This episode is SO full of win.

edit: that was a pretty low blow at the end. Hit me right in the funny bone

Yeah I'm moving...I wanna embrace my socialism!

I'm obviously living in the wrong country.

Bill Maher does not get the "It Gets Better" campaign.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

He speaks the truth.

Hm – well I’ll give the racist bigot host a 50% for being half right.

It is true that US citizens do have a hypocritical relationship with the big government’s socialist voter-bribery scams. However, he is dead wrong when he claims ‘socialism works’.

Socialism doesn’t work. European governments across the spectrum are being forced to increase privatization and cut social benefits in order to stave of fiscal collapse. When BM glowing describes all the great stuff European countries have (health care etc…) he totally ignores report after report after report of these so-called ‘services’ being abject, utter, complete failures. The UK health care system is being forced to ration SURGERIES (IE death panels) or collapse. Spain, Greece, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Portugal… The list of European socialist nations tottering on the edge of failure and having to pass ‘austerity measures’ to survive is myriad.

But the reaction that citizens have to cuts in socialist services in Europe is no different than that of the pork addicted public in the US when anyone suggests that shutting off the spigot. The riots in Greece prove that. It is nothing more than the principle Thatcher nailed so accurately in 1975… “The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money.” This is merely an extension of Tytler’s argument that “democracy can only survive until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship.” Which then leads to his subsequent “Cycle of Tyranny” (Liberty, Complacency, Dependancy, Tyranny, Revolution).

Maher (and other of his ilk) love to pretend that socialism works. Problem is that every factual analysis of socialism proves quite conclusively the exact opposite. Socialism doesn’t work. It is failure after failure on parade. And the reason the US is failing is BECAUSE it has so much socialism in it already. We better hope the Tea Party can talk more citizens into agreeing to ditch socialism, or the US is destined to financial collapse and subsequent balkanization.

As a side note – oh YEAH Bill Maher… The US budget entirely goes to military spending and corporate tax breaks, eh? What a complete moron. Whenever he opens his mouth to vainly try and sound intelligent, he proves himself ever more conclusively to be an absolute idiot. The 60 trillion in unfunded federal obligations is for socialism, dummy. The biggest budget items are socialism, idiot. Defense spending could be cut to zero tomorrow and we’d still be 59.2 trillion in debt for all those wonderful social programs that everyone loves so much.

Maher calling Palin a retard is like a severed head calling Cain Velasquez a cripple.

Jeez WP I can just see your pulling at your hair and frothing at the teeth while your typed that. Bill really got to you this week didn't he!

WTF has any one of you actually an idea what socialism means? This rant of Bill is just useless. "European socialism"? The last socialist country was the DDR (east germany) back in the 80s. I just can't stand it anymore. Stupid throwing around of buzzwords. Socialism is a specific form of government. Switzerland is NOT a socialist country. Germany is NOT a socialist country. Sweden is NOT a socialist country. Get your facts straight and read a book from time to time!

Dude, you clearly can't comprehend what was said. He said European Socialism works, not that Europe is socialist. He then pointed to socialist programs in Europe, such as universal health care, paid for college tuition, pension programs, etc. How are those programs not socialist? Hint: THEY'RE SOCIALIST PROGRAMS! There's no two ways about it. How idiotic can a person be who proclaims socialism is bad, but they send their kids to public school, or they collect unemployment benefits, or draw social security, or they live in the Tennessee River Valley and appreciate the fact they have electricity, or they have an affordable federal gov't backed mortgage, or they safely assume the food they eat won't kill them, or that they can safely assume the house they live in won't fall on their heads because of government safety code, or their tires won't blow out driving down the road, or they can still get medical care if they become poor, or...

Guess what? Every single one of those above are examples of either direct gov't intervention into the economy, or were outcomes from a time when the government did. That's direct opposition to free market principles. And before anyone says it, YES, IT IS UNDERSTOOD THAT SOCIALIST SOLUTIONS DON'T ALWAYS WORK WELL. We know that. But it's absolutely positively ridiculous to suggest socialist ideas and solutions NEVER work. It's absolute bullcrap to the extreme that you can see everyday in your life that it does make everyone's life better.

This editorial is spot on. It's what I've tried hammering home with no effect to QM and WP that there are too many examples of ideas within the US that have or did work that were socialist in nature. Socialism isn't a dirty word. It's one approach of several economic philosophies that can help solve problems, just as free market ideas can work. Neither work 100% of the time, so stop with the ridiculous notion that neither is the be all end all of all economic ideas. Every industrialized nation is a mixed economy. A completely 100% free market economy doesn't exist, and would fail if it did. (Ditto 100% true communist economies.)

