However, there's no point in pardoning someone when you don't anticipate possible criminal charges,
Obama was considering bringing possible criminal charges, he just couldn't figure out how.
nor if you'd rather bring someone up on charges if you could.
Well, so you agree then: Obama would have liked to have charged Assange, he was simply too incompetent or too politically weak to do it. Since Trump overcame both of those problems, you should be happy then.
Personally, I think Obama should have pardoned Assange and Snowden, but Obama turned out to be completely in the pocket of the national security establishment.
If Hitler was so anti-Capitalist, why was he at such pains to court capitalists, and reward the cooperative once when he came to power?
He didn't "court capitalists", he courted wealthy and powerful industrialists. Wealthy and powerful industrialists love creating monopolies and love screwing people over, and fascism and progressivism give them the power and tools to do it. The only thing that keeps wealthy and powerful industrialists in check is competition in a free market.
Hitler was obviously fine with Capitalism.
It is irrelevant what Hitler deep down believed or what you think he did after he came to power (confused as you are on those points); what is relevant is how he came to power, and that is through promises of striking down the capitalist system and forcing businesses to pay people what they are worth and operate in the interest of society and the nation (as determined by the government). When supporting Hitler and Mussolini, people were looking for a third way, supposedly avoiding the problems of both socialism and capitalism. The fact that Hitler afterwards turned out to be a genocidal maniac, well, that's not what his supporters intended, it never is. In fact, fascism was popular in the West and not generally a dirty word until it was tainted by Hitler's genocide on the one hand, and attacked propagandistically by communist regimes on the other.
And let's be clear here: when you say that you are a "socialist" but are "strongly against any collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government", the third position is pretty much your position.
I have absolutely no idea where you get your ideas of history, but you need to find less biased sources.
My parents lived through WWII, were scattered all over Europe, and lost everything. I experienced real world socialism first hand growing up. I have heard the crap you are spouting before: it's the same propaganda that I heard every day in the propaganda of totalitarian regimes. That's on top of having read a couple of bookshelves full of books on history and economics. I suggest you take your own advice and find yourself some "less biased sources"
There are other differences between Communism and fascism, but I'm strongly against any collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government.
Socialism, communism, and fascism are all "collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government", both in terms of their ideology and in reality. So you are just not being honest.
From the Soviet point of view, they were allying with the imperialist capitalists against the fascist capitalists
Yes, linking capitalism with imperialism and fascism was a deliberate propaganda strategy by the Soviet Union, which makes it all the more unacceptable that you keep repeating this propagandistic lie.
We tend to just assume the US viewpoint, but if you want to understand what was going on at the highest levels you need to understand the other viewpoints.
Well, you certainly do. My family suffered under both fascism and socialism, and I experienced some of it firsthand before I emigrated to the US, so I perfectly well understand "what was going on" and what kind of propaganda the socialist regimes spun. That is why I find your views so contemptible and offensive.
Pardon for what? How can you pardon someone who hasn't even been charged with anything yet? You give him a signed blank piece of paper or what?
We have this wonderful thing called the "WWW". You can use it to get answers to questions like that easily. Really, you should give it a try sometimes. It's a great resource, in particular, if you're too ignorant of US history to figure this out for yourself.
And as a non US citizen not residing in the US is suppose that he still has to comply with US law?
Correct. Just like a non-French citizen not residing in France has to comply with French law, and a non North Korean citizen not residing in North Korea has to comply with North Korean law. You "have to" comply with the laws of any nation, to the extent that that nation is likely to be able to enforce its laws against you.
At no time has Assange had a US security clearance. He has no legal obligation to not publish info others have provided. [...] The US would have to prove that Assange directed the leakers to collect and transfer the leaked information to him.
Well, and that is why it took so long to charge him: generally, prosecutors believed that he was protected under 1A, "but now believe they have found a way to move forward."
This article brings forth a claim of Bradly being directed by WikiLeaks but I have not seen that before not even during Bradley's trial and considering CNN's current reputation for creating "news" I doubt this unsubstantiated claim.
