- “It is mostly capitalistic in nature” sounds very much like a judgment call rather than a logical or numerical distinction. From my perspective, “it is mostly capitalistic in nature” is a conclusion that can only be reached by ignoring the decidedly non-capitalistic influences on the economy – influences which are both ubiquitous and strong. I’ve already mentioned a range of these.
- I’m not actually using “socialism” in the way that Republicans use it (they use it as a curse word where I’m merely using it as a value-neutral descriptor; your assumption seems as though it may be predicated on the assumption that socialism is a bad thing), though I suspect you’re using “capitalism” in the way that libertarians use it. Are you simply referring to market-based allocation as “capitalism”? If so then there’s a serious problem of semantics here because I think there are non-capitalistic market-based systems of allocation. I think “capitalism” specifically refers to the model in which a large amount of money (capital) is used to establish a business which then purchases labor from people who need to eat.
- I disagree that a welfare state and a socialist state are two different things. I think a welfare state is a type of socialist state. I think this is very much consistent with typical usage of the word “socialist”. This is a result of the specificity of my definition of “capitalistic” – since sale of labor is an integral part of any capitalistic system, putting a floor under the labor market with welfare provisions is a thoroughly socialistic intervention into the economy.
- It seems to me you’re conflating state communism with socialism. I don’t think they’re the same thing. France, just as one example, is often referred to as socialist despite the fact that its economy is largely market-based.
See above. I don’t think “market allocated” and “capitalist” are synonyms.
I’ve already explained why this is wrong. Our system is only “fundamentally” a capitalist system if you ignore those aspects of the system which are fundamentally not capitalistic (“fundamentally” is a weasel word here; I don’t care what it is “fundamentally” which is open to interpretation, I care what it is actually). I’ve already explained why “crap” being “made by corporations” isn’t enough to make the system capitalistic but I’ll go again: the government picks winners and losers by intervening heavily in utilities and similar infrastructure markets. If you actually trace all the inputs for any particular consumer product I think you’ll see that a great deal of those inputs are from government sponsored monopolies or a result of infrastructure that was funded by the government. This means that the markets which determine how resources are allocated have been distorted by government intervention; if not for the government’s intervention, the profitability of any given product could very well be different and the range and type of “crap” manufactured would also be different as a result. Just look around at your “crap” and think about what probably wouldn’t have ever been manufactured if it weren’t for the US government subsidizing the petrochemical/petroleum fuel industries.
I suspect this is largely a semantic disagreement. If you want to change the meaning of the term “capitalistic” to refer to the sort of economy we have now then I can’t really stop you. However, I’d prefer to use the term “capitalistic” to refer to those concepts and practices which have traditionally been referred to as “capitalistic” – otherwise the term “capitalistic” is simply tautologically defined as whatever the nature of our economy is at the time we’re describing it. This makes it more difficult to analyze the actual structure of the economy since it impoverishes the set of words and concepts we can use to differentiate and describe various facets of the economy.
