ok leadbelly... I have made a checklist of statements pertaining to issues both modern and historical and I'd like you to list either "agree" or "disagree" next to each one, with an optional ONE sentence of clarification (please use very sparingly). Within each section, I've tried to keep the point of view consistent. Here they are:
[public spending]
- If you earn more, you should pay more in taxes.
- The rich are not taxed highly enough in my country.
- It's shameful that people are allowed to make money simply by virtue of having wealth (stocks, rent, loans).
- Universal healthcare is a good idea.
- We should never privatize education.
- Higher education should be free, just like primary and secondary education are.
[identity issues]
- Racism is alive and well in my country.
- Systemic racism contributes to the continued oppression of racial minorities.
- Undocumented immigrants who have been living in my country should have some kind of legal status.
- Gender is a social construct and people should be free to identify as male or female.
- Human sexual preference is mostly biologically determined.
- Gay marriage should be legal.
- You should not be able to discriminate against someone on the basis of their sexual preference.
- Ditto, but for sexual identity.
- Ditto, but for race or gender.
[women's rights]
- Women have just as much of a right as men to be in the workplace.
- Contraception and abortion procedures should be legal (up to the third trimester).
- Abortion should be legal even in the third trimester.
- The cost of childcare is a major barrier for women to enter the workforce. We need public daycare or daycare vouchers.
- #MeToo is an important cultural movement.
[islam]
- People from majority muslim countries often have certain values which are fundamentally incompatible with western values.
- The refugee crisis in Europe is doing long-term damage to European society.
- Liberals are too quick to stand up for refugees from war-torn countries.
- We do not have a responsibility for fixing these countries or taking their needy.
- Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant debater.
[economy]
- Unions are, for the most part, a good idea.
- Laws that forbid workplaces from forcing employees to join unions are anti-union and should be opposed. [this used to say "Right to Work", which means something different in the UK, sorry]
- The government should provide a federal job guarantee because there is so much unemployment and so much infrastructure and community work that needs to be done.
- BREXIT is not a good idea.
- Free trade is generally good.
- CEOs make way too much money for what they actually do (nothing).
[climate]
- Climate change is real and anthropogenic.
- We should fund green technology.
- We should mobilize the nation to reduce our carbon output by a certain amount by a certain date.
- We should help depopulate Bangladesh into surrounding areas because it's going to be underwater and it's our fault.
[war and peace]
- My country should
not sign a no-first-use promise for the use of nuclear weapons (my country should never use nuclear weapons first).
- My country's military protects my freedom.
- Saddam Hussein had to be deposed.
- If my country leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban will come back and my country will be at risk again.
- China is a threat to global peace.
- The US military should stay in South Korea.
- The US should overthrow the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
- My country should maintain its current level of defense spending.
[general liberal issues]
- My country puts far too many people in jail.
- Flagburning is a right.
- The death penalty is wrong and should be abolished.
- Irrespective of Israel's right to defend itself from terrorism, Palestine is illegally occupied.
- The sanctions on Venezuela are needlessly compounding its economic crisis.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
[scientific socialism]
- The industrial processes, especially supply chains with numerous levels of intermediate goods, are becoming increasingly more centrally planned by the firm owners, even and especially when these supply chains span multiple continents. This contradiction within the modern free market economy is empirical evidence that central planning by bureaucratic authorities in the age of computation is a perfectly efficient method of allocating resources.
- Work by economists like Hyman Minsky, Thomas Piketty, and Steve Keen, show rigorously that the existence of a privately owned finance sector produces a structurally unstable economy that is bound to produce serious economic crashes and exponentially greater inequality that is fundamentally inconsistent with democratic values. The nation's largest capital reserves must be publicly owned, from now until forever.
- When a large firm takes one component of its supply chain and moves it overseas from a developed nation to an underdeveloped one, with no change in the skillset of its labor or the efficiency of its capital, but the price of the intermediate good is still reduced by an order of magnitude, this is a deliberate act of exploitation which produces superprofits for the firm and/or superprofits for the consumer in the developed nation (and this surplus is then circulated through the rest of the economy, arbitrarily inflating its standard of living). Third world factory workers must unionize and reverse this "free trade" theft of wealth.
- The media is owned by major financial firms and operated by ruling elites and thus will always filter or distort news to serve its own interests. The public and labor must therefore own an alternative media.
- Post-USSR globalism has made income inequality even worse, both between nations, and within each nation.
- These and other contradictions will eventually lead to the end of capitalism itself.