In high school/early college I was socially moderate with far right economics.
In mid-college, upon meeting people of all walks of life and seeing some of the failures of corporations and great social injustice around the world, I became more socially liberal and a bit of a centrist on economics.
Upon graduating college and reading more into the shady things corporations were doing in the financial sector and so on, as well as realizing the dangers of privatized, for-profit companies providing necessary services (hello, U.S. healthcare!), I began to become more of a socialist. However, I only think those aforementioned necessary services should be socialized. For luxury goods, free market economics works excellently to spur variety among products, leading to every niche being filled, with popular products surviving and unpopular products disappearing from the market.
I'd probably prefer if the U.S. became more like the social democracies of the Nordic countries, with a number of changes taking place:
- Dramatically improved our election process. Replace First Past the Post with something better, get rid of the electoral college, which causes politicians to give swing states special attention, and so on. Make our government more representative of the people's wishes, and held more directly accountable to the general population.
- Complete transparency in government, to further hold government accountable to the people. If not, at leat we have Wikileaks now.
- Make capital gains and inheritance taxes progressive like income tax, and add a new bracket to income tax, beginning at $1.5 million. Have the top capital gains bracket taxed at 50%, and tax the top income/inheritance tax brackets taxed at 90%. Get rid of all deducations and tax breaks save for a tiny handful.
- Implement single-payer healthcare, by expanding Medicare to all and getting rid of deductables and copays.
- Implement a similar system of payment for post-secondary education, to improve our society's well-being and decrease social inequality.
- Maybe nationalize energy production.
