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

To: TimF who wrote (92706)	10/31/2008 1:57:59 PM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541777

having the government control much of the economy without actually owning it, through taxes and regulations, or through other methods ... typically gets called socialist Typically in this case being wrong. Control without ownership is not socialism. The use of the money raised through taxes may be toward socialist ends, and the government may be socialist itself, but if there is not ownership of the "means of production" (extractive/agriculture, industry, commerce, service etc) then control alone is not socialism. The point is that not just the administration (running) of an organisation is in state or collective hands, but also the income: so the profit belongs to the owners to do with as they please. You rarely see one without the other, but it does happen. For example in WWII Britain, industry and agriculture were heavily controlled and regulated by the state, directing their efforts towards the war needs, but they were still privately owned. There was a distinct period of approximate socialism by the Labour government elected immediately after the war, which did nationalise much of the economy. Conversely, state ownership without control might be termed socialist, but I'm struggling to think of any case where a government owns a corporation and gets all the income from it without directing its efforts... I can think of arms-length corporations, like the BBC, but they keep their own income: possibly the Post Office is the nearest thing we have to such, but it's still subject to a lot of state control. I suppose its in the nature of governments to want to run things as well as own them... You're right that other things often get called socialism, but I'd say that only proves these people don't actually know what they're talking about - or if they do, then they are deliberately using "socialist" as a derogatory epithet designed to obfuscate and hence to inflame. I'd be wary of people who use such labels with abandon... <g>