| ToxicJosh said: All countries use money, doesn't that make them all capitalist? Your argument that tax = socialism makes about as much sense as my previous statement. |
Yes. Soviet style communism was called state capitalism for a reason.
Which is kind of my point. No system on Earth is pure. According to your impractically rigid defintion, something is only socialist if the state owns it outright. A mixed economy is therefore no more socialistic than a completely free market. But, of course, socialist thought didn't begin and end with "the People should own everything". How you could even achieve such a thing has always been up for debate. So socialist theorists have tinkered with various ways of reaching socialist aims for over two centuries now, including having to contend with the successes of market economies, and it is absurd to deny socialist influences in systems that aren't purely socialist.
| ToxicJosh said: Again you missed the point by a country mile regarding what socialism is. It is about OWNERSHIP. |
No. I didn't miss that. You missed my point that to reserve the right to regulate something is to exert at least partial ownership of that thing.
| ToxicJosh said: Socialism and regulation are entirely unrelated. You can have a strongly regulated industry that is privately owned and operated (such as buses in the UK), or you can have a publicly owned one that is mostly self-regulated, such as our Primary Care Trusts. There is no relation. Regulation is painted as being socialist in order to run a strawman argument. |
It's worth noting that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of socialism is:
A political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
