FW: Can We Appropriate the Rich? (Re: Surplus NOT from Capital Ga ins Receipts

[Seth Ackerman]

Nathan Newman wrote:

> Worse, the welfare states of Europe and folks in the US enjoy the standard
> of living we do to even attempt such self-payment only because of massive
> expropriate of the labor of third world workers producing consumer goods
> as sub-level wages.  The goal of any real socialist or even social
> democratic moevment has to aim for expropriation of the income (at
> minimum) of the first world wealthy to pay not only for a welfare state
> here but for redistribution globally.
> 
---

Nathan, you amaze me. Your political vision combines ever more grandiloquent
dreams of global socialism with fervent loyalty to a series of increasingly
centrist New Democrats. 

Without global redistribution, you say there is no hope of socialism or even
social democracy. But the US government will not even allow third world
countries to voluntarily *withdraw* from the global system. Asking the US to
*fund* such a withdrawal is hilarious. 

I assume you envision this American-funded world socialist state to be
administered by a left-wing Democrat president. (Under pressure, of course,
from below.) It's not going to happen. Even the Roosevelt Administration,
which actually harbored a few people who shared your agenda, was dominated
and overcome by the business wing that runs your party. 

Seth