And the way to resolve such doubts, either way, is through a trial.
So I'm having a hard time seeing how they charge him with anything that could stick.
They may well not be able to make it stick. A court may toss this out and hand the Trump administration and Sessions a major embarrassment. If they do, then Assange will be officially cleared, which will be good for him as well. And if the prosecutors do make it stick, we have a legal decision and legal reasoning that people either accept or that will cause Congress to act and change the law.
Either way, resolving such issues by actually bringing them to trial is the right thing to do. Having someone under constant threat of indictment for ten years is itself an injustice, an injustice that is removed by seeing this through to its legal conclusion, whatever it may be.
Hello Secret US various services, you actually broke the law(s), performed illegal operations and basically fucked up your internal security.
Operatives of intelligence agencies often break the laws of other countries. And when discovered, they get indicted, arrested, charged, and imprisoned if possible.
If you think this is newsworthy, or represents a policy change, you really know little about international relations.
Imagine if the tables were turned -- say, the Russian government seeking to extradite and arrest an American citizen for acts that violated some Russian law but which occurred thousands of miles outside of Russian borders.
Foreign governments charge US citizens with espionage all the time (not to mention other crimes) and, of course, demand extradition. Furthermore, the US has mutual extradition treaties with many countries and will extradite US citizens if certain conditions are met. Likewise, the US lives with the fact that often, foreign governments refuse to extradite (e.g., Roman Polanski) and doesn't go into a frenzy over it.
It takes an incredible, overweening arrogance for U.S. officials to assume that every goddamned person in the world, wherever they may be, is subject to Washington's dictates.
What happens internationally may seem confusing to privileged Americans like you who seem to have little first-hand experience with, or understanding of, the world beyond US borders. But, in fact, charging people beyond one's borders and demanding their extradition is common internationally. Since you obviously don't seem to be able to rely on first hand experience, I suggest you read the news a bit more diligently. You might also use Google search to find past cases in which US citizens have been charged with espionage by other countries.
I would have liked to see Assange pardoned and this matter cleared up. Obama had eight years to do this but dragged his feet, leaving Assange in legal limbo, because it was politically the most expedient thing to do.
As the world becomes more and more populous and intertwined, voting with one's feet is getting less and less practical.
How does a "more populous and intertwined world" make it harder to move from California to Oregon? How does a "more populous and intertwined world" necessitate that laws be passed at the national level rather than at the state or local level? If anything, a more populous world would mean that political units should become geographically smaller and more diverse, instead of the other way around.
Lots of problems are national, and aren't well suited to being handled at lower levels.
And lots of problems are not national and are well suited to being handled at lower levels, yet progressives push for them being handled at the national level in order to take away any ability of people voting with their feet.
Why can't you leave the country? You can try to emigrate to any other country you like.
I didn't say that "you can't leave", I said that American progressives are particularly draconian on people who try to vote with their feet, compared to Europeans: expatriates have to pay US tax on their worldwide income, and people who give up US citizenship entirely have to pay a massive exit tax.
Let's not sit here and pretend that HDTVs didn't cost thousands of dollars when they first hit the market.
And they remained a luxury item for those who could afford it. $5000 TVs certainly did not create "a monopoly driven into the industry secured by patents", because the $200 regular TVs continued to be available for a long time.
I didn't buy my first HDTV until they had come down to about $300. No monopoly.
(Also, Hitler wasn't a socialist. He was a capitalist.)
Stop spreading this ignorant bullshit. Hitler was explicitly, expressly, unequivocally anti-capitalist. So was Mussolini. That wasn't just what these people ran on, it is what they believed, through and through.
"Dictatorship of the proletariat" is a strictly Marxist and Communist concept. There are plenty of varieties of socialism that don't involve that.
Correct: national socialism doesn't involve that; dropping the class aspects of socialism/communism and replacing it with the notion of "society as a whole" is the primary distinction between fascism/national socialism and communism/socialism.
