustainable empire.

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The Catholic church says hello.

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Virtually all the economic gains can be tied to the war effort.

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And what about all those US factories that devoted their production to the war effort? BF Goodrich using their tire plants to build tires for the planes, for example. Rationing of consumer goods by the Office Price Administration. Even in the war effort there were elements of socialism.

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Has Socialism ever lifted large numbers of people out of poverty

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Yes.


When unions mattered, prosperity was shared


By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Watching the great civil rights march on television in August 1963, I couldn't help but notice that hundreds of people carried signs with a strange legend at the top: "UAW Says." UAW was saying "Segregation Disunites the United States," and many other things insisting on equality.

This "UAW" was a very odd word to my 11-year-old self, and I asked my dad who or what "U-awe," as I pronounced it, was. The letters, he explained, stood for United Auto Workers.

It was some years later when I learned about the heroic battles of the UAW, not only on behalf of those who worked in the great car plants but also for social and racial justice across our society. Walter Reuther, the gallant and resolutely practical egalitarian who led the union for many years, was one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s close allies.

Remembering that moment is bittersweet on a Labor Day when so many Americans are unemployed, wages are stagnant or dropping, and the labor movement itself is in stark decline.

Only 12.3 percent of American wage and salary workers belong to unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, down from a peak of about one-third of the work force in 1955. A movement historically associated with the brawny workers in auto, steel, rubber, construction, rail and the ports now represents more employees in the public sector (7.9 million) than in the private sector (7.4 million). Even worse than the falling membership numbers is the extent to which the ethos animating organized labor is increasingly foreign to American culture. The union movement has always been attached to a set of values -- solidarity being the most important, the sense that each should look out for the interests of all. This promoted other commitments: to mutual assistance, to a rough-and-ready sense of equality, to a disdain for elitism, to a belief that democracy and individual rights did not stop at the plant gate or the office reception room...

All but forgotten is the fact that our nation's extraordinary prosperity from the end of World War II to the 1970s was in significant part the result of union contracts that, in words the right wing hated Barack Obama for saying in 2008, "spread the wealth around." A broad middle class with spending power to keep the economy moving created a virtuous cycle of low joblessness and high wages.

Between 1966 and 1970, as Gerald Seib pointed out last week in the Wall Street Journal, the United States enjoyed an astonishing 48 straight months in which the unemployment rate was at or below 4 percent. No, the unions didn't do all this by themselves. But they were important co-authors of a social contract that made our country fairer, richer and more productive."

LINK

So socialism works for about 30 years.

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When unions mattered, prosperity was shared

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Unions are also examples of "necessary evil" - I applaud their work from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s - at least those not hopelessly compromised by either organized crime syndicates on one hand or Bolsheviks on the other. Unions, especially at a time when workers were largely uneducated (or undereducated), unsophisticated and detached from sources of information about their own and others' working conditions, were highly effective in leveling the playing field within industries, trades, companies, etc.

However, the very nature of their corruption, their easy susceptibility to outside influences of either alien enemies or domestic gangsters, coupled with their inane push for seniority trumping everything including merit, rabid defense of the worst workers and a wholly one-sided political leaning holds me back from lamenting their relative loss of influence since the 1970s.

Well the Communist Party of China which is a socialist party has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty through a mix of socialist and market-based policies.