just john

What exactly is that? I would define socialism as collecting money from a group at large and redistributing it as means for achieving a larger goal, presumably a greater good. I think a lot of people would agree on that singular point. It's a common accusation flung at liberals for health care, social security, welfare, education, public transportation, etc. Kind of a nasty insult in our capitalist system because all afore mentioned are inherently evil.

For many years, I've been considering that the U.S. is not a true capitalist state at all. I think I started this train of thought during the Reagan years when I realized the defense industry was, indeed always has been, a heavily government subsidized institution from which beneficial technologies spun off. The morality of profiting from war research notwithstanding, we have gained immeasurably from government-funded military research in the private sector. Oh, and a lot of well-connected people got rich. The interesting thing about the defense industry is that it was funded more or less by both political parties through both times of war and peace. We had periods of fraud and scandal through the industry that ran in cycles from as far back as when Howard Hughs was designing airplanes, to mega-dollar toilet seats, and lately blantantly false charges from our own little corner of the south east.

Now we seem to have some other problems. The government has moved away from the socialistic redistribution of tax payer funded student loans to subsidizing private loan companies. Why are we paying companies to lend students money, compensating them for their "loss" when the government could have, and has, managed the program in the past. Somehow we moved from the government collecting the interest equivalent of a stable bond market to the government paying private companies because they were only making the interest equivalent of a stable bond market and a few well-connected people got rich plus a few more got arrested for defrauding the system.

Now Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are asking for increased caps on their customer based. They currently hold 40% of the U.S. mortgage market and are only making slightly more money than they would in a stable bond market. As compensation for this, they are heavily subsidized by the government. They recently paid (or returned subsidies) a $50M fine for fraudulent accounting practices, no one went to jail. Well-connected people are still rich.

Something in my dimming memory also seems to recall a Chrysler bail out right around the time they were "saved" by those dreadful k-cars. Don't even get me starting on what the U.S. is doing with pharmaceutical companies. And prisons, don't forget corporate prisons, an abomination if there ever was one.

So we've got government subsidized businesses related to defense research, housing, transportation, home lending, education finance, and medicine but none of it is distributed to individuals who need it. It is rather channelled to business-minded individuals who will stimulate growth (like we're seeing right now) who end up getting so rich and entitlement-sensed that they steal from the same coffers they were freely given. I can't legitemately see a free market operating here. I see money being collected from society at large being redistributed to business.