Learn some history. We don't have much absolute poverty today because we have some socialist elements in the economy. Study earlier and purer forms of capitalism, and what happened to people.
Yes, you need to learn some history: what happened under "earlier and purer forms of capitalism" was rapid growth and rapid reductions in absolute poverty.
There are such things as barriers to entry.
Indeed there are: they are created by government, in particular, by progressive and fascist governments.
(Fascism is fine with this, by the way, since it's a very friendly philosophy to capitalists, and historically doesn't seem to care about the masses.)
You are absolutely right that fascism is fine with barriers to entry: it creates them. Where you are wrong is calling that system "capitalism"; that system is, in fact, a regulated market economy, because the primary effect of regulations is to prohibit economic activity. And of course that is exactly what you are advocating.
In the main fascist states I know of, pre-takeover businessmen who didn't get political against the fascists remained in place and profited. [...] In a Communist state, a factory manager is one primarily because of politics. It isn't enough to not be an enemy of the Party; one must participate.
I see, so that's your great distinction between communism and fascism, and that's why communism is A-OK?
If you're a capitalist willing to go along, you're going to like a Fascist regime a lot better.
Of course, why wouldn't they? "You need to stop being a capitalist, but we will let you keep your property and use you as a manager if you go along with fascism" is certainly a lot more persuasive than "We'll kill you no matter what."
Fascists were usually anti-labor,
They were nominally pro-labor, and factually anti-labor. Just like communists.
and the Nazis were happy to provide cooperative businesses with slave labor.
This will likely be a considerable disruptive move within the industry that has made traditional heat-based machines for decades now. A monopoly driven into the industry secured by patents may not prove to be a benefit for all those employed in the industry. For consumers, neither will a $5000 price tag.
Good grief, listen to yourself. How can a $5000 product be a "disruptive force" competing with products costing $200 and doing the same thing?
They ran some small-scale experiments with flat fabric samples on a huge transducer, then they stuck some transducers into a drum and imply that somehow they can make it scale. If this ever works (and that's doubtful), it will take tens of millions of dollars to develop. What a waste of $880000 of public funding.
You want energy efficient drying? That's really simple: hang your clothes up on a line. If you need it faster, wear synthetics.
Socialism is an economic system based on a philosophy. It does not lead to totalitarianism.
Socialism doesn't "lead to" totalitarianism it is explicitly totalitarian: it envisions a "dictatorship of the proletariat" that reshapes society and can control every aspect of life in order to achieve a society conforms to communist thought and ideals. You can also look at more specific aspects of totalitarianism. Marx and Hitler explicitly rejected freedom of speech and freedom of the press because they considered the goal of bringing about their utopias as more important than such basic individual liberties.
The problem with classical liberalism as you describe it is that it's really hard on the have-nots.
Classical liberalism is a lot less hard on the down-trodden than socialism: even the poor under capitalism are almost universally better off than the average man under socialism.
The usual philosophy of Socialism is to help the downtrodden, and the usual philosophy behind Capitalism is to ignore them or exploit them further.
The "philosophy" of socialism is that it is the job of the state to help the downtrodden. Now, who do you think runs the state in a socialist country? Do you think it's really smart, gentle, charitable people who climb up the socialist party hierarchy to gain power? Or do you think it's power-hungry, greedy sociopaths? I can tell you from first-hand experience that it's the latter. And since it's a socialist country, you can't get away from them: those sociopaths decide whether you get a job, an education, a home, a car, even food.
The "philosophy" of free market capitalism is based on the realization that the world is full of power-hungry, greedy sociopaths no matter what you do, and that, at a minimum, people should have the freedom not to associate with them and not to be forced to work for them. Not only does that mean that in a capitalist system, you're not forced to be dependent for your livelihood and shelter on sociopaths, it actually encourages those sociopaths to direct their energy towards doing things that causes people to want to associate with them and give them their money. It's not a perfect solution (while the state may not force you to put up with bad people, circumstances might), but it's a lot better than the alternatives. Furthermore, even imperfect capitalism eliminates absolute poverty, so that's simply not a problem. I would rather be poor in the US than be an average citizen in an East Bloc country, a choice that many people, in fact, have made in the 20th century.
