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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (10487)	2/1/2006 1:15:56 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541481

I think the issue of whether there is a monopoly or not is relevant to the practical issues involved in providing or receiving the good or service. Its an important consideration. But I don't think its relevant to whether the system is socialist or not. If the government owned all American steel mills, but allowed foreign competition than it wouldn't have a monopoly on the US steel market but it would still be a socialist system. Even if there where a few private American mills the publicly owned ones would themselves be a socialist system, and steel production in the US would be mostly socialist. That is similar to education. Education as a whole (or at least primary and secondary education as a whole) is mostly socialist in the US. The public school system itself is entirely socialist/socialized. I did comment about the problems with the dictionary definitions of socialist and the online encyclopedia entry for socialism, in terms of relevance to this particular debate, so I won't consider them definitive by any means, but none of them included a monopoly as part of the definition. You can have wholly private monopolies, and IMO you can have socialist/socialized provision of services in competition with private provision of the same services. Even if you don't like the word socialist or socialized applied when there is no monopoly I think it is important to draw a distinction between government owned and run and funded institutions and private ones, and that there are many reasons to lump the government ones together in a separate category from the private ones. I think you provided the term collectivist before. (although that brings to my mind more extreme connotations than socialist), or some other term could be used. Tim