>> ^conan:

WTF has any one of you actually an idea what socialism means? This rant of Bill is just useless. "European socialism"? The last socialist country was the DDR (east germany) back in the 80s. I just can't stand it anymore. Stupid throwing around of buzzwords. Socialism is a specific form of government. Switzerland is NOT a socialist country. Germany is NOT a socialist country. Sweden is NOT a socialist country. Get your facts straight and read a book from time to time!

I'm not gonna bother with the rest of your post because I've already addressed it seemingly hundreds of times by now, but I'll take exception to this:

As a side note – oh YEAH Bill Maher… The US budget entirely goes to military spending and corporate tax breaks, eh? What a complete moron. Whenever he opens his mouth to vainly try and sound intelligent, he proves himself ever more conclusively to be an absolute idiot. The 60 trillion in unfunded federal obligations is for socialism, dummy. The biggest budget items are socialism, idiot. Defense spending could be cut to zero tomorrow and we’d still be 59.2 trillion in debt for all those wonderful social programs that everyone loves so much.



He didn't say that at all. He was pointing out that the US could choose to fund universal health care, a real pension program, college tuition for anyone able, etc. instead of massively funding defense, giving corporate tax breaks. It wasn't ever suggested all the US budget goes to military spending and corporate tax breaks.

And he's right, this is the choice the US has chosen to make. Now, it's completely fair to debate if that choice is the wise one, but to pretend that's not what the US has chosen to do fiscally is simply ignoring basic fact.

And your statistics are calculated how exactly? Stop pulling numbers out of your butt. The massive deficits run the past few years are due to sudden severe income tax revenue declines plus temporary stimulus when the economy collapsed. If you're taking those numbers to project out long term national debt, you're being extremely disingenuous.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:


Socialism doesn’t work. European governments across the spectrum are being forced to increase privatization and cut social benefits in order to stave of fiscal collapse. When BM glowing describes all the great stuff European countries have (health care etc…) he totally ignores report after report after report of these so-called ‘services’ being abject, utter, complete failures. The UK health care system is being forced to ration SURGERIES (IE death panels) or collapse. Spain, Greece, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Portugal… The list of European socialist nations tottering on the edge of failure and having to pass ‘austerity measures’ to survive is myriad.

Ouch. That's pretty damning. Shame it's not true.

The problem with the NHS in the UK is lack of funding, caused by (surprise, surprise) Thatcher. Most people in the UK, while critical of some of the ways the NHS is run are broadly supportive of the concept, and almost every country with socialised medicine views the US system as backward at best and barbaric at worst.

As for Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Ireland, they were poor countries to begin with and their problems have much less to do with socialism than they do with rampant borrowing (i.e. capitalism). In fact, Ireland is one of the worst off economies and it has nothing close to a socialist government. All it's problems are down to banks loaning property developers ludicrous sums of money in the hope of short term capital gain. Hmmm, that doesn't sound like a socialist issue to me. Meanwhile France and Germany are still strong economies, and the Scandinavian socialist countries continue to rate high in every metric we have for measuring society. The main problems that Germany is facing are due to having to pay for the idiocies of other countries in the EU.


>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Maher calling Palin a retard is like a severed head calling Cain Velasquez a cripple.


No, anyone calling Palin a retard is like any sane person calling a retard a retard.

European Socialism does exist. Over here we just don't call it that, because over here socialism, is SOCIALISM in the Soviet sense. We do have far more comprehensive socialistic programs and we do pay a hell of a lot of more tax. For instance, our very most (classic) liberal is angry about our high taxes and want to push it waay down to 40 %..

You're also not brainwashed into thinking socialist ideas are automatically bad ones, and trained to overlook the examples of socialist programs that already exist.

Every industrialized country is a mixed economy, every single one. We vary between how much we are socialist or capitalist, but we're all mixed, and that pretty much seals the deal that neither capitalism or socialism work 100% of the time. If everyone would accept that simple obvious truth, we could actually have adult conversations about our economy.

>> ^gwiz665:

European Socialism does exist. Over here we just don't call it that, because over here socialism, is SOCIALISM in the Soviet sense. We do have far more comprehensive socialistic programs and we do pay a hell of a lot of more tax. For instance, our very most (classic) liberal is angry about our high taxes and want to push it waay down to 40 %..

And to paraphrase Anthony Weiner: no offense to the mentally handicapped.
>> ^ChaosEngine:


No, anyone calling Palin a retard is like any sane person calling a retard a retard.

