Benjamin Parker

We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. We know they know we know they are lying. But they are still lying. -AIS

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

The fun folks at OregonTrailTay on Instagram added me to their web series!
https://t.co/wChL1kiL4y

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@donpelao1 @BelgianFans Lucky jersey

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@thechrisknight @BelgianFans It’s their lucky jersey now gotta stick with it.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

Your entire set of screenshotted counter-arguments is a pathetic exercise in redefining terms, rewriting history, and pretending coercion is freedom. Taking screenshots of others’ arguments is not going to convince anyone.
However, for those who wish to engage in debate rather than screenshotting the work of others, I’ll engage his pathetic attempts to rationalize his delusions:

On the claim that democratic socialism is not about state control: You are too stupid to see the contradiction in demanding that healthcare, education, housing, and retirement be stripped from the profit motive and run by the state. That is state control of production in the sectors that dominate modern economies. Your “mixed” economy is just a slow-motion seizure dressed as coexistence. Removing profit from essentials guarantees inefficiency, rationing, and declining quality because bureaucrats have no skin in the game and no price signals to guide them. Your intelligence fails you here completely.
On the Nordic history nonsense: Your rewriting of the timeline is historically illiterate. Wealth was created by liberal markets and property rights long before the welfare state ballooned. The welfare layer came later and produced the crises that forced tax cuts, deregulation, and market mechanisms in the 1990s. Those were retreats from overreach, not “calibrations.” Claiming the safety net encourages risk-taking is the opposite of reality. It subsidizes failure and reduces the necessity of success. Your delusion on this point is embarrassing.
On the size and diversity excuse: You are too dim to understand that large scale does not magically make bad incentives work. Existing programs like Social Security and Medicare are already heading toward insolvency and are riddled with fraud and inefficiency. They do not prove scalability; they prove that even limited versions strain under size and demographic change. Adding more while ignoring lower trust and cultural fragmentation in a diverse nation would accelerate the looting of the productive by the dependent. Your political will argument is code for forcing through what voters eventually reject.
On the innovation pipeline: Your public-risk private-profit whine is economically illiterate. Foundational research gets some tax money, but the hard work of turning it into usable, scalable products happens because private actors chase profits and bear failure. Without that, you get projects that stay in labs. Demanding the public “share in the rewards” is just another excuse for confiscation after the fact. It destroys the incentive to commercialize in the first place. You lack the capacity to see that.
On your closing delusion about true freedom requiring economic security: This is the most pathetic part. True freedom is the absence of coercion, not the presence of state-provided comfort funded by theft from others. Your “democratic consensus” is majority voting to extract value from the minority who produce it. That is force, not freedom. It creates dependency, not dignity. People bound by “economic desperation” in a free market at least have the dignity of their own choices and the possibility of rising. Your version traps them in political dependency forever. Your entire worldview is economic illiteracy masquerading as compassion, and your intelligence is too limited to recognize the destruction it causes.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

The arguments you’ve screenshotted are classic left-wing evasion. They redefine socialism to dodge its record and claim state spending drives innovation while markets just skim profits. Both are false, and neither supports transplanting Nordic models to the United States.
The definition bullet is word games. Socialism means state control of production and abolition of private capital ownership. Nordic countries never did this. They preserved private property, markets, and profit-driven firms. They added heavy taxes and redistribution on top of existing capitalist wealth. This is welfare capitalism, not democratic socialism. Sweden grew rich during its liberal low-tax era, then nearly collapsed in the 1970s-90s from over-expansion. It reformed with tax cuts and market mechanisms because the model failed. Norway relies on oil, not socialism. Denmark tightened rules after problems emerged. These nations succeeded where they stayed capitalist. The “mix” proves even diluted versions need constant market retreats.
Scaling this to America is impossible. The United States is large, diverse, and lower-trust, unlike the small, homogeneous Nordic societies with pre-built social capital. Welfare programs here already correlate with dependency and family breakdown. Nordic cohesion has fractured under immigration, creating crime pockets and fiscal burdens. Applying the same high-extraction system here would worsen capital flight, slower growth, and political fights over redistribution. America lacks the cultural and demographic conditions that allowed Nordic results.
The incentives bullet is malpractice. Government funds basic research with taxes taken from the private sector. That does not make state planning the driver of innovation. The internet stayed niche until private companies used profit motives to build email, commerce, and global platforms. GPS was military until private apps made it ubiquitous. Medical therapies reach patients through profit-seeking pharma firms, not grants alone. Without profit signals, spending follows politics and lobbying, not consumer value. Failures persist via subsidy. Market competition enforces adaptation through bankruptcy risk. Large state-directed efforts have delivered waste and stagnation. Nordic successes still depend on private incentives within their borders. Removing profit motives contradicts every record of central planning.
The screenshot’s nuance is rebranding. It whitewashes coercive redistribution while Nordic countries already retreat from its heaviest forms. The United States cannot adopt it without importing bigger contradictions: dependency, eroded incentives, demographic strains, and consumption of the productive base. Markets tie self-interest to value for others. Democratic socialism extracts value by force and assumes the producers survive. History and math show they do not.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

