Do you think that Socialism could ever get a strong foothold in the USA? (read op)

[ToxicJosh]

badgenome said:

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.

That reason being to distant the communism that was being advocated for from the communism that was being practiced in the USSR. North Korea calls itself a People's Republic, it's a propaganda term.

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.

Actually, I did cover that states can be mixed, but to argue on the basis of the minor regulation that exists in the USA is ridiculous.

As below with your reference to the OED, you have confused socialism as an ideology that advocates in favour of workers rights, equality and fair treatment, with the economic term socialist; which is to do with ownership.

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.

I didn't miss your point. I disagreed with you. Because it's wrong. This is, again, more paranoid ramblings from the American far right.

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.

It's worth noting that the OED deals in lay definitions: That's socialism the ideology, rather than socialism the economic description. They also spelt 'organisation' wrong.

See comments above in bold.