Classic liberalism, as you put it, doesn't imply a free market. It implies a market with limited or no government intervention, and markets like that generally become less free in modern economies.
A free market is simply a market in which economic transactions are voluntary, nothing more and nothing less. If a government intervenes in markets, it is necessarily to coerce some people to make transactions that they wouldn't make voluntarily (because if they made them voluntarily, the state wouldn't have to intervene); therefore, government intervention, by definition, can never make a market any more free than it would be without government intervention.
What you're probably referring to is the idea that markets become monopolized unless regulated. That just is Marxist and fascist humbug. In fact, the only source of long-lived monopolies is government. Occasionally, businessmen with delusions of grandeur and too much money try to "corner the market" on something, but that doesn't make the market unfree (all transactions are still voluntary), and more importantly, it's just not sustainable. And, of course, there is nothing more monopolistic than a socialist system in which everything is fully monopolized.
Read up on how Nazi Germany worked. Businesses were in the hands of businessmen.
The only practical difference between fascist countries and socialist countries is in who fills the position of "businessmen": socialists kill off the pre-revolutionary businessmen and replace them with their own crooks, while fascists simply persuade some subset of prerevolutionary businessmen to join them and become crooks. After a communist/socialist/fascist takeover, free markets and capitalism cease to exist, so the distinction between a "businessman" and a socialist factory manager is meaningless: both are allowed only to operate in the ways the ruling party tells them to, and if they comply with the government, they get wealth and power.
The National Socialist German Workers' Party started as at least partly socialist, but that wing was eliminated in the 1930s. The party name and the word "Socialist" were useful in propaganda, but the NSDAP didn't act on it.
Well, we got a simple natural experiment with Nazi Germany and East Germany, and there was little practical difference between the two: they both promised to represent the interests of workers, they implemented many similar policies, and they both ended up as totalitarian shitholes instead.
Copyright doesn't prevent me from telling stories. I'm trying to make the point that copyright is an artificial construct without traditional roots.
So are about 99.9% of the laws we have today.
Are you an anarchist?
No, I simply believe in subsidiarity and classical liberalism.
If not, government does need money to operate, and we are required to pay more or less our share.
But people aren't paying their share, that's the problem. The federal government has become a vast redistributor of wealth based on political power, where some people get far more than their fair share. And the reason that this is happening at the federal level is because there people can't vote with their feet. Taxation should be primarily local, and secondarily at the state level. That way, people can move away from dysfunctional government.
The problem isn't with conservatives and classical liberals wanting to do away with government or taxes, the problem is with progressives demanding totalitarian control so that they can implement policies that many people simply don't want to live under. American progressives are particularly bad that way because, unlike Europeans, they even effectively take away the option of leaving the country.
I would define "great" as leading the world in peaceful conflict resolution, technological advancement, social advancement, education, art and overall happiness and equality of a nation's citizenry. Trump is working towards, well, none of those.
Ah, yes, the values of a progressive elite imposed on the citizenry by force if necessary; the political program of the likes of FDR, Mussolini, Bismarck, cheered on by intellectuals and the middle class. But the ambiguous and questionable nature of some of these goals and the injustice of imposing them on the people by force isn't even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that a century of progressivism shows us that progressive governments are utterly incapable of delivering on these promises and often make things worse. You can't make people happy or educated through government force; you can't resolve conflicts (peacefully or otherwise) between people around the world that have been going on for centuries; you can't force people to like each other or to create technological advancements. What government can achieve is equality of a nation's citizenry, though that only by making everybody equally dirt poor.
Also, you're looking at storytellers in pre-literate societies in the wrong way. It wasn't like a guild, and you didn't have to be a professional to tell a story. If you knew a story, and could spin a good yarn, you could tell it.
And copyright is preventing you from "telling stories"... how?
Copyright law tells me that I can't do certain specific things with certain specific items I own. There's a difference there.
