AHC: Have a Socialist President of the United States

The Labor party has been a big part of Australian government since the beginning. With Federation coming straight after the drought and recessions of the 1890s the politicians of the day set up a number of commissions to ensure everyone got a fair go. For the most part they set what people get paid for different jobs. Decide whether strikes are legal. That sort of stuff. . .
I favor this type of approach during serious slumps, and from what you say, this combo of a drought and recessions in Australia in the 1890s sounds plenty bad enough.

But for regular times, to me this is too centralized.
 
What I mean by laws tilting 55% in favor of unions . . .

When a company attempts to hire replacement workers (scabs) early in a strike, Oh, yeah, the police and maybe national guard might come out, but they’re on the side of the union to prevent replacement workers from entering, thank you very much.

The union can take a dispute to a judge at their choice pretty early on, for the company to do this, they have to jump through some procedure hoops.

Pretty much the mirror image of what we have now.

Perhaps you’re thinking as I once did, ‘This is chaos. The unions would loot the companies and there’d be nothing left!’ But then I thought some more about how people are naturally risk-averse, almost to a fault. Yes, there might be a few cases in which a union doesn’t realize it’s driving a company to bankruptcy until it’s too late, but workers very much want to protect their jobs. I’m not even sure this would happen one time, but I don’t think it would happen more than a handful.

Compared to hot shot corporate executives, we’d have less busts like the Savings & Loan meltdown in 1990, and the very serious financial institution crisis in 2009. But, on the other hand . . . labor unions controlling the auto industry might be even slower in introducing front-wheel drive than the Big Three of Detroit were! :p
 
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This is hard to do really in any era in U.S. history, let alone with a twentieth century POD. I do agree though that any socialist president is likely not to win wit the support of a party that is socialist in name.

I agree that Socialist in name makes it difficult to fly in the US. A fair number folks I cross paths with consider the Democratic party solidly socialist, (communist if they are a modern conservatives). This includes many Democratic voters who see themselves or the party as the best hope for creating the ideal safety net society. What with a huge government sponsored retirement plan, government employment, large scale government healthcare (even pre ObamaCare), Workmans Comp mandates on employers, OSHA, the active government involvement in the citizens health is huge. Collectivist public services like sanitation, automotive roads, airline and other transport support of subsidies, R & D for industry at publicly supported universities are all part of the fabric of what many folks see as a Socialist US.
 

Yes, I see . . .

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/bosses-and-workers-in-australia/6407092

‘From the 1950s onwards the system became increasingly complex, partly because of legislative change and partly because the parties were making more and more demands on it,’ explains [Breen] Creighton [one of Australia's leading labour law scholars]. ‘Increasingly, unions and their members were negotiating terms and conditions at the workplace over and above the relevant award.

‘These over-award payments got out of hand and were regarded as having significant inflationary effects. In the 1970s wage inflation was a major social and economic problem. The award system really struggled to deal with it because in practical terms there was no means of enforcing the norms of the system.’

This is the more mysterious early '70s stagflation. As one component, maybe companies didn't fight wage increases as much as they used to figuring they could just pass the costs on. Maybe companies, unions, people in general, were trying to hit a moving target by predicting future inflation, and overshot the mark. So, a lot of moving parts.
 
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And this is the very non-mysterious stagflation! , which occurred following the 1973 and and '79 oil shocks.

In 1973, world oil prices quadrupled (yes, increased 4-fold). In '79, they more than doubled. The supply curve shifts inward and you end up at a place of both lower GDP and higher price.

AS = Aggregate Supply
 
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http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/bosses-and-workers-in-australia/6407092

A Labor government, led by Kevin Rudd, was returned in 2007 and the WorkChoices legislation was replaced by the Fair Work Act, which set out 10 national employment standards and a further 10 minimum standards to be included in awards.
And who could be against this? Minimum standards sound like a great idea. All the same, it does increase of cost of having an employee, so the people with jobs are better off but perhaps more total unemployment.

And I tell you, I'm most likely on the Aspergers-Autism Spectrum, although people like me at age 55 are going to tend not to be diagnosed. I have a speech difference, talk a little bit like Coach K of the Duke Blue Devils basketball team. And if you don't have the rich and successful thing going, that speech difference plays less well, I can tell you that for sure. Now, you might see someone here who's a pretty good researcher and a pretty good fellow writer of AH, and you might think, plenty good enough on the talent side, loads of corporate jobs, right? Or, you might think, well, GeoDude, you just need to compromise and conform, just a little bit, think of it as engagement, not even compromise. Well, I do compromise, all the time, and sometimes make a mess of it. It's a skill like anything else, and I am getting better at it. But I definitely want more total jobs.

Particularly, if it's complicated or involved to fire (sack) an employee, companies often shy away from hiring someone who's different and weird like myself.
 
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. . . do agree though that any socialist president is likely not to win wit the support of a party that is socialist in name.
almost like to go the other way! :)

De-toxify the word “socialism” (somehow!) , but have a half-assed, loosey-goosey, mixed economy type of socialism which ends up working pretty well.

Or, what they teach us in 9th grade (age 15) American government, just the whole thing works better.
 
A lot of people here talk about the stigma of the word socialism in the US as though it was the natural platonic state of an American to view socialism with suspicion and disdain. Yet this kind of overlooks the fact that such suspicion was something that was actively cultivated and constructed over a century of political suppression and ideological warfare. There was a time when the US had one of the fastest growing Socialist Party in the world. Without WW1, or at least Americas entry into it, which was arguably one of the main factors in disrupting American Socialism due to the internal splits it caused (pro and anti war and then pro and anti Communist) and the external repression brought about by the Sedition Act and First Red Scare, they could well have continued to gain support.

If you want an interesting option for a Socialist President that hasn't been mentioned yet perhaps I could recommend Horace Greeley? He was, amongst other things, a Fourierist, who were an early utopian socialist movement, and owned the newspaper that Karl Marx was a correspondent in. He stood as the Liberal Republican presidential candidate in 1872 but both lost in a landslide against grant and died before the EC voted. He was, however, very active in US politics throughout his life so it isn't impossible to imagine a scenario where he gets a nomination at a previous date.
 
A lot of people here talk about the stigma of the word socialism in the US as though it was the natural platonic state of an American to view socialism with suspicion and disdain. Yet this kind of overlooks the fact that such suspicion was something that was actively cultivated and constructed over a century of political suppression and ideological warfare. There was a time when the US had one of the fastest growing Socialist Party in the world. Without WW1, or at least Americas entry into it, which was arguably one of the main factors in disrupting American Socialism due to the internal splits it caused (pro and anti war and then pro and anti Communist) and the external repression brought about by the Sedition Act and First Red Scare, they could well have continued to gain support.

If you want an interesting option for a Socialist President that hasn't been mentioned yet perhaps I could recommend Horace Greeley? He was, amongst other things, a Fourierist, who were an early utopian socialist movement, and owned the newspaper that Karl Marx was a correspondent in. He stood as the Liberal Republican presidential candidate in 1872 but both lost in a landslide against grant and died before the EC voted. He was, however, very active in US politics throughout his life so it isn't impossible to imagine a scenario where he gets a nomination at a previous date.
Greeley 1868 in a Lincoln lives scenario?
 
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