| HappySqurriel said: The government providing a limited set of goods and services as or more efficiently as the private sector is not called socialism, it is called good government. The government providing a set of goods and services regardless of the cost or inefficiency of government delivery to rectify perceived economic unfairness is called socialism. Using healthcare as an example, even if evidence was presented that government run healthcare would cost several times and provide lower quality care than private healthcare Socialists would continue to press for public healthcare because they believed that a system without everyone having full access to healthcare was unfair. In contrast, most people do support public education in principle and most of the opposition of public education in the United States comes from the fact that the United States spends far more than most other countries on their public education system and gets very inconsistent mediocre results from it. |
You violated your own defintion of socialism, which is what my point of my post was. You stated:
Government does a good job of providing goods - not Socialism
Government does a bad job of provding goods - Socialism
Your defintion of a socialism has nothing to do with wether or not the government provides goods, just if the government can provide goods effectively.
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Yes, under your definition socialists would desire equality and push for the government to provide healthcare even if it was more costly. But are they not socialists if they push for government healthcare and it turns out to be less costly? Is a capitalist someone who pushes for the private market to provide goods even though the government is more efficient at providing that good?
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Yes, the United States government is doing a poor job at providing education. Let us consider the United States government providing education and the United Kingdom's government providing healthcare. If one government does a good job at providing education and another does a bad job, can we say that one government is socialist and the other is not, even though they are fundamentally doing the same thing?