There are lots of differences; they are also spelled differently, for example. But how is that relevant?
The law arbitrarily deprives me of my property (taxation) and it arbitrarily limits my ability to use my property in certain ways (copyright law). If you believe the former is justified, I don't see what principled objections you can have to the latter.
I think I'm pretty consistent: I think both tax law as it currently stands and copyright law violate personal property rights. As such, I oppose both. However, as long as they are the law of the land, I obey both, and I certainly want the government to enforce both of them strictly and equitably.
Jacobins believed in positive rights, equality of outcome, rejection of religion, redistribution of property, and scientism. In what way did they differ from socialists?
were dwarfed by the death and destruction of the Napoleonic Wars that followed
Yes, that's the usual sequence of events: socialists stage a revolution, socialism runs the country into the ground and kills a whole bunch of people, then dictators move in and kill a whole bunch more people.
While the Soviet Union and Communist China killed a lot of people, it wasn't at the overall rate of Nazi Germany and militaristic Japan in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s
Not even close. The Soviet Union and Communist China killed many tens of millions of people between them. The Great Leap Forward alone killed about 20-40 million people. Furthermore, the Nazi death toll should be counted there as well, because fascism, communism, and socialism are ideologically quite close (that's why they hate each other so much: they are competing for the same followers).
Socialism is an economic ideology or system where the means of production are, directly or indirectly, owned and run by the workers. Capitalism is an economic ideology or system where the means of production are separate from the workers and may be used for rent (in the economic sense). If you see only one as an ideology, you're too deep in one of them.
An ideology is a set of norms and values. Socialism defines such a set of values and then defines an (eponymous) economic system to deliver on those values; and, in fact, in reality, stripped of all its mumbo-jumbo, socialism simply advocates a form of totalitarianism, that is, an ability of the state to intervene in people's lives in any way deemed necessary to achieve the goals of socialism. The primary ideology that opposes socialism is, in fact, (classical) liberalism, namely the belief that the state only has the right to enforce negative rights, not positive rights.
Classical liberalism implies free market capitalism as the economic system. But you can certainly have free market capitalism exist under many other forms of political organization.
The strawman of capitalism as the supposed opposing ideology to socialism is a nice fiction created by socialists; it's because if you contrast socialism with its actual opposing ideology of liberalism, most people naturally reject socialism.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess again.
Obama was considering bringing possible criminal charges, he just couldn't figure out how.
Well, so you agree then: Obama would have liked to have charged Assange, he was simply too incompetent or too politically weak to do it. Since Trump overcame both of those problems, you should be happy then.
Personally, I think Obama should have pardoned Assange and Snowden, but Obama turned out to be completely in the pocket of the national security establishment.
He didn't "court capitalists", he courted wealthy and powerful industrialists. Wealthy and powerful industrialists love creating monopolies and love screwing people over, and fascism and progressivism give them the power and tools to do it. The only thing that keeps wealthy and powerful industrialists in check is competition in a free market.
It is irrelevant what Hitler deep down believed or what you think he did after he came to power (confused as you are on those points); what is relevant is how he came to power, and that is through promises of striking down the capitalist system and forcing businesses to pay people what they are worth and operate in the interest of society and the nation (as determined by the government). When supporting Hitler and Mussolini, people were looking for a third way, supposedly avoiding the problems of both socialism and capitalism. The fact that Hitler afterwards turned out to be a genocidal maniac, well, that's not what his supporters intended, it never is. In fact, fascism was popular in the West and not generally a dirty word until it was tainted by Hitler's genocide on the one hand, and attacked propagandistically by communist regimes on the other.
And let's be clear here: when you say that you are a "socialist" but are "strongly against any collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government", the third position is pretty much your position.
My parents lived through WWII, were scattered all over Europe, and lost everything. I experienced real world socialism first hand growing up. I have heard the crap you are spouting before: it's the same propaganda that I heard every day in the propaganda of totalitarian regimes. That's on top of having read a couple of bookshelves full of books on history and economics. I suggest you take your own advice and find yourself some "less biased sources"
Socialism, communism, and fascism are all "collectivist authoritarian philosophy of government", both in terms of their ideology and in reality. So you are just not being honest.
