Oddbean

There’s a radical difference between the pursuit of equality of opportunity and pursuit of equality of condition. Neither has ever been achieved anywhere. I’d agree that the pursuit of equality of condition is always repugnant. I also think we’ve all benefited from society’s clumsy, well-intentioned attempts to help us get to the starting line in life, like through public education, for example. Not every government social program is “communist.” Each person has a range of what is acceptable help vs. government waste. If Harris advocates more than what you want, it does not make her a Maoist. Sorry, that’s just a dumb point of view. Even Trump wants to keep Social Security and Medicare and veterans benefits, so he must be a communist too in your world.

You can call it whatever you want, but you're using semantics to skate around the fact that she wants to steal property from some people and give it to others (equity, everyone ending up in the same place). I don't really give a shit what you want to call the violation of property rights. The principle evil remains. You can't have a society where everyone has property rights AND everyone ends up in the same place. There will always be those who achieve more and earn more. The only possible way to achieve (in theory) what she claims to want IS communism. I consider Trump a mixed-economist with socialist tendencies, but I don't hear him saying that the government should make everyone exactly the same, which really means to reduce everyone down to the lowest common denominator in the interest of 'equity.' You're trying to use terms as a distraction from the actual issues at hand. She's absolutely a socialist, and her ideas could only be serious pursued under a communist regime. Otherwise, producers wouldn't go for it.

2024 is very simple to me. Beat Trump. He’s an authoritarian. If we can’t beat him, contain him through checks and balances. If Harris turns out to be a closet communist, contain and defeat her, too.

There is a difference, which is why she makes it explicitly clear in this video that she wants everyone to end up in the same place via equity. Equality of outcome is the stated goal. You can't have that in a free society.