u/Joesindc

This is not a question for the anti-democrats amongst us. For you we know that democracy is merely “the aristocracy of the orators.” I mean this question for those of us with ruder sensibilities.

There are two broad views of representative democracy, the delegate model and the trustee model.

Under the delegate model representative democracy the elected representatives should do no more than express the interests of the polity that elects them, suppressing their own views on a topic in favor of the will of the electorate. The motto of the representative of this system would be, “I’ll do what you tell me!” And it is favored by Roseau. At an extreme representative democracy as a whole is just an expedience because people live busy lives and the real best form of government would be a direct democracy.

Under the trustee model the representative should express their opinion on a matter even when that opinion contradicts the electorate. The motto of the representative in this system would be, “I will do what I think is best!” And is put in full display in the writings of Edmund Burke. In essence the people are hiring an expert to do the job of governing to the best of their ability the way you might hire a plumber because you have no knowledge of the plumbing arts. The trustee model would resist the creation of a direct democracy.

Obviously in real life, neither of these models is acted out perfectly and representatives regularly flip flop between them as is convenient.

Which of these models do you subscribe to? Or do you have a secret third option you prefer?

Hi all, I am working on a grad school capstone that is a policy proposal that we replace all taxes for County and Municipal government in the US with an LVT. I used data from 397 counties in six states that publicly report land values to build an OLS regression that would (hopefully) does a pretty decent job of predicting total land values for almost all of the counties in the US. Then I calculated what a 4-8% LVT (those are the cap rates I see most often in the literature) would return and compared it to the revenue counties and municipalities collect in taxes from the census. What I come out to is that at a 4% rate you’d get 1779/3108 counties and municipalities funding themselves and at an 8% rate you’d get 2525/3018 funding themselves, but all produce a quite sizable surplus such that if we wanted to we could put all of the money into a national pot and redistribute back down so that everyone could fund their county and municipal governments and still have money left over to I guess treat everyone to ice cream or something. Obviously, this is not the “look at a piece of property and tell us the LVT” tool we are all hoping to produce some day, but my hope is that it represents a statistically sound prediction of how much tax revenue the concerned levels of government could expect if they transitioned.

I am looking for an input this community might have on the approach. Anything obvious people are seeing they’d recommend I’d fix or add to the model. If anyone knows of other states or parts of states that publicly report land values like the six states I have (Wisconsin, Washington, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York (minus NYC), and Florida) and a few loose counties from seven other states. I also want to disclose that though the method is mine and is based on work I have done previously, Claude was a big help with the coding and fiddling with the model as it sits currently. Any help you have is appreciated:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRVZbIfj-1dSh9ufExyT94EWAs6Y0FtL767XsB2aYg4etm_xR86obKLkbSOL0GP3w/pubhtml#gid=1172561394

How do you balance the seemingly quite expanded duty of the state in both economic and moral spheres called for by Catholic Social teaching with the limited state called for by libertarianism?

There is a movement in the US, primarily in the South but growing elsewhere called “Yes In God’s Backyard” or “ YIGBY.” The principles of the movement are best codified in Florida Senate Bill 1780 which was recently signed into law. Basically, it gives local governments, county or municipal depending on who your zoning authority is, the option to grant churches the option build affordable housing units on land that they own that is otherwise not zoned for housing. This could get 30,000 parcels onto the market for housing.

Big point to highlight is that it’s an option on both sides, no county or municipality is required to do this and no church is required to build units on land they own. It’s also not required to be part of the parsonage or worship space. That means you don’t have to add them as like extensions to a church or the priests house. If someone has donated land to a church in a bequeathment or otherwise halfway across town that land can be used for affordable units.

Another point, “affordable units” are not the same as “social housing.” Social units are those explicitly put aside to provide housing as part of a program and usually provided at low or no cost. “Affordable units” often now being rebranded as “workforce housing” are units sold or rented on the market at intentionally below market rate and usually with certain income requirements needing to be met to get them (a certain percentage around the area median income).

