“ALL HAIL CHAIRMAN TRUMP! WITH HIS GLORIOUS 10% PURCHASE OF INTEL, THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF AMERICA ENTERS A BOLD NEW ERA” -- California governor Newsom riles Republicans with Trump-trolling posts

[u/marketrent]

https://www.barrons.com/news/meme-lord-newsom-riles-republicans-with-trump-trolling-posts-05b74794

[u/koshgeo]

I know you're being sarcastic, but not really. They love socialism for the military, for example. There are plenty of things they love spending government money on, but then they pick and choose what they call "socialism".

Anything they don't like: socialism. Anything they do like, they never mention it.

[u/PlusScience3574 → u/koshgeo]

They love socialism for the military

The military isn't socialism. Government spending isn't socialism.

Socialism is when the workers own the businesses and they keep the full value of their labor. Capitalism is when someone who doesn't work makes passive income by exploiting a worker.

[u/koshgeo → u/PlusScience3574]

I'm playing loose with the term in the same way that conservatives often do, which is to label anything paid for by taxpayers "socialism", and denigrate it on that basis.

Even in ostensibly capitalist systems with things like universal healthcare, it is often called "socialized" healthcare. Does that make the system overall "socialism"? [shrug] It depends on the definition. For example, in that situation it isn't exactly like the workers own the healthcare business and keep the full value of their labor, to use your definition. The employees are working and getting paid roughly at cost, products and services are still being bought and sold at some kind of profit (e.g., equipment and supplies), and people are paying into it collectively (via taxes). Many such systems often have a parallel private, for-profit, conventionally capitalist system.

Medicine is one element of a functioning society. How many elements do we have to tick off as government/collectively-funded before we start calling it "socialism"? It is merely that the public owns a business and keeps all the value from it? Is it some fraction of commerce in an economy that has to be that way?

Yes, there are more nuanced and correct meanings, and I am emphatically not saying your definition is wrong (sounds about right to me), but there is quite a wide range you could legitimately argue, and there are plenty of people who (mistakenly) start calling it "socialism" the moment the government is involved in anything. It is those extreme concepts that I am satirizing, which, if you applied them consistently, would mean that the government bought-and-paid-for military is "socialism".

I mean, we could decide that military defense is a private matter and people can hire military defense services on a for-profit basis if they wanted to, picking from multiple corporate options that might market their services to us. "Mom's Friendly Military Defense" versus "Big Daddy's Super Troopers" or whatever. Or maybe we could opt out of it and accept that such a person's territory might get invaded and their property forcibly taken because they didn't pay their military defense bill that month, but we generally decide not to do things that way for some reason.

I like to talk about the idea of "socialism" in this way because, clearly, when you get to the roots of it, society has decided that some things are worth collectively funding and managing. It is easier to talk about what that basis is, and where the lines should be drawn between public and private commerce, than allow conservatives to invoke a vague "socialism" boogeyman, which they can define however they want to exclude things they don't like.

Temporarily accepting their crude definition and calling the military "socialist" at least gets them thinking about what it really means. It also opens the door to talking about what should and shouldn't be taxpayer-funded, and what the principles should be, without getting hung up over the definition of the "socialism" term.