I always find it ironically amusing when people throw around accusations that such and such is a socialist. Right now that’s most commonly observed among the Republican challengers for their party’s presidential nomination and used to characterize Democrats generally.
The reason I find it amusing is that, with the possible exception of Rand Paul, they’re all socialists. Socialism is the belief in centralized control of the means of production. The most important means of production today is money. Unless you believe in a hard currency and nothing other than head taxes, you’re a socialist. Basically, nearly all of us are socialists today.
The “flat tax” doesn’t cut it since it posits that people with higher incomes should pay higher taxes than those with lower incomes. It still provides control over the means of production.
You can’t maintain things like a modern army or modern regulatory state without something other than a head tax.
Rather than throwing around insults that we barely understand, how about we talk about what works and what doesn’t work? Let’s start with the idea that the Laffer Curve doesn’t say that tax cuts will always pay for themselves and produce economic growth.
“The reason I find it amusing is that, with the possible exception of Rand Paul, they’re all socialists. Socialism is the belief in centralized control of the means of production. The most important means of production today is money. Unless you believe in a hard currency and nothing other than head taxes, you’re a socialist. Basically, nearly all of us are socialists today.”
One way to look at it. You are taking the approach that if you believe in the government controlling anything, you are a socialist. OTOH, the few socialists i have known don’t believe you are a socialist unless you want government to control the production of nearly everything. Much like movement conservatives don’t believe you are really a conservative if you don’t buy into every talking point coming out of talk radio. Or you can’t be a true liberal if you believe everything other liberals do, but oppose immigration. I think folks on the extremes here are a bit off. If you believe 90% of what “pure” socialists believe, you are a socialist. 10%? Probably not.
Steve
No, I’m not. I’m using the actual definition of socialism and only one means of production, at that—money. The socialists you have known are irrelevant. You’re making the Humpty Dumpty argument—that words mean whatever you personally want them to mean, no more, no less. And a very nearly textbook example of a straw man argument, at that. You’ve taken when I wrote (control of money), distorted it (control of anything), and argued against that rather than against my actual argument.
You seem to be saying that if someone believes that the government should control the production of money, but believed the government should not be involved in anything else to do with production, i.e. they didn’t think government should regulate, set standards or anything, pure laissez faire other than money, they are a socialist. I don’t buy that.
Assume, reasonably I believe, that Rand Paul believes in hard money. He thinks government should stay out of everything, except that he thinks government should regulate the safety of foldable lenses for cataracts since he has seen some bad outcomes from faulty lenses. Laisez faire for everything else. Is he a socialist?
Steve
Look up any definition of “socialist”. Dictionary, Wikipedia, economic, etc. You’ll see that it conforms to the definition I’ve given. There are usually two components: state control of the means of production and democratic control, e.g. an absolute monarchy isn’t socialism.
In other words that word does not mean what you think it means.
“In the many years since socialism entered English around 1830, it has acquired several different meanings. It refers to a system of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control, but the conception of that control has varied, and the term has been interpreted in widely diverging ways, ranging from statist to libertarian, from Marxist to liberal. In the modern era, “pure†socialism has been seen only rarely and usually briefly in a few Communist regimes. Far more common are systems of social democracy, now often referred to as “democratic socialism,†in which extensive state regulation, with limited state ownership, has been employed by democratically elected governments (as in Sweden and Denmark) in the belief that it produces a fair distribution of income without impairing economic growth.”
In any event, the absolutist comments describe a world with which I am not familiar. Perhaps it’s like pornography, I know,it when I see it.
Guarneri is right. The dictionaries and encyclopedias you used are obsolete: state ownership is not the criterion, state oversight and regulation are. I would only add that in socialist economies the state provides a comprehensive suite of social services, including education, medical care and pensions.
Plainly, the US is a socialist state, or nearly so
I was just observing that there are more expansive and less rigid definitions. The label doesn’t mean much.
bob,
That’s far too loose a definition of socialism to be useful. It would mean every economy which has existed in recorded history has been socialist, which is another way of saying the term has no meaning at all. It is also a mistake to assume capitalism is an absence of government involvement in an economy. No capitalist system in a developed country has come into being without a strong, activist government supporting its existence.
State Socialism is a system in which both private ownership of the means of production and their distribution are under some form of public control with no bias toward capital.