I am pretty neutral on the issue. I am broadly ambivalent on zoning and think most of what we seek to accomplish with zoning can be better accomplished by other means (nuisance laws mostly to prevent industrialization in non-industrial areas) so the idea of moving any land out of traditional zoning limitations seems good to me. However, I also understand that it’s good for towns to have some level of economic planning that zoning helps accomplish. The idea of a church becoming a direct housing provider in this was is iffy to me. Housing is a BIG issue in the US and we need more workforce and missing middle housing but we also need more shelters and housing for those in absolute destitution. I would rather see a church engage in that than being a landlord/developer. I also just don’t want to see our churches already dealing with a vocation crisis adding one more job to the plate of some already pretty overworked priests. Thoughts?

TL;DR-Donald Trump’s moves to bring private enterprise under state ownership is socialism and in many ways it represents a more significant departure from the capitalist mode of production in favor of the socialist mode of production than anything that so called “democratic socialists” are doing. If you don’t want to see my work and just read the meat of the argument that’s section III.

I.                    Notes on Terminology
a.      First, I generally do not like terms like socialism, capitalism, communism, feudalism, or similar. In my experience, these terms snuff out light while producing quite a bit of heat. The minute something is labeled with one of these terms you end up debating the term and if the particular policy being discussed belongs under that term, rather than discussing the particular policy. I much prefer using terms like planned economy or market economy, centralized decision-making or decentralized decision-making, worker-owned/state-owned/private-owned/stock-owned corporations. I find these do a much better job balancing the light and the heat so the discussion can actually progress. I will be using the terms in this post (obviously) because they are used in common parlance to do rhetorical work, but in general there are better ways to do political discourse. 

II.                  What is Socialism?
a.      In common parlance when “people” say socialism they often mean something different than either the definition of the term or how a self-described “socialist” system has manifested itself in the world. I want to do my best to define the term well and draw out what I mean when I say, “Donald Trump is a socialist.” When modern detractors of Socialism use the term they are generally referring to a system that has a centrally planned economy that lacks market elements and is governed by a non-democratic single party dictatorship and when they label a policy as “socialist” they are saying “this policy is moving us in the direction of that kind of system.” When a defender of socialism describes the term they are likely to say something like “Socialism is when the state does something. Roads are socialism. The army is socialism.” Both are wrong but in different ways.
b.      Though the term “socialism” pre-dates Marx by a few decades and the ideas that live comfortably under the label “communism” pre-date him by either decades or centuries depending on how you apply the terms, generally the term has been brought under the Marxist ideology. The birth of what was self-styled communism  came in the mid-19th century as Europe grappled with what political theorist Karl Polayni called “the great transformation.” A continent that had previously been dominated by agrarian and manorialist modes of production was transitioning to industrial and market modes of production. This dispossessed workers and old aristocratic families alike. While on one side “liberal reformers” though that the competitive nature of the market and the protection of individual rights was the best way to run a society, the communists argued for a more communal (hence the name) and non-competitive way of doing things. Marxism is just one school of thought out of that milieu and was the most successful. In the Marxist framework first you have capitalism, then the workers take control of the state and use the state to enforce the rule of the workers, claiming the means of production from the non-worker owners and running it through the state, then once that is achieved the state slowly atrophies away and you get beautiful perfect stateless communism (cue swelling music). It is for this reason that the states that attempt to create communism might call themselves the “Communist party” because that is their aim, but their economies are “socialist” because they are state run. Thus, terms like “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The big thing I want to draw out is socialism, by definition in a Marxist framework, is when the state claims ownership of the means of production from private people and then runs them for the benefit of the workers and society as a whole (because under the socialist framework everyone is a worker).
c.      Something I also want to draw out is the opinion that Marx in particular had about stock corporations as it will be important later. Marx actually loved the stock corporation because he argued it demonstrated clearly that the management of a firm and the ownership of a firm are distinct tasks. In a stock corporation the group of owners choose a manager to run the company for them and just collect the dividends and occasionally providing broad direction. All of the real decisions about the running are left in the hands of their agent and the managers that agent hires. For Marx, this was a useful point to creating a socialist economy. The state could just replace the stockowners of a company and leave the management structures untouched.  

