General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Capitalism is NOT a dirty word. [View all]nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)by definition, and it is a form of socialism.
And the only thing I disagree with you is putting down a system that you are defining. Social democracies take both the good aspects of capitalism, private ownership of factories for example, and the good aspects of socialism, such as public ownership of roads, utilities, schools, ergo the commons. It goes much deeper than that, but this is a good start.
What you want is social democracy. This is exactly where we were going towards with FDR, and even Ike, and what a certain group of usual suspects organized to unravel. They have been so successful that people cannot see what they want for what they want. The red baiting has been extremely successful in the US.
That is all I am saying. It is ironic that while you bash a philosophy you do not understand, you are calling for a form of it. For the record, what Adam Smith proposed was not capitalism, if you ever bother to read the Wealth of Nations, but a form of social democracy. It included silly shit like living wages, which European Social Democracies have, for the most part, implemented. In my view they are closer to what Smith (and yes even Marx, they are the two bookends of classical liberalism) wrote about.