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We pay microtransactions on life
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Swede here, I have said it before, and I'll say it again:
The Social Democratic is the best ideology humanity has found.
It combines the safety nets of government run services with the powerful incentive of a free market.
Sure, not all sectors are included in the free market, essential services like public transport, power, water, sewage, hospitals, schools, and similar stuff that you need to live and participate in society should be run by the government, and not just by decree, but actually running them.
Anything more should be on a (regulated) free market.
Progressive tax brackets should be kept st a high level, with a public highscore list with a awards like fancy dinners, medals, and other symbols of status for paying a lot of tax, creating more incentives to pay tax.
That to me sounds like a good society
It's pretty good while it lasts, but lately I'm getting the impression that social democratic states are kind of weak against propaganda from other ideologies. Core issue being that even in social democratic states, the rich still accumulate wealth, which gives them undue influence over the population.
There isn't a human on this planet that isn't weak to propaganda.
Yes. The issue is that social democratic states have a general tendency to be very permissive towards propaganda that is hostile to social democracy, because offering a lot of freedom of expression is generally part of the core ideas of social democracy.
This is a problem of any state with freedom of expression, not specific to social democracy. The USA fell victim to it and was never anywhere close to social democracy.
Public education seems to be the best treatment so far, and it's more prevalent in social democratic states. I sincerely hope something more robust can scale someday.
I think that in Social-Democracy the means by which information is spread should not be owned by the Private sector.
In other words, the Press should either be state owned, owned by its workers (i.e. cooperatives), owned by everybody in the area they cover or some other such form of communal ownership were power over it is not approportioned based on wealth.
Like Tolerance, there is a Paradox here were the freedom of Social-Democracy when extended to structures which can be captured by those who gain from having a different system to undermine Social-Democracy through Propaganda, will end up destroying it, so permiting freedom there Social-Democracy ends up delivering less freedom overall (because it gets subverted and eventually destroyed).
Mind you, this just a vague idea based on having seen in places like Britain when I lived there how the Press, after being almost entirelly captured by a few wealthy individuals in Thatcher's years, very activelly and openly pushed the country first towards extreme Neoliberalism (which is how the leftwing Labour Party was hollowed out and replaced by the hard-right "New Labour" ideology) and later even Fascism (which is how the Tory party was captured and the "conservative" ideology it was replaced by rabid racist and ultra-nationalist populism and New Labour itself has more openly embraced autoritarian tools of exercising power, such as expanding extreme civil society surveillance more forcefully and deeming groups demonstrating against their policies "terrorists" and arresting those who support those groups).
I think a modified version of social democracy that seeks to prevent excess accumulation of wealth/power would be more resilient to this effect.
There will always be an upper crust full of people that want to be the upperest. That's how we got here.
Do say, what "incentive" do you see in this "free market"?
Because just FYI, an overwhelming majority of things that actually progressed humanity forward... We're not done for capital. They weren't done in the hopes of getting rich. True innovation, true progress comes not from the want of money or power or control, but by the want of knowledge. And the "free market" most definitely does not incentivise seeking knowledge - in fact said market heavily depends on keeping a big chunk of the population just smart enough to do the menial work they're "needed for" by the ruling elite.
Denmark and Sweden are definitely examples of the direction we should be going, but that's all - they're the direction, not the end goal.
If your goal is to lead the race (for best quality of life), then 1st place is the goal. 1st place doesn't slow down or they won't be 1st for long. If a utopia is the finish line, but not for another half marathon, then focus on the next mile and/or the next position in the race. That's how progress is made.
Except there's no nation-wide drive to be "number one" - except for maybe the US but then again they use that to cover up how shite their QoL is.
Progress on a societal level is made once it happens on an individual level, and society recognises the worth of that progress. See e.g. bicycles, cars, telephone, radio, electricity in general, vaccines, or pasteurisation, or literally any advancement - a personal need (let that be for the thing, or for knowledge) drives the individual discovery, which then gets adopted by society.
In fact you can see contrary examples of the "free market" not innovating but keeping innovation away from people. Not just today, but look back e.g. at the various industry battles that resulted in not the better product but the better capitalist winning. Edison v Tesla - even though we use mostly Tesla's work today, it's credited to Edison. For example, Tesla always promoted AC, while Edison was a proponent of DC. Guess which we are using today overwhelmingly? Guess who got rich, and who died penniless?
The free market isn't the source of innovation, it's the stifler of it. Period.
Ask Palestinians what they have to say about how wonderful EU Social Democracy is. Ask Libyans the same, or Iraqi. Ask Algerians, murdered by the million in the 1960s, Burkinabe or Mali having their central bank in Paris what they think of France's social democracy. Ask Cubans or Syrians what they think of Obama's social democracy. Ask the immigrant field-labourers picking up the berries planted in Almería (Spain) that you eat in Sweden what they think of Social Democracy.
Ask the Greeks who elected the leftist party Syriza to government, only to have their state power removed by the Troika under threat of the European Central Bank to drop servicing of Greek state bonds. Ask the French who democratically elected a leftist coalition last elections and their president of the republic rejects to nominate a candidate for them. Or ask them what they think of Social "Democracy" when Macron declares emergency measures to skip the Parliament vote and implement an antidemocratic raise of the retirement age.
Ask the Spaniards what they think of Social Democracy when their police and ministry of interior manufactured false evidence of funding from Venezuela and Iran to the largest leftist party in the country at the time (Podemos) together with a media campaign to leak this "evidence", when 40% of the media are owned by fucking Silvio Berlusconi (burn in hell, fascist fuck).
Such wonderful "democracies" all of them, raising military expenditure collectively to 5% of GDP without any democratic input from society, all of them enacting exclusively austerity policy for the past 20 years of my life.
People my age (30ish) in Europe have NEVER seen anything other than austerity policy and the ever growing degradation of public services, growth in inequality, stagnation in economics, lowering of purchase power, raising of rent prices and lowering of home ownership rates, destruction of labor rights, and now the fucking raise of the far right all over the continent. In 4 years time, virtually all of the EU will be controlled by far right parties, who will be using the 5% GDP expenditures in weapons of "social democrats" for god knows what.
Tell me again how fucking wonderful this system is
I mean as a matter of fact it is better than the American system, but the rise of far right parties like the AFD in germany is terrifying. I mean what system do you recommend and could it be implemented in Europe?
Well, you may guess from my username, I'm a socialist. Not as in socialdemocrat, as in socialism socialism: expropriate the capitslist companies, provide guaranteed jobs for everyone, provide guaranteed housing for everyone at low prices, free education to the highest level...
Note how I said ideology, not party, I an not a super fan of how the current social democratic party has been handling things