Hi, I’m looking for a country whose people or government mainly support my values. I’m looking for a country that:
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supports wildlife protection
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supports eco-friendly things and solar/wind energy
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supports freedom of expression and does NOT criminalize queer people, be it trans, gay, bi, pan, intersex, asexual, etc.
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peaceful, low crime
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community-oriented
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equal and just
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very friendly towards animals, filled with animal sanctuaries and no-kill shelters
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free education and/or healthcare (preferably education and healthcare are free/government-funded)
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high taxes are therefore fine to me
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compassion-oriented
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affordable food with low unhoused rates and high employment rates
Merz is explaining that they are going to cut welfare. Why? Because wealthy capitalists run Germany, and their gains from imperialism are drying up, so they force austerity to keep their own rate of profit while making the working class pay for it. This is the nature of late-stage capitalism. The inequality, wealth disparity, incompetence, and bureaucracy are all intrinsically tied to the mode of production, imperialist capitalism.
Yes, Germany could have welfare without imperialism, this requires socialism. Socialism isn’t taxation under capitalism like you seem to think it is, though, it’s a fundamentally different mode of production. Where capitalism is a mode of production characterized by private ownership as principle and capitalists ruling the state, socialism is a mode of production characterized by public ownership as principle and the working class in charge of the state, like the GDR.
In capitalism, you cannot simply “tax the rich until there are no rich left,” because the system is dictated by the rich.
Communism is a post-socialist mode of production where the contradictions within socialism have been resolved into a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Communism as a mode of production has never existed, only socialist states guided by communist parties working towards communism. Socialism absolutely does work, and is guiding the largest economy in the world, the PRC.
It seems the problem is most people can’t begin to imagine what actually existing socialism looks like from the inside, without suspending their belief in generations of propaganda fed to us for several generations by our own states, and while we may be able to imagine how to work differently within the framework we have, can’t imagine discarding that framework without something better to replace it. We can imagine bending the framework, but not building a different one before or during the process.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most people imagine a socialist replacement looking a lot like what DOGE did, but here’s a thing: we already have a blueprint for reimagining the existing framework ala New Deal, while we can also work toward building and implementing a new framework based on blueprints from AES states. Nobody is talking about taking a chainsaw to the current framework on day one.
Maybe what I’m saying isn’t realistic, either but I’m open to having it picked apart.
The major difference between the New Deal and what socialists want is the replacement of bourgeois rule with proletarian, which does require axing the state and replacing it. The Party for Socialism and Liberation has a book called Socialist Reconstruction that goes over what that would look like in the US, including nationalizing the top 100 companies immediately.