Half of millennials would rather live under socialism and communism

[Dill]

(11-06-2017, 04:37 PM)JustWinBaby Wrote: No, I'm pointing out you don't have to actually call the shots to control how business is done.  I'm saying the far end of taxes and regulation is indistinguishable from socialism.  As you move further down that spectrum, you are moving toward socialism whether you intend to actually own the business or not.

Same way a Board doesn't have to call the day-to-day shots to largely determine the direction of a business.  Or alternatively you can call the shots yourself OR you can create incentives (or disincentives) to have the "right" decisions made.

Do you think single payer is not socialism just because the govt isn't telling a business how to operate day-to-day?  Do you honestly believe when the govt is both regulator and sole buyer that the industry is still effectively "private"?

I agree with you about the "spectrum" of control, along which there is indeed a point at which private ownership becomes virtually null. And government policies may certainly move "towards" socialism--without yet being socialist.

In my view of that spectrum, public ownership is still the essential determining criterion for calling governments and policies "socialist." So far as I know, there are no examples of virtual public control still called "private ownership."  Even receivership won't qualify. 

Even Milton Friedman agreed there were some policy areas in which ONLY government could sensibly call the shots. Socializing the costs of the military armament, for example, did not, for him, push the US towards socialism.  But even that limited "socialism" was a far cry from how costs in East Germany or the Soviet Union were socialized--where governments not only socialized the costs of armament through taxation but ACTUALLY OWNED the factories which produced their arms. That all important structural feature of their (socialist) economies disappears when people start calling every little bit of US government oversight "socialism."

There can be reasonable arguments about what gets included in that category of "best left to government" or some hybrid of public and private. I guess where we disagree is whether it makes sense to call some government control--usually to prevent monopolies, fraud, or health costs to the general population--"ownership" and "dictating margins" to the point where the S-word makes sense as a descriptor. 

Not sure how single-payer popped into this.  One program, single payer healthcare, does not a socialist country make any more than a socialized military, especially when all the single payer "caring" is still done by private practitioners.
Also government is the regulator and (almost) sole buyer for the US military arms industry, which, yes, is still effectively "private."