Sorry MSH, just one of those things that gets my beard turning all white and fluffy seeing people talking about finance and any implication of "efficient distribution" in regards to necessary supplies. There are systems which handle things involving bulk procurement and distribution of basic goods and services for all, we call them governments, not letting them handle those things is how we get fun stuff like the US healthcare system, or worse, the US ISP arrangement.
Still, given the choice between someone who at least tries to acknowledge areas where more socialism is needed, and someone who takes the "ok, let us bend you over and shtup ya good and hard, then when we're done we'll see what trickles down" positions of a party to an extreme... it's an easy call.
Efficient distribution is very important, the issue here is bargaining power asymmetry. It's a well known limitation of capitalism, along with imperfect information and high entry/exit costs.
European style socialism uses capitalism because it's such a convenient optimisation algorithm for the economy, but take its well known limitations into account : National agencies accounts for imperfect information with their panels of experts, consumer protection laws mitigate bargaining power asymmetry, and national companies deliver good and services for market that are natural monopolies or have too high entry and exit cost. We also have institutions for things that are vital and therefore shouldn't depend on your score at the big monopoly game of capitalism.
So you can live in poverty, but if you want luxuries you have to play the game. How well you're doing shouldn't affect your children ideally.
It's somewhat the best of both world, but we have three issues that are playing troublemakers : "Soft" corruption, clientelism and nepotism.
Soft corruption is what you can see in Clinton's e-mail : it's collusion between the financial world, the media and the politicians to scratch each other's back. It makes the whole system very likely to favor short term corporate gain over anything else. Of course it's push to a pretty grotesque degree in the US, but it's a huge issue here too.
Clientelism is basically getting peoples indebted to you everywhere in the administration, and giving a lot of favours to some peoples in your electorate in order to gain vote. It's sadly common in Wallonia, where peoples from all parties have been caught offering illegal favours (up to trying to influence a judge). Of that riddled our administration with absolutely useless peoples that are just a drain and unlikely to ever getting fired.
Nepotism is simply favouring one's own family and is a pretty obvious and self-explanatory issue.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1421324 times)