Socialism is an economic system. It's about government ownership of the production and distribution of stuff. Like shoe factories or dairies.
Not just goods, but also services. If the government ran shoe-shining facilities, or massage parlors all over the place would they not be part of a socialist system?
There are, indeed, legitimate government functions.
I don't think "socialist" automatically equals "not a legitimate government function", or turned the other way around that a legitimate government function is automatically not socialist when it is provided by the government.
"Socialism" only has meaning when contrasted with communism on one side and capitalism on the other. You are leaving faint space on the continuum for capitalism.
Faint space for "pure capitalism", and probably faint space for "pure communism". Probably no system has been pure either way. All systems are mixed to a certain degree. If the whole economy is largely socialist than its reasonable to call it socialist. If the whole economy is largely capitalist, than its reasonable to call it capitalist even though there is some mix.
The US could reasonably be called either a capitalist system or a mixed one. Most goods are produced by the private sector (even if the government taxes and regulated a lot), but a huge fraction of services (esp., if you include things like defense and the courts as services, but even if you don't) are provided by the government. For example - Education is mostly a government function. Healthcare probably still is a majority private function but there is the military and veterans systems and local governments own some hospitals and while Medicare and Medicaid are not strictly speaking government run health care they are government run health insurance (another type of service).
It seems to me that a better place to draw the line is where material goods or transfer payments come into play, not before. A school is not a shoe factory
A transfer payment is arguably less socialist than providing goods. Some definitions of socialist would exclude the government paying for something as being socialist, they would only include the government owning the means of production. Government owns the school system. The main distinctions between a school and a shoe factory are
1 - The school provides a service not a good. I don't consider this to be a very relevant distinction.
and
2 - Education is more commonly provided by the government than shoes. I don't consider this very important either.
One relatively new concept is cities providing wireless broadband internet services. This is a service but is it not a socialist system? It isn't the norm now, but it could become the norm in the future. If it does become the norm, and stays that way for a few centuries does it now cease to be socialist?
Go back a few centuries and public school systems where not the norm either.
Tim |