Socialized medicine…only failing because of a lack of funding

Oh of course. Socialism never fails. Instead, socialism just doesn’t have enough money. Just keep on pouring taxes into the meat grinder, and finally socialized (whatever) creates the perfect sausages… Except it never does. War on Poverty. Great Society. Socialized Medicine. Universal Education. Social Security. Post Office. Shoot – take it all the way down to Food Stamps. No socialist program ever has ‘enough money’.

Social medicine fails because socialism is not designed to help people. Socialized systems are designed 100% to create large bureaucracies, which in turn exist only to self-perpetuate in the form of increasing year-over-year budgets. Helping people actually decreases a program’s budget-line, so they work to deny services (or waste them) as aggressively as possible so they can use it as leverage to lobby the government for more money and power. That’s the reason why the UK system (or any socialist program) routinely denies more and more ‘care’, while at the same time costing more and more money.

Guys like BS Bill brag about how wonderful socialist systems are. They ignore the reality. Socialist nations are rife with cronyism, corruption, poor standards of living, and regularly oppress their people. Socialist governments are the perpetrators of the worst tragedies of all human history. Historically, for every Switzerland there are a hundred North Koreas. Even the modern Euro socialist lite nations only work because they have capitalist wealth-creation engines to support (barely) their corrupt and inefficient socialist programs. The US is not failing because it is too capitalist and giving too much to the rich. It is failing because heavily socialized programs are doing what they always do… Collapsing because of internal corruption.

At its heart – socialism is nothing more than laziness and selfishness. People see a problem in society. They feel bad. They think, “Gee – someone should do something…” At that point you have a couple choices. 1. Be a capitalist and solve the problem yourself. 2. Be a socialist and vote for someone who PROMISES to solve the problem for you. That’s the trick of socialism. It preys on people who are well-intentioned, but who are also selfish, lazy, and a bit stupid. Socialists want to ‘help’, but are too selfish and lazy to actually do something about the problems they see. Therefore they become stupid and fervidly believe any liar (like Obama) who says they will solve the problem for them using taxes. It is stupid because there is no evidence that taxes EVER solve social problems.

Examples of lies that socialists believe…

“Aw – you feel bad when there are poor people… Vote for me and I’ll create The Great Society and eliminate poverty!”
“Aw – you feel bad about people who have medical needs… Vote for me and I’ll tax the ‘rich’ so you don’t have to pay for your medical expenses!”
“Aw – you get sad when you see pictures of polar bears… Vote for me and I’ll tax all carbon emissions and change the global climate!”
“Aw – you want children to get an education… Vote for me and I’ll create free universal public education!”

And do these systems work? Of course not. The Great Society didn’t make a dent in poverty. Social medicine denies more care than it provides. Carbon taxes don’t change the climate. Kids that go to public schools come out stupider. But the SOCIAL PROGRAMS created to address these problems? Oh – of course – they just need ‘more money’ and THEN they will start working!

Socialism. The lazy jerk’s way of destroying society while telling themselves they are ‘helping’.

I have to agree with Chaosengine. Being Portuguese I can assure you our problems are not a direct result of a socialist agenda. In fact, it's the direct result of governments borrowing more than we can pay, and leaving the tab for the next guy like the assholes that they are, and spending money on completely moronic things.

Did you know Portugal is actually one of the countries in the world with the best network of roads? There are no more, no less that 3 different roads, in parallel connecting Lisbon and Porto (the two biggest cities). You have the A1 (the most important highway), then the A17 (a newer highway) and the old N1 (just a regular 2 lane road). WHY? We don't need it.

A few years back, the then Minister of Defence (who is now the foreign affairs minister, a disgusting weasel) order 2 fucking submarines from Germany. They cost 500 million euros each (1 billion in total). Now... It's true that Portugal has an absolutely huge area of the Atlantic to survey, control, and administer, but anyone with half a brain knows that you do that with frigates and fast ships. That 1 billion euros could have been used to save a big famous shipyard which is on the brink of bankruptcy, and could have easily manufactured hundreds of smaller vessels. (oh.. and that shit head of a minister, when he was the defence minister actually told the people who worked at the shipyard that they would be building what I just said. Of course, they never did)

The previous government insisted against EVERYONE that Lisbon needed a new Airport. Of course, that is now on the shelf, be cause it was completely stupid and it would cost several billion euros.