Socialism is an ideology that declares war on human nature by abolishing private property and the profit motive. Without these, there are no incentives to produce, innovate, or take risks. Central planners, no matter how well-intentioned, lack the information that free markets generate through millions of daily transactions. They cannot calculate value or allocate resources efficiently. The result is always the same: economic collapse. This is not theory. It has been tested repeatedly at horrific cost. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Maduro’s Venezuela all followed the script of seizure, centralization, failure, and terror to maintain power. Millions starved in engineered famines. Millions more died in camps and killing fields. The pattern is the direct consequence of a system that treats individuals as raw material for the collective and requires force to override their choices. It is powered by envy, enforced by violence, and has produced only poverty and tyranny wherever tried. It deserves permanent rejection.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@johnsaponaro @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC It is, according to the people who live there.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@AdrienEmber @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC Socialism is the ideology of failure and death. It punishes the productive to subsidize the unproductive, destroys innovation, and concentrates power in the hands of criminals. The body count from its implementations - over 100 million dead - is the ultimate proof of its evil.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

I myself prefer to live in reality, fully aware of the impossibilities that human nature imposes upon socialism. I prefer to realize that I’m not going to get a whole bunch of free stuff in life - makes for less disappointment later. I also don’t want a bunch of free stuff making me a spoiled, entitled child for life.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@AdrienEmber @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC Keep dreaming, brother - I won’t stop you. It’s nice to dream of utopia.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@AdrienEmber @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC Someone is living in la-la land.

[Art @ZarkFiles]

Communism through (my) ages:
1) When I was 15, a teacher told me "It isn't as bad as they say, and makes a lot of sense."
2) At about 19, college friends, "Socialism isn't communism."
3) At 20, on meeting my grandfather-in-law, "They are evil. We escaped in 1949."
4) At 30, "China is a wonderful developing Democracy"
5) At 35, I was sent to communist China on business. It was a crowded, smelly, dirty, factory of despair and hopelessness. This I saw with my own eyes.
6) At 36, "China doesn't count. Successful socialism is in northern Europe."
7) I moved to northern Europe when I was 40. It was much nicer than China, but also felt like I was living in the past. I had to wait 6 months for a hernia operation.
8) When I was about 45, the migrant crisis began. The socialist/globalist/pacifist allowed them entry into every country, regardless how many crimes they committed along the way. Just 20 minutes from my house, in Calais, I was shocked to see migrants jumping onto trucks, breaking open the doors, scattering the contents across the highway, then climbing in. They went through the Chunnel and got out in England.
9) At 52, the soft socialism around me had transformed into globalism. I was told I had to call people by their preferred pronouns, though it was a lie, and even if I didn't know what the preferences were. I quit.
10) I returned to the US, and am now 60. "Socialism" is no longer a dirty word here. People openly espouse the virtues of it. Politicians run as socialists and win.

Socialism has taken many forms, from the Bolshevism of Russia, to the CCP in China, the Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, and the many forms of it found in Latin America. It is one of the two most destructive ideologies on earth. It is designed to deprive, despirit, and murder everything that comes in contact with it.

Socialism is a great lie at every level. It helps no one, not even those who benefit the most. This is because the cost is the imposition of one's will on everyone else, and that destroys the soul of the usurper and the life of the oppressed.

Socialism always fails on its own, but only after destroying almost everything in its train. It can also be conquered. Those are the options.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@AdrienEmber @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC Multiple delusional proposals, yep.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@PDgasman @johnsaponaro @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC Faster than ours.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@AdrienEmber @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC You are dreaming. Universal healthcare would bankrupt the country, full stop.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@AdrienEmber @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC It’s literally impossible. Socialism is at odds with human nature and as such is doomed to failure every time it is tried. Repeatedly trying it and insisting it will be different ‘this time’ is insanity.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@johnsaponaro @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC The quality of life in those countries is going downhill fast.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

Those are tiny countries with high trust societies (or they were…). It ‘worked’ for a time, as they had US protection and kinship amongst themselves. Their experiment is now failing in real time - watch those countries continue to go downhill, as they now have to spend money on both defense and massive social programs that are being bled dry. It doesn’t work.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@AdrienEmber @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC It’s reality. Something that socialists have a hard time dealing with.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@Mosislak1 @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC How’s Western Europe doing? Lot of innovation going on there these days, is there?

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@Milesm31 @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC And QUITE LITERALLY the only country that protects the rest of them so that they can continue their socialist experiments.

[Benjamin Parker @benedpark]

@Lionness1019 @karenbutts5535 @JasonJournoDC U.S. the only country at the World Cup that protects the rest of them. So fucking willfully ignorant.