Soshulisum

"Socialism" is just a word, like all words. But it's a particularly mushy one. It has meant everything from Stalinism, to most of Western Europe for most of the post-WWII decades including what are today the happiest nations in the world (which are Scandinavian, happy despite the long dark winters). Broadly, if it means anything at all, it means believing that government has to manage capitalism for the greater good. In other words it means accepting the indisputable fact (except to libertarians, who are insane) that there is no such thing as a free market™. Markets are not forces of nature, they are created, and shaped by government, which makes contract and property law, creates money, and creates and maintains the public goods essential to the functioning of capitalism. The question is how markets will be managed, and for whose benefit.

So, for example, if you say that taxing rich people to provide some form of benefit to the less fortunate is "socialism," all you are really saying is a) for unspecified reasons you don't like to tax rich people and/or benefit the less fortunate and b) you are calling that "socialism" because you use socialism as a term of disparagement. You aren't actually making an argument, you are just putting meaningless words together.


Update: One of my goals in maintaining this blog is to explicate and promote critical thinking. So let me make a couple of obvious points.

If you are committed to interpreting the word "socialism'" as meaning "the abolition of private property" then you are obviously being a total idiot if you yell "socialism" when someone proposes single payer health are or taxing rich people to pay for free higher education or child care. You can't have it both ways, assuming you are capable of rational thought.

BTW I am a beta tester for The Nation crossword puzzles and word definitions come up all the time. Merriam  Webster is the world's worst dictionary. They seem to have no concept of actual current usage. In any case, what the dictionary says is irrelevant if we are discussing what particular people actually mean by a word.

I once actually had what passed for a conversation with a guy who claimed that the concept of organic produce was meaningless because organic means "carbon compounds" and all produce consists of carbon compounds. Again, that is not argument, it is idiocy. Word have multiple meaning which must be understood in context.

I will not allow comments by people who are incapable of logical thought.

Update to the update: As I have said, words often have multiple meanings. If you want to engage in a discussion, then you need to accept the meanings of words as they are intended. "Socialism" does generally imply that government owns "important businesses and means of production." Well guess what? The United States is a socialist society! The government owns most of elementary and secondary education, and a good part of higher education. The government owns the roads, bridges, airports, and seaports. The government owns the biggest insurance company -- Medicare -- and shares ownership of insurance for poor people -- Medicaid -- with the states. The government owns the health care system for veterans and Native Americans, and many states and municipalities also own hospitals. I could go on. So it's a matter of degree, actually. Again, the point is, just deciding that the label is disparaging and that you're advancing a discussion in some way by saying "If you call it socialism, ergo it's bad" is inane. Same goes with demonization of the word "liberal." Meaningful discussion is about facts and ideas, not which words we happen to like.