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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, this way of talking seems to have its origin in the 2008 financial crisis more than in any actual technical economic language (https://www.cnbc.com/id/34921639). And it speaks more to American's mis-education about what socialism is (or its history) than anything else.

Apparently HN does not agree with me, I challenge my downvoting fans to find citations for "socializing losses" in the way you're talking about, prior to 2008.

"Lemon socialism" (gov't bailing out lemons) existed, but that actually has a different tone entirely.

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Your comments don't appear gray to me, so not sure what downvotes you're referencing. But allow me to channel my inner HN and humbly suggest that the downvotes you're receiving, such as they are, arise from your assumption that if terminology is not "technical economic language," it is incorrect. You replied to a person who used a commonly understood term correctly and you claimed it was incorrect. Now you're saying that the terminology didn't come to have the current meaning until 2008. But I'm not seeing the connection between that and whether the terminology is appropriate to the current context. Why would anyone bother to cite you a source of this terminology before 2008? Nobody has even referenced a claim that the terminology is older than that. It's a non sequitur to observe that the terminology is young.

The long and the short of it is that the person you originally responded to was correct to call the behavior "socializing costs." You were incorrect in your response where you claimed that a subsidy is not "socializing costs," since that's exactly what the term means in common parlance. The downvotes probably come from your not recognizing and admitting your mistake.

This was published in 1972 in Italy

The title translated in English reads as

"SOCIALIZATION OF THE COSTS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LARGE INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41630721?seq=1

"Socializing costs" is a widely used idiom, at least in my language, it might be true that America is miseducated to the meaning of socialism, but subsidizing the production of goods and services it's a form of socializing the costs in a non socialistic way (in which the state produces those goods and services)

Social is used in this case to intend the society, public money, people taxes.

> Frankly, this way of talking seems to have its origin in the 2008 financial crisis more than in any actual technical economic language

The exact phrasing of "privatize the profits and socialize the losses" seems to have become popular in 2008, if not actually originating there, but the concept of the problem is much older; its essentially a new phrasing of what has both before (and even since) popularly been phrased as "Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor" [0].

But "socialization" for distributing a cost/benefit outside of the participants in a transaction, and "privatization" for concentrating it there is a common term that is disconnected from "socialism" except that their shared "shape" is not mere coincidence, but because they have related-though-not-derived-from-each-other meanings.

> And it speaks more to American's mis-education about what socialism is (or its history) than anything else.

That's true of the older form (though less so the newer, though it derives some rhetorical utility from the similarity in words), though not in the obvious way. At least the earlier form was coined and is still popularly used by people who know very well what socialism is; it deliberately and directly leverages the way (not just the fact, but the specific arguments used) that the people who support what it criticizes have poisoned the well against socialism and misleading used to promote capitalism, turning it against the system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_cap...

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