Yes, linking capitalism with imperialism and fascism was a deliberate propaganda strategy by the Soviet Union, which makes it all the more unacceptable that you keep repeating this propagandistic lie.
Well, you certainly do. My family suffered under both fascism and socialism, and I experienced some of it firsthand before I emigrated to the US, so I perfectly well understand "what was going on" and what kind of propaganda the socialist regimes spun. That is why I find your views so contemptible and offensive.
Pardon for what? How can you pardon someone who hasn't even been charged with anything yet? You give him a signed blank piece of paper or what?
We have this wonderful thing called the "WWW". You can use it to get answers to questions like that easily. Really, you should give it a try sometimes. It's a great resource, in particular, if you're too ignorant of US history to figure this out for yourself.
Correct. Just like a non-French citizen not residing in France has to comply with French law, and a non North Korean citizen not residing in North Korea has to comply with North Korean law. You "have to" comply with the laws of any nation, to the extent that that nation is likely to be able to enforce its laws against you.
Well, and that is why it took so long to charge him: generally, prosecutors believed that he was protected under 1A, "but now believe they have found a way to move forward."
And the way to resolve such doubts, either way, is through a trial.
They may well not be able to make it stick. A court may toss this out and hand the Trump administration and Sessions a major embarrassment. If they do, then Assange will be officially cleared, which will be good for him as well. And if the prosecutors do make it stick, we have a legal decision and legal reasoning that people either accept or that will cause Congress to act and change the law.
Either way, resolving such issues by actually bringing them to trial is the right thing to do. Having someone under constant threat of indictment for ten years is itself an injustice, an injustice that is removed by seeing this through to its legal conclusion, whatever it may be.
Operatives of intelligence agencies often break the laws of other countries. And when discovered, they get indicted, arrested, charged, and imprisoned if possible.
If you think this is newsworthy, or represents a policy change, you really know little about international relations.
Foreign governments charge US citizens with espionage all the time (not to mention other crimes) and, of course, demand extradition. Furthermore, the US has mutual extradition treaties with many countries and will extradite US citizens if certain conditions are met. Likewise, the US lives with the fact that often, foreign governments refuse to extradite (e.g., Roman Polanski) and doesn't go into a frenzy over it.
What happens internationally may seem confusing to privileged Americans like you who seem to have little first-hand experience with, or understanding of, the world beyond US borders. But, in fact, charging people beyond one's borders and demanding their extradition is common internationally. Since you obviously don't seem to be able to rely on first hand experience, I suggest you read the news a bit more diligently. You might also use Google search to find past cases in which US citizens have been charged with espionage by other countries.
I would have liked to see Assange pardoned and this matter cleared up. Obama had eight years to do this but dragged his feet, leaving Assange in legal limbo, because it was politically the most expedient thing to do.
How does a "more populous and intertwined world" make it harder to move from California to Oregon? How does a "more populous and intertwined world" necessitate that laws be passed at the national level rather than at the state or local level? If anything, a more populous world would mean that political units should become geographically smaller and more diverse, instead of the other way around.
And lots of problems are not national and are well suited to being handled at lower levels, yet progressives push for them being handled at the national level in order to take away any ability of people voting with their feet.
I didn't say that "you can't leave", I said that American progressives are particularly draconian on people who try to vote with their feet, compared to Europeans: expatriates have to pay US tax on their worldwide income, and people who give up US citizenship entirely have to pay a massive exit tax.
You don't know what you're talking about.
And they remained a luxury item for those who could afford it. $5000 TVs certainly did not create "a monopoly driven into the industry secured by patents", because the $200 regular TVs continued to be available for a long time.
I didn't buy my first HDTV until they had come down to about $300. No monopoly.
Stop spreading this ignorant bullshit. Hitler was explicitly, expressly, unequivocally anti-capitalist. So was Mussolini. That wasn't just what these people ran on, it is what they believed, through and through.
