Generally, my daily routine involves plugging into the STEEM blockchain shortly after waking, booting Discord, jumping on SteemPeak with a few different accounts, and pulling up a couple SteemWorld tabs to make sure everything is functioning properly and start working on my piece of daily content.

Today was a little different, waking up and heading off to meet my dad, spending a LONG time at Natural Grocers trying to get his new GooglePay account to work, then heading across the hills and out towards the coast, visiting my aunt & checking out a couple pieces of property that he's interested in.

This week I'll be out in Vernonia, spending some time with family, and cooking up a bunch of food for them to freeze and have over the coming weeks. I'll be sticking with my daily posting schedule, including the first episode of my new series: Tuesday Talks on the Tao Te Ching, which I'm greatly looking forward to :-)

One thing that I found really interesting is how the one day STEEM was down also happened to be the one day I suddenly had a post show up in my "feed" on Fedbook. I have every single friend and 'liked page' un-followed on my FB account, because I only use it as a messenger and to find events. By having nothing followed, I don't ever have posts show up, or ads (their algorithms want the ads to blend in with your actual feed, so as to get to your subconscious).

Apparently I forgot to un-follow someone I friended back in June, and he just posted for the first time I guess, because I suddenly had a post there looking at me. Of course, that post was something that seemed like a glaring contrast to what I would consider to be the truth of our reality. My friend shared this video:

With a simple statement:

"More socialism please."

Well, socialism when it is spoken about generally has a whole lot of government involved, and the original video's text was:

"Democratic socialists are growing in numbers, running for office and even winning elections. What's it all mean?"

Obviously as a voluntaryist, an anarchist, a believer in sovereignty & personal responsibility, I am not a fan of "democratic" anything. My fingers hadn't yet had an opportunity to flow out a message of any kind today, so a few things came through...

Image Source

Some Definitions

Democracy:

Current (Oxford): A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.

Etymology: government by the people, system of government in which the sovereign power is vested in the people as a whole exercising power directly or by elected officials; a state so governed," 1570s, from Middle French démocratie (14c.), from Medieval Latin democratia (13c.), from Greek demokratia "popular government," from demos "common people," originally "district" (see demotic), + kratos "rule, strength" (see -cracy).

Sometimes 16c.-17c. in Latinized form democratie. In 19c. England it could refer to "the class of people which has no hereditary or other rank, the common people." In 19c. U.S. politics it could mean "principles or members of the Democratic Party."

Socialism

Current (Oxford): A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

(in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.

Etymology: 1837, from French socialisme (1832) or formed in English (based on socialist) from social (adj.) + -ism. Perhaps first in reference to Robert Owen's communes. "Pierre Leroux (1797-1871), idealistic social reformer and Saint-Simonian publicist, expressly claims to be the originator of the word socialisme" [Klein, also see OED discussion]. The word begins to be used in French in the modern sense c. 1835.

Image Source

My Responses

Democratic = 2 wolves & a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Socialism = The idea of "taking care of everybody". Fine as a stand-alone concept; genocidal & totalitarian when combined with any form of government.

At the moment, the top 1% is everyone earning an annual income greater than or equal to roughly 32,400 USD.

Let's turn down the statism before we try turning other things up, unless we want to turn up individual responsibility, agorism, mindfulness, transparency, honesty, etc.

To which he replied in a handful of separate comments, so I replied to each of them separately.

Image Source

Him: From my reading of Marx, I would define socialism as nothing other than an economic system in which workers own the means of production.

Me: Marx was under the impression that it would work to centralize all ownership and control into the state, and then dissolve the state... Obviously that won't work. Dissolve the state (eliminating most of the tools that allow those richest few to control everything), and then work on restructuring the economic system, once those with the most to lose no longer have control of the currency, the police, and the military.

Him: We need more institutions in this country that are worker owned. Plus you know, the elite subsidize themselves with tons of federal tax-payer money. Just look at the bailout of the financial industry in 2008. The corporate elite live in their own socialist world. Its capitalism for the rest of us.

Me: Right, more people should stop giving up their time & labor to corporations, as well as stop giving up their moral agency to the governments designed to protect & serve the people who own those

Him: In the US, an income of $465,626 puts you in the top 1 percent in 2014. Im sure its higher now.

Me: Right, but the US is less than 5% of the world's population...

Him: well if 1% of the wealthiest amaricans make over $500K, and the US is 5% of the global population, then im talking about concentrated wealth among the .0005%. Wealth is astronomically concentrated at the top. The corporate elite have captured policy making bodies across the globe, have immense resources, and write laws that benefit themselves.

Me: Right, I'm not disagreeing with the fact that a small collective of people, mostly amongst a small handful of families, have created an entire economic & social system specifically to benefit themselves. Those same families & collectives control the media & schools in much of the world , making it easy to indoctrinate billions of humans into playing by their rules. Then a handful of those indoctrinated humans make it their "living" to go commit mass murder, large scale destruction of infrastructure & property (the whole of which they term "war"), against societies and communities who don't want to play along to their rules (though in many of the battles that seem like this is what's happening, the folks who are trying to run things are actually manipulating & profiting from both sides of the conflict.)

What I'm disagreeing with is the idea of "99% vs 1%", since we've already established that this is a global issue and the it is actually less than 0.0001% of the humans on the planet who are pulling the strings behind the scenes, and only a little bit there since the whole societal structure is specifically designed to function this way.

"Governments" make people think it's somehow logical, nay moral, for a small group of people to steal a huge amount of the labor of others ("taxes"), while also using violence against the majority of people for doing things that are forbidden for one reason or another (usually religious)

Corporations allow for the use of the government monopoly on violence to be used in many other was to extract even more labor from the masses, and to shut down small-scale competition, allowing more control of the "market"

Socialism when added to those things is horrifically dangerous, and leads to things like the welfare state, the social security scam, massive homelessness, etc.

Libertarian Socialism (one of the names for most anarchist philosophy through most of the last few hundred years) strives to bring the power back to the people, removing usury, institutionalized violence, war, the illusion of authority, etc. (Other terms: mutualism, agorism, Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Sam Konkin, Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, Murray Bookchin, Pierre Proudhon)

Him: I agree.

Image Source

Hope all you magnificent Steemians are having a great day, and enjoyed your time away from your computer screens :-) I'm very interested to see what HF 20 has to offer us, and hope the witnesses can get things squared away with ease & grace. Personally, I'm stoked at the idea of being able to perpetually edit my posts!