III.                What makes Donald Trump a Socialist?
a.      In June of 2025, President Donald trump struck a deal with US Steel to grant the US government a class G “Golden Share.” This share effectively abrogates the ownership rights of existing US Steel stockowners in favor of state control of the company. As the sole Class G Shareholder the US government has the right to prevent the company from doing a variety of things including selling itself, moving its headquarters, closing production facilities, and laying off workers. This is a truly unprecedented level of state control of a firm and is especially noteworthy because it involves the third largest producer in the industry and because that industry is steel, one of the most basic industrial goods. President Trump has claimed this was done both for national security concerns and to benefit American workers. This is socialism. In August, the US Government became the largest share holder in Intel acquiring a 10% stake in the company with CHIPS act money. Throughout 2025 the US government became a part owner in a variety of rare earth element companies. The main thing I want to draw out is the ways in which the state, under President Trump, has moved to take ownership stakes in firms that operate in industries providing the basic building blocks of the modern industrial and post-industrial economy. Steel, computers, and the rare earth metals that make the computers work. You might support these moves as ensuring jobs in these industries stay in the US and you might support these moves because they keep the American economy competitive. Just know that these moves, by any reasonable standards, is socialism. The state has taken over ownership of productive property within the economy and is running it not to turn a profit but for either the direct benefit of the workers (keeping the factories open and preventing layoffs) or for the indirect benefit of the workers (a competitive economy employs more people).

IV.               Why does it matter?
a.      These firms are no longer being run for profit as they would be under a Capitalist mode of production. This violates the property rights of the other shareholders of the company. In the landmark Dodge v. Ford Motor Company the Michigan Supreme court created the doctrine of shareholder primacy. Companies have a duty to make money for their shareholders, not their employees. This is a doctrine that has guided jurisprudence dealing with stock owned firms in the US ever since. This doctrine sets out a key piece of the property rights of owning a stock at all. When you own stock in a company you have the right to a company that is at least trying to pay you a dividend. You obviously do not have a right to a company that will definitely succeed in that end, but you have a right to compel the company to try by legal force. This doctrine has been further expressed by Milton Friedman in his book Capitalism and Freedom and has become part of the furniture of modern capitalism. The President of the United States has begun the process of abrogating that right, compelling the companies that the state has ownership stakes in to be run not for the profit but for public benefit. You can think that’s a good idea or not, but whatever you think: That’s socialism. I would argue it is even more socialist than some of the reforms being advocated by those claiming the label of socialism.
b.      This matters because the way we use terms like “socialism” causes people to misunderstand what they are signing up for and in the American context the socialist ideology has become so intertwined with the left wing thinking the assumption is that the right wing can’t do it. When we use political terms as rhetorical cudgels we obfuscate what is actually going on and if we should actually be agreeing to certain things. This post is not me outright endorsing the way markets allocate resources without state intervention, nor am I saying that it is impossible for the state to have a more direct hand on pieces of the market. For example, if the goal of the Trump Administration was to fully remove military production from the market, I think that would be a fantastic idea. I think living in a society where there is any form of profit associated with the production of war materiel is a bad idea as a little less than a century living with the military industrial complex has shown us. I think that converting firms to being worker owned rather than traditional “capitalist” firms is a great idea in a variety of industries, especially as an alternative to that firm relocating or going out of business. I am highly critical of the state taking ownership stakes in firms as a means to institute any form of top down central planning or attempting to run those firms in the best interests of workers. We have seen what happens when the state does that and it does not go well. The incentives are too perverse and the decision makers are too remote from the problems they are trying to solve.
c.      This also matters because we as Catholics have prior commitments to opposing particular ideologies. When these terms are sloppily applied we end up in a situation where we affirm something we shouldn’t because the policy proposal does not explicitly advertise itself as socialist when it is socialism or reject something with should affirm because it claims to be socialism when really, its just a sparkling social safety net, not originating in the socialism region of France. 

It is clear that the progress of a subreddit does not merely fail to relieve the poverty of low effort post bot-ing, it actually produces it. This association of progress with poverty is the great enigma of Reddit. It is the riddle that the sphinx of fate pits to our community, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.

The only solution is a tax on the karma rent that each post produces to encourage the development of quality posts and punish post-hoarding bots!