Correct: national socialism doesn't involve that; dropping the class aspects of socialism/communism and replacing it with the notion of "society as a whole" is the primary distinction between fascism/national socialism and communism/socialism.
Yes, you need to learn some history: what happened under "earlier and purer forms of capitalism" was rapid growth and rapid reductions in absolute poverty.
Indeed there are: they are created by government, in particular, by progressive and fascist governments.
You are absolutely right that fascism is fine with barriers to entry: it creates them. Where you are wrong is calling that system "capitalism"; that system is, in fact, a regulated market economy, because the primary effect of regulations is to prohibit economic activity. And of course that is exactly what you are advocating.
I see, so that's your great distinction between communism and fascism, and that's why communism is A-OK?
Of course, why wouldn't they? "You need to stop being a capitalist, but we will let you keep your property and use you as a manager if you go along with fascism" is certainly a lot more persuasive than "We'll kill you no matter what."
They were nominally pro-labor, and factually anti-labor. Just like communists.
Just like communists.
Good grief, listen to yourself. How can a $5000 product be a "disruptive force" competing with products costing $200 and doing the same thing?
They ran some small-scale experiments with flat fabric samples on a huge transducer, then they stuck some transducers into a drum and imply that somehow they can make it scale. If this ever works (and that's doubtful), it will take tens of millions of dollars to develop. What a waste of $880000 of public funding.
You want energy efficient drying? That's really simple: hang your clothes up on a line. If you need it faster, wear synthetics.
That's pretty much all you need to know; it has failure written all over it.
Socialism doesn't "lead to" totalitarianism it is explicitly totalitarian: it envisions a "dictatorship of the proletariat" that reshapes society and can control every aspect of life in order to achieve a society conforms to communist thought and ideals. You can also look at more specific aspects of totalitarianism. Marx and Hitler explicitly rejected freedom of speech and freedom of the press because they considered the goal of bringing about their utopias as more important than such basic individual liberties.
Classical liberalism is a lot less hard on the down-trodden than socialism: even the poor under capitalism are almost universally better off than the average man under socialism.
The "philosophy" of socialism is that it is the job of the state to help the downtrodden. Now, who do you think runs the state in a socialist country? Do you think it's really smart, gentle, charitable people who climb up the socialist party hierarchy to gain power? Or do you think it's power-hungry, greedy sociopaths? I can tell you from first-hand experience that it's the latter. And since it's a socialist country, you can't get away from them: those sociopaths decide whether you get a job, an education, a home, a car, even food.
The "philosophy" of free market capitalism is based on the realization that the world is full of power-hungry, greedy sociopaths no matter what you do, and that, at a minimum, people should have the freedom not to associate with them and not to be forced to work for them. Not only does that mean that in a capitalist system, you're not forced to be dependent for your livelihood and shelter on sociopaths, it actually encourages those sociopaths to direct their energy towards doing things that causes people to want to associate with them and give them their money. It's not a perfect solution (while the state may not force you to put up with bad people, circumstances might), but it's a lot better than the alternatives. Furthermore, even imperfect capitalism eliminates absolute poverty, so that's simply not a problem. I would rather be poor in the US than be an average citizen in an East Bloc country, a choice that many people, in fact, have made in the 20th century.
A free market is simply a market in which economic transactions are voluntary, nothing more and nothing less. If a government intervenes in markets, it is necessarily to coerce some people to make transactions that they wouldn't make voluntarily (because if they made them voluntarily, the state wouldn't have to intervene); therefore, government intervention, by definition, can never make a market any more free than it would be without government intervention.
What you're probably referring to is the idea that markets become monopolized unless regulated. That just is Marxist and fascist humbug. In fact, the only source of long-lived monopolies is government. Occasionally, businessmen with delusions of grandeur and too much money try to "corner the market" on something, but that doesn't make the market unfree (all transactions are still voluntary), and more importantly, it's just not sustainable. And, of course, there is nothing more monopolistic than a socialist system in which everything is fully monopolized.
