[Seether]

I am taking several political science classes this semester for my minor, and one man happens to teach two of my classes. During the classes he likes to ignore essentially all that is in the book and talk about current events which he leads into the propagation of his beliefs, which seem very socialistic. While I normally am relatively quiet in classes, the things this guy says forces me to be active just to try to cut some of the bs out and at least show another view point. Also, one class is a constitution study class which all teachers need to take so he is in a sense influencing many future teachers. So onto his points.

He consistently refers to Enron and the sub prime housing collapse as failures of the "unregulated free market".

My full knowledge of the Enron fall is limited so I have not been able to challenge him on that point at all, but I was thinking this.... The accounting of public companies is regulated, if someone lies on the financial sheets they are breaking the law, thus it is not a failure of regulation, it is a crime. Much in the way that the murder of people is regulated by laws although some choose to break them? Is this a decent argument?

Then he speaks of the sub-prime lenders and how they screwed over people (he also mentioned how lenders would help people set up fake jobs to get approved for the loans). My retort to this argument is that the transaction was based on free will and that the people getting these loans should have looked into the details before getting loans they can not afford.


He also advocates the redistribution of wealth from the "capitalist who harnesses the labor of society for his gain" and wants an increase in taxes. He named off a bunch of people making 20 million+ a year and said they should be paying more, and cited that the 95,000$ ceiling on social security tax is not fair. He also advocates the creation universal health care, and criticized Bush's veto by comparing it to iraq war spending. He has also asserted that with the government managing social security there is a 1% cost of handling the money, yet if it was done privately there would be a 20-30% fee.

When he was going on his rant of the need for more programs I made the following statement, which is slightly paraphrased.

"The largest social program instituted by the gov was social security, which there are now giant predicted short falls in the future, and it is likely that everyone in this classroom will have no chance of seeing a dollar from social security, how can the government be trusted to make socialized health care viable"

I feel like he kind of dodged the answer as he said there was 5 trillion in IOUs in social security from the government because they had spent the money and then he made some comment about military spending.

I stated that that shows that we can not trust the government with holding our money in to which he went into an anecdotal story of an old friend of his who never wanted to pay social security tax, dodged it, and is now being supported by his wife who is 70 and still has to teach to support her husband. A total dodge of my question.

Like many advocating massive social programs he mentions the Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Sweden as essentially Utopian societies which we should model our social programs.

A lot from what I have read on these boards has led me to believe that it works there due to having a smaller homogenous population, but he was saying they have a large amount of immigration like the US. (Although I have heard it is very hard to immigrate there).

I'm kind of lost on an argument here other than our countries demographics makes it not viable?

I'm sorry if this post doesn't come across the best but I just can't handle this guy's massively socialist arguments be given a pulpit to speak to hundreds of students and no one at least trying to address the other side of his arguments. Any comments/criticism on the arguments I have used is appreciated and any firepower to send back my teachers way is greatly appreciated. I'd like to address his foreign policy views as well but I'll see how this goes at first. Thanks for any contributions.