Oh, did I mention the TGV? (the high speed train). Porto and Lisbon are connected by a train called the Pendular, which looks a lot like a tgv, and is supposed to reach speeds of 250 km/h (which is great really. At that speed the trip between the two cities would take no more than 2 hours) the problem is, greedy incompetent assholes always get their hands on government funded programs, and they built the whole line between Porto and Lisbon (which is about 350km's in lenght) and the only place the train can achieve the top speed is between my city and another one to the south, in a journey of no more than 50km's (it's not a safety thing mind you, it's just the track wasn't built like it was supposed to) The rest of the time, the train hops along a 150.. 170km/h. WHY THE FUCK WOULD WE NEED A TGV between the two cities when the existing train is already great IF it had been properly built. Thankfully that's also in the shelf.

The European Championship of 2004... it was great. Portugal almost won the championship, which would have been great, since we were the hosts. And everything went great. Several new stadiums were built, the festivities were very nice, etc. The problem is, most of these stadiums are now a maintenance nightmare, because the ones left with the bill are the cities and not the government. My own city is 200 million in the red because of all this shit (a city of less than 80,000 people. although the whole district has a lot more people. About 600,000).

These are just a few examples, and not ONE of them is a result of socialism, but of stupid management and capitalism, and wanting to buy shiny things.

AND then we also get fucked nice and royally in the ass by most atrocious capitalist system in the world, the american one, which has the 3 most notorious rating agencies spewing nothing but stupidity, speculation, lies, and anything that gets their fuck buddies some extra euros or dollars. The United States was 2 days away from going into default, and only came up with a ridiculous temporary measure. Yet, none of the agencies touched the american rating. How curious! Portugal was bailed out by the IMF, it has a majority government, consensus from the people that sacrifices must be done even though they suck and in some cases are completely unfair, was actually going beyond what the IMF requested, and still Moody's slashed the rating to junk.

In short... this whole financial crisis was caused by over-consumption, really shitty management, and a lot of business practices that should, quite frankly be a crime!

I would just look to point out out that some of our buses smell of piss from time to time too.

Wow, comment threads are way more fun when you just skip on past the WP bile!

Meanwhile, I haven't seen a 'New Rules' segment in the past few months that hasn't had me laughing out loud.

These are laughable. Universal education is a failure?! Uhh, on what planet? Despite the enormous problems universal education faces today in the US, it's a hell of a lot better than the last time we left education up to the private sector only. It also put the US on the road towards becoming an economic and military superpower. Social Security has been a failure? How exactly?! The US was not an economic superpower until AFTER SSI began, and amazing, we've been a superpower ever since. Not that SSI caused our ascendance, but it clearly didn't hurt at all. The Post Office is a failure?! A few money issues doesn't change the fact that the post office still delivers mail to anywhere in the US for a nominal charge.

Now, and here's the most laughable thing I've seen WP say yet. That everywhere there's socialism, there's cronyism, corruption, poor standards of living, and routinely oppress people. Uhh, dude, we're more capitalist than virtually every European country, and you're saying there's no cronyism, corruption, standards of living are good for everyone in the US, and we oppress people less than France, Britain, or Germany?! Completely laughable.

And do you know how many failed, corrupt mainly market economies there have been?! Do you understand that the US has suffered two massive recessions (1929 & 2008) after structuring itself missing very basic regulation required along with proper enforcement, right? Oh, of course you don't. Somehow, socialist agendas somehow caused each.

For every Switzerland there's a bad socialist economy. Ok, how about this? Name a single thriving economy that isn't a mixed economy.

Socialist agendas are not aimed at creating bureaucracies for the sake of bureaucracies, and advocates are not selfish. I'm a pragmatist who favors what works. I know for example a well run public education system and wide access to normal people for college educations (first introduced to average Americans en masse in the GI Bill) radically changed society for the better. It's absurd to even argue against that. The US's rise to global superpower came as generations began being generally educated. I know the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal program, laid the foundation to industrialize that region of the US, which helped to produce war material to win WWII, improve the quality of life for people in that region with wide availability of electricity, and lots of jobs. It was originally one of those evil gov't socialist programs you so despise.

