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Socialism is essentially the political direction of capital investment. Notice, you shifted from saying that the economy was "socialist" to saying it was "socialistic", because even you must recognize that there is too much freedom in the capital markets to support the former assertion. But is it even "socialistic"? A welfare state is not automatically socialistic, since it merely extends commonly recognized functions of government, such as poor relief and emergency intervention, to a broader array of circumstances. Since there remains a substantially free market in two key areas, capital and labor, we have still not gone very far down the road. It is true that there are continual threats to fend off, such as the floating of "comparable worth" regulation, or calls to over- regulate junk bonds, and that there are things that should be rolled back, but to define the current economy as "socialistic" makes the charge so weak as to be almost meaningless....Further, since government involvement in welfare and economic regulation is much greater than it was in FDR's time, it is even more overblown to call the New Deal "socialistic". |
