(07-25-2018 12:33 PM)tanqtonic Wrote:  What else would you call someone who wishes to a great deal in a redistributionist-centric philosophy? That philosophy is so anti-capitalist that it truly could be labeled as a vein of socialist thought, even when dealing with a regime of heavy taxation and layers of social policy implemented at a centralized core. There is good reason why the Nordic countries are labeled Socialist and the UK pre-Thatcher as well.

One does not necessarily have to believe in full-out state control of the means of production to engender the 'Socialist' moniker.

No you can have anti-capitalist policies like the city that abuts my suburban community. They offered to give Bass Pro an abatement of city property tax and a turnback of city sales tax to locate there. Never mind they already had a smaller national chain in the city offering basically the same inventory that got no break or that there was a nice sized locally owned store with similar products offered no breaks.

Crony capitalism is not capitalism.
Differing tax burdens for competitors in the marketplace is not capitalism either.

If you abandon the classic definition of socialism you get big fuzzy nothing that means nothing.

Public schools and colleges? Workforce education? Highways? Airports? Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment insurance? Worker's compensation? Police? Fire? Ambulance? Local Health Department? Federal bank insurance?

All those are redistributionists you turn the word socialist into a meaningless word that two people talking and using the word are unable to communicate effectively because they are each defining it a different way.

The Nordic countries are not socialist. They for political reasons hijacked the word to address the post-war instability they were experiencing. People with food and shelter who don't have to worry about their kid dying in a preventable manner don't overthrow governments.

Even post-Thatcher, the UK is a rarity. They have an actual SOCIALIST health care system, the government owns the hospitals and most clinics and most doctors, nurses, and techs are employees of the government.

The post-war UK had severe lack of capital (but they paid off the US loans early) and had acquired Jaguar, BP, British Oil, British Aerospace, and British Steel and started British Telecom and British Airways. All of which she sold off.

She also had her version the Homestead Act, selling much of the government owned housing (lot of townhouse construction) to the people living in the housing units for roughly $20,000 US creating a surge of people rising out of poverty as most of the properties were worth 10x that a decade later and nearly all residents qualified to borrow because they were handed a great deal of equity with the deed. Thatcher redistributed tax purchased to the residents at below market value. That's about as redistributionist as it gets.