We can fix public education without privatizing it, btw. Across the US, there are shining examples of top notch schools that are public schools that outperform private schools, even though private schools get their proverbial pick of the litter. Across the US, there are lots of examples of bad private schools. I went to a public school, and here I am, on my second successful career, intelligent, thoughtful, and in demand by employers. I attended a public university, and I don't regret it at all.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Socialized medicine…only failing because of a lack of funding
Oh of course. Socialism never fails. Instead, socialism just doesn’t have enough money. Just keep on pouring taxes into the meat grinder, and finally socialized (whatever) creates the perfect sausages… Except it never does. War on Poverty. Great Society. Socialized Medicine. Universal Education. Social Security. Post Office. Shoot – take it all the way down to Food Stamps. No socialist program ever has ‘enough money’.
Social medicine fails because socialism is not designed to help people. Socialized systems are designed 100% to create large bureaucracies, which in turn exist only to self-perpetuate in the form of increasing year-over-year budgets. Helping people actually decreases a program’s budget-line, so they work to deny services (or waste them) as aggressively as possible so they can use it as leverage to lobby the government for more money and power. That’s the reason why the UK system (or any socialist program) routinely denies more and more ‘care’, while at the same time costing more and more money.
Guys like BS Bill brag about how wonderful socialist systems are. They ignore the reality. Socialist nations are rife with cronyism, corruption, poor standards of living, and regularly oppress their people. Socialist governments are the perpetrators of the worst tragedies of all human history. Historically, for every Switzerland there are a hundred North Koreas. Even the modern Euro socialist lite nations only work because they have capitalist wealth-creation engines to support (barely) their corrupt and inefficient socialist programs. The US is not failing because it is too capitalist and giving too much to the rich. It is failing because heavily socialized programs are doing what they always do… Collapsing because of internal corruption.
At its heart – socialism is nothing more than laziness and selfishness. People see a problem in society. They feel bad. They think, “Gee – someone should do something…” At that point you have a couple choices. 1. Be a capitalist and solve the problem yourself. 2. Be a socialist and vote for someone who PROMISES to solve the problem for you. That’s the trick of socialism. It preys on people who are well-intentioned, but who are also selfish, lazy, and a bit stupid. Socialists want to ‘help’, but are too selfish and lazy to actually do something about the problems they see. Therefore they become stupid and fervidly believe any liar (like Obama) who says they will solve the problem for them using taxes. It is stupid because there is no evidence that taxes EVER solve social problems.
Examples of lies that socialists believe…
“Aw – you feel bad when there are poor people… Vote for me and I’ll create The Great Society and eliminate poverty!”
“Aw – you feel bad about people who have medical needs… Vote for me and I’ll tax the ‘rich’ so you don’t have to pay for your medical expenses!”
“Aw – you get sad when you see pictures of polar bears… Vote for me and I’ll tax all carbon emissions and change the global climate!”
“Aw – you want children to get an education… Vote for me and I’ll create free universal public education!”
And do these systems work? Of course not. The Great Society didn’t make a dent in poverty. Social medicine denies more care than it provides. Carbon taxes don’t change the climate. Kids that go to public schools come out stupider. But the SOCIAL PROGRAMS created to address these problems? Oh – of course – they just need ‘more money’ and THEN they will start working!
Socialism. The lazy jerk’s way of destroying society while telling themselves they are ‘helping’.

Ah classic WP, can't even touch the argument on offer (ie. America already has socialist policies in action and the people screaming loudest about them are also recipients) so he creates an argument he thinks he can win (Bill says socialist countries are awesome). And he even manages to fuck that up because Bill was talking about countries with socialist policies, not socialist countries...

Australia is a democratic country with socialist policies. We're doing okay all things considered. We'd be doing better if greedy capitalists hadn't caused the GFC of course. Remind me WP, when was the last time a socialist policy cause a world wide financial collapse?

We did, but then someone had to mess up the economy some 3 years ago to make a cheap buck.

Im not saying that socialism is the end all of politics it's just that you need a balanced approach to this.
While the market economy is needed to build wealth and prosperity socialism needs to be there to form a base that will allow the market to do so, it is also needed to insure that the market moves in the right direction in the interest of the public (which is almost never the case with capitalism).
>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Socialized medicine…only failing because of a lack of funding
Oh of course. Socialism never fails. Instead, socialism just doesn’t have enough money.

*controversy

Adding video to channels (Controversy) - requested by MrFisk.

To be fair, the economy tanked for various reasons. It was at least 30 years in the making, with policy choices that were poor from both liberal and conservative thought.

>> ^zeoverlord:

We did, but then someone had to mess up the economy some 3 years ago to make a cheap buck.
Im not saying that socialism is the end all of politics it's just that you need a balanced approach to this.
While the market economy is needed to build wealth and prosperity socialism needs to be there to form a base that will allow the market to do so, it is also needed to insure that the market moves in the right direction in the interest of the public (which is almost never the case with capitalism).
>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Socialized medicine…only failing because of a lack of funding
Oh of course. Socialism never fails. Instead, socialism just doesn’t have enough money.

*promote

...in honor of Warren Buffet: socialist
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-18-2011/world-of-class-warfare---warren-buffett-vs--wealthy-conservatives?xrs=share_copy

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, August 1st, 2011 7:51am PDT - promote requested by littledragon_79.