The only practical difference between fascist countries and socialist countries is in who fills the position of "businessmen": socialists kill off the pre-revolutionary businessmen and replace them with their own crooks, while fascists simply persuade some subset of prerevolutionary businessmen to join them and become crooks. After a communist/socialist/fascist takeover, free markets and capitalism cease to exist, so the distinction between a "businessman" and a socialist factory manager is meaningless: both are allowed only to operate in the ways the ruling party tells them to, and if they comply with the government, they get wealth and power.
Well, we got a simple natural experiment with Nazi Germany and East Germany, and there was little practical difference between the two: they both promised to represent the interests of workers, they implemented many similar policies, and they both ended up as totalitarian shitholes instead.
Yes, that's pretty much what Sunde said. RTFA
So are about 99.9% of the laws we have today.
No, I simply believe in subsidiarity and classical liberalism.
But people aren't paying their share, that's the problem. The federal government has become a vast redistributor of wealth based on political power, where some people get far more than their fair share. And the reason that this is happening at the federal level is because there people can't vote with their feet. Taxation should be primarily local, and secondarily at the state level. That way, people can move away from dysfunctional government.
The problem isn't with conservatives and classical liberals wanting to do away with government or taxes, the problem is with progressives demanding totalitarian control so that they can implement policies that many people simply don't want to live under. American progressives are particularly bad that way because, unlike Europeans, they even effectively take away the option of leaving the country.
Ah, yes, the values of a progressive elite imposed on the citizenry by force if necessary; the political program of the likes of FDR, Mussolini, Bismarck, cheered on by intellectuals and the middle class. But the ambiguous and questionable nature of some of these goals and the injustice of imposing them on the people by force isn't even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that a century of progressivism shows us that progressive governments are utterly incapable of delivering on these promises and often make things worse. You can't make people happy or educated through government force; you can't resolve conflicts (peacefully or otherwise) between people around the world that have been going on for centuries; you can't force people to like each other or to create technological advancements. What government can achieve is equality of a nation's citizenry, though that only by making everybody equally dirt poor.
And copyright is preventing you from "telling stories"... how?
There are lots of differences; they are also spelled differently, for example. But how is that relevant?
The law arbitrarily deprives me of my property (taxation) and it arbitrarily limits my ability to use my property in certain ways (copyright law). If you believe the former is justified, I don't see what principled objections you can have to the latter.
I think I'm pretty consistent: I think both tax law as it currently stands and copyright law violate personal property rights. As such, I oppose both. However, as long as they are the law of the land, I obey both, and I certainly want the government to enforce both of them strictly and equitably.
Jacobins believed in positive rights, equality of outcome, rejection of religion, redistribution of property, and scientism. In what way did they differ from socialists?
Yes, that's the usual sequence of events: socialists stage a revolution, socialism runs the country into the ground and kills a whole bunch of people, then dictators move in and kill a whole bunch more people.
Not even close. The Soviet Union and Communist China killed many tens of millions of people between them. The Great Leap Forward alone killed about 20-40 million people. Furthermore, the Nazi death toll should be counted there as well, because fascism, communism, and socialism are ideologically quite close (that's why they hate each other so much: they are competing for the same followers).
An ideology is a set of norms and values. Socialism defines such a set of values and then defines an (eponymous) economic system to deliver on those values; and, in fact, in reality, stripped of all its mumbo-jumbo, socialism simply advocates a form of totalitarianism, that is, an ability of the state to intervene in people's lives in any way deemed necessary to achieve the goals of socialism. The primary ideology that opposes socialism is, in fact, (classical) liberalism, namely the belief that the state only has the right to enforce negative rights, not positive rights.
Classical liberalism implies free market capitalism as the economic system. But you can certainly have free market capitalism exist under many other forms of political organization.
The strawman of capitalism as the supposed opposing ideology to socialism is a nice fiction created by socialists; it's because if you contrast socialism with its actual opposing ideology of liberalism, most people naturally reject socialism.