Communism or Capitalist society, take your pick

However, forcibly trying to make everyone equal quashes freedom and individuality, especially the way it has been implemented by existing communist regimes. People are inherently not equal of ability. Some people have a talent for math, some people might have a talent for basketball, etc. One problem with communist regimes is that they generally fail to recognize this and offer few incentives for people to use their talents to the fullest. Essentially, why should person A work hard and produce a lot of progress when person B who has lesser talent produces less and gets the same benefit. Person A might as well be lazy and stoop to person B's level. This might not be morally admirable, but it's a reality that large scale communist societies have failed to effectively deal with.

Of course, redistributing and making all property communal also pretty much completely destroys the idea of economic freedom.

Partially socialist societies have been effective in some places, but personally I think a balance needs to be found between helping people who are disadvantaged have opportunities to succeed and presenting a situation where not succeeding doesn't provide enough of a disadvantage. That is, a welfare state in which the unemployed receive enough so as to live comfortably is not a good idea because it encourages unemployment.

As a citizen of the US, I think the US government is overly socialistic in some places but fails to do enough in other places where money might be spent more effectively. Social security is a stupid program. People should save for their own retirement, and if they don't, they'll have to keep working. This isn't and shouldn't be the government's job. On the other hand, the government spends far to little trying to get education and job training for the poor. I think it would be a good idea to pay people with a high enough financial need to go to community college or trade school for 2 years. It is more costly in the short run, but it helps create people who can get jobs, be contributing citizens in society, create better opportunities for their children, etc, and it gets them off welfare and such.



Ayn Rand is not someone I like much either. I understand the argument when someone claims they should not be forced to help others, but Ayn Rand goes so far as to say that charity is a sign of weakness and imply that we have a moral duty to NOT help the less fortunate because these people are almost unworthy of human dignity until they have made something of themselves, which I disagree with.

Nihilism is the most frightening philosophy in existence, in my mind. While not expressively destructive, there is no sense of anything and every action is of equal value(or rather, no value). To me, nihilism is the opposite of intelligence, as it rejects what defines humans as different from animals and even from inanimate objects. Nihilism is practiced primarily and most effectively by nonliving objects, certain events in subatomic physics that(we think) are random and unknowable when it comes to predicting individual events.

I don't, however, think Nietzsche was a nihilist or necessarily an evil person. He was trying to grapple with many of the philosophical ideas that had been developed that threatened meaning and existence, nihilism among them. His works were unclear and often varied significantly from one to the next, and unfortunately, this has caused people to misinterpret and use his ideas to justify horrible things.