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

To: Lane3 who wrote (10736)	2/3/2006 11:37:21 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541874

The two sides in policy debates are not the "socialist" and the "capitalist." That's simply deliberately provocative language meant, in this political climate, to put a negative spin. You might call one the "communal" (Amatai Etzioni prefers that, I'm not so certain); you might call it "welfare capitalism" (as it was called, though I think that misses much), but each has the benefit of noting that we are a far distance from socialism. I actually happen to think capitalism is a fine economic system but that it's obvious excesses need to be buffered, both in its tendency to simply generate human casualties with no social benefit, only pain to them (that's what you call "entitlements"); and, just as important, it's tendency to economic bubbles and busts which also produces much human pain but hampers business through lack of predictability (that's items like federal monetary policy). None of this is socialism.