Not just Eisenhower. All those before him too. The extremely wealthy—I’m talking robber baron wealthy—would have nearly 90% of their wealth taxed way long ago. They fought tooth & nail over the decades to lower it, and it gradually was brought down to where they now pay less taxes than the middle class. The biggest changes happened from the 60s-90s, which is also where most of our social change came from (hence the last 2 sentences I made in that other thread).
But then that means I’m both a socialist and a capitalist lol.
I understand what you’re saying, but the problem is that there’s be too much disagreement and nothing would ever get done. That’s actually precisely why Lenin frowned upon the mainstream socialists. Spiting one person would be like spiting the whole and people would be bickering for way too long, unless it’s a majority rules type thing (democracy) in which case you’d need to have semi-independent city-states so that they don’t outvote those in rural areas (because if they do, the whole country would collapse since rural areas control food supply).
As for your last paragraph though, that goes back into the problem I said before where one person is working a lot harder than another person while they both have the same standard of living. That’s basically anarchism, which isn’t nearly as efficient as bureaucracies for large-scale operations. You could make decisions more swiftly if you compartmentalized the tasks more. It’s why the Persians were able to get so powerful because they were the first ones to develop one if I recall correctly (I remember reading this in my social studies book in like 2nd or 3rd grade so forgive me if I’m wrong). Like I said, I just don’t see it as getting stuff done or really viable for large communities really. In the end, you and I (along with like 95% of others) don’t disagree on what the end goals are, we just disagree with how to get there. The problem is that people suck, not even the system. If certain people weren’t money-hungry and power-hungry all the time, capitalism would work. So would communism. Anarchism too. Every system would work if people just stopped sucking all the time lol and could accurately communicate with one another.
You can call it pedantic but I'm going to be a good economist and insist that they didn't really have their 'wealth' taxed away, they had their 'money' taxed away, because "money isn't wealth". And yes, the biggest changes indeed happened during that period and continued to happen afterward. 1971 IIRC was the breaking point when improved productivity gains in USA detached from increased wage gains, and price inflation for essentials (education, healthcare, housing, maybe other stuff like utilities but I don't remember what else) also started taking off. The control over economic assets to be able to detach wage gains from productivity like that,
that's wealth.
You can't be a socialist and a capitalist, that's like simultaneously wanting to bake a blueberry pie and not wanting to bake a blueberry pie. You can be conflicted in which one you think is the better idea, but you can't want both at the same time. Maybe you're more of a socialist than you dared think
Revolutionary Catalonia seemed to work fine for as long as it managed to exist before the fascists wiped it out, I'm not so sure that nothing would ever get done, and yes there would of course be majority rules democracy. It's supposed to be practically viable, not a dreamland where everything is completely flawless perfection, that's just wishful thinking.
There is no set model for what the means to achieve socialism should be or whether some goals are achievable or not. The means you want to try and the goals you want to define are up to you. They will then have to be experimented with and adapted as they contact reality. You are of course right that bad people, like cluster Bs, suck no matter which system they exist in. But positions of power, especially without oversight and accountability, attract and foster predatory people to them like homing beacons - it's far easier to have what's called a Pathocracy when you have less democracy than when you have more. And there is no reason why functions can't be delegated. The difference is that any delegates would always be able to be overruled from below, held accountable in direct meetings with their electorate, and be recallable.
The fact is that anarchism has already "worked" for almost all of homo sapiens's evolutionary history. For most of our history there was democracy rather than authoritarian chains of command as in corporations and states, no privatization of socially necessary economic assets like land, resources or money creation, no production for profit with negative externalities and workers competing against each other for wages in arbitrary jobs to survive in a top-down hierarchy of command, there was even sharing of society's "surplus value" in food and tools, and our ancestors had shorter equivalent working weeks than our full time ones are now. The question is, how do we translate this into a working model for us in our conditions today.