State Capitalism is a system with private ownership of the means of production. The owners of capital are awarded disproportionately to the work actually done (the profit motive) and there can be some level of redistribution after the fact. The more is redistributed the more “social democratic” the system is said to be. The world’s developed countries lay somewhere along this spectrum, with the U.S. directing more income toward the profit share of national income than most anyone else.
These two systems aren’t distinct; they heavily overlap and share many characteristics. That’s why the Republicans can, as Dave argues, be called socialists and capitalists at the same time. They very much want state controls, but they want them so more income and resources can be directed to capital than would otherwise be.
What an absolutely and ill informed notion of socialism. Only a Socialist would come up with it.
Economics is about value not money. It is convenient to use money as a substitute, but it is also sloppy. Presently, currency and money are conflated, and both are assumed to be stores of value. A gold dollar is money. A paper dollar is currency. The sacks of corn that can be purchased by a gold dollar is the value of that corn, and the amount of work somebody is willing to pay for a gold dollar is the value of that work.
Paper can be substituted for the gold dollar, and as long as all parties believed in the soundness of the substitute, there would be no difference. It could be company chits, banknotes, or handwritten IOU’s. The farmer could use IOU’s on next year’s crop, and as long as everybody was satisfied, it could be used as money.
The problem with using IOU’s is that there is no way to know what next year’s crop will yield, but if it fails, that IOU becomes redeemable against a future crop. If the IOU holder does not redeem it in the next harvest, the corn cannot be stored forever, and the storage is lost opportunity (value) for the farmer.
Having the local government create a common corn storage facility for all farmers would solve part of the problem, but there would still be the crop failure problem. When the crop fails, more IOU’s would have been issued than corn produced, but unless the IOU’s were tied to a specific crop year, they would be redeemable upon any year. There would be too many IOU’s and too little corn.
Lord Keynes would solve the problem by borrowing from the future. The problem is that the only way to borrow from the future is with IOU’s, and when the problem is too many IOU’s, the solution is probably not creating more IOU’s.
When the system is managed by sensible, conservative (traditional not political), old fuddy-duddies, it can work because in a large enough system with slow money supply growth the good years will mask the lean years, but this also requires a diverse economy.
In the US, money is a raw material and a finished good. Money is like corn. The harvest provides the seeds to plant for next year’s crop, but the financial sector moves a lot faster. Both the government and the private sector can product money, but they use different methods.
The traditional economic theory that Republican and conservatives believe is based upon sound money. The basis for sound money is agreed upon tangible assets. This is usually gold or some other precious metal, but it does not need to be. The US dollar is a credit based system, and over the past 30 years, the credit has become more and more leveraged (derivatives).
The US dollar is not a store of value as it should be and as traditional economic theory assumes it to be. Instead, it is a commodity, and it can be produced no different than watches or sofas. Traditional economic theory includes banking activity, but today, conventional banking activity is able to produce US backed dollars not banknotes. (This is why the rich get richer, and there is nothing anybody can do to stop it.)
In a well functioning free market capitalist system, there will be some government regulations, and there will be taxes (possibly usage) to pay for the needed physical infrastructure and services. The government will issue currency is needed, but the currency will correspond with the actual money supply, and money will not be created artificially.
When the government or government sponsored entities begin manipulating the monetary system, the economic system ceases to be a free market system, and any claims to capitalist are dubious. There can be no value-for-value transactions when the values are unknown, unknowable, and ever changing.
The money supply is the most fundamental aspect of any economy, and if the government controls it, it ain’t free market. As to whether it is socialist or crony capitalist, it is beside the point to me – six of one or half a dozen of the other.
You cannot have free market, free trade, or free anything with an unfettered credit based monetary system, but most Republicans and conservatives have swallowed the pablum of the financial sector. The Democrats and progressives have swallowed the swill also, and the rich will get richer with each attempt to beggar them.
The truly pathetic part is that there is nothing nefarious occurring. Both sides want to believe the most inane nonsense.
Pre-1980 Republicans, yes. Paleocons, yes. Today’s Republicans and conservatives no. Many if not most of today’s Republicans are what used to be called “Southern Democrats”. They’re Jacksonians. No interest in sound money. They believe in credit.