China isn't what would normally be considered a western society; I assume they were talking about the developed world.
Much of the developed world does have substantially better social safety nets that the US, and lower rates of income inequality, though probably not due to the distribution of ownership of farmland.
Can you point me to your sources on this, I'm quite curious?
As for income inequality, the statistics are pretty telling.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/08/news/economy/global_income_i...
But it is the goal of liberalism to have strong social safety nets and equalize pay to all. The US has a different culture with different values... tending towards the "conservative" and with great trust in market forces.
"Obamacare" is seen as Socialism and half the population seems to hate it. But Obamacare only establishes rules for the free market to operate under... standardizing health care plans across insurance companies. There is no state-sponsored health care from the law, and yet people are still worried about socialism.
Obamacare is closer to Credit Card reform, in that it forced all credit card companies in the US to standardize upon the "Annual Percentage Rate" / APR so that everyone can comparison shop across credit cards. With Obamacare, all insurance companies have to offer similar plans (bronze, silver, gold, platinum), and they must cover certain provisions (contraceptives make the controversy here). So now when you see a "Bronze" plan from say... Aetna Health Insurance, you know it is similar to "Bronze" plans from Kaiser Permanente.
As far as the "Socialism" goes... US has had Medicare / Medicaid for nearly 80 years now. The "socialist" part of our health care system has existed for a very long time, but no Republican seems to want to attack it.
But inside the US, any new laws upon the market is seen as a "Market Distortion" and is criticized as "Socialism". Because most American's don't even know the meaning of that word. The absurdity in the "Net Neutrality" argument is more proof of the free market sheeple ignoring important issues and placing their trust in the free market instead.
Medicare/Medicaid are, like the student loan programs with college tuition, at least partially responsible for driving up the costs of healthcare in the US.
We've backed ourselves into a very difficult corner, and getting out of it isn't going to be easy, and it won't be popular.
Obamacare is closer to car-insurance, with the caveat
that even if you don't want a car you still have to buy
the insurance. THAT is what has most of the nay-sayers
agitated.
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2014/07/24/bill-oreill...
Bill O'Reilly, who is frankly a good conservative voice, clearly thinks that "Obamacare is Socialism"... that it is about income redistribution.
Which tells us a few things: Bill O'Reilly hasn't read Obamacare, and he also doesn't understand what "Socialism" means. Otherwise, he'd be attacking Medicaid.
And Bill O'Reilly is actually an overall intelligent guy. I do enjoy listening to him a lot of the time. His opinion and views are generally very reflective of conservatives. So when Bill O'Reilly gets it wrong, it reflects poorly upon conservatives as a whole.
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Without getting into the Obamacare debate, you have to admit that a fairly large portion of the conservative crowd doesn't even understand what "Socialism" is. That's what I'm trying to say.
Obamacare is a massive example. The individual mandate has absolutely nothing to do with socialism or income redistribution, but is instead a provision to eradicate "pre-existing conditions" clauses in insurance companies.
Socialism is... like the US Postal Office. The Government ownership of a service that the Free Market could take over. (ie: FedEx / UPS)
Socialism is a social and economic system characterised
by social ownership of the means of production and
co-operative management of the economy, as well as a
political theory and movement that aims at the
establishment of such a system.
Socialism: Medicaid, Postal Office. When the government owns and manages a core service, that is Socialism.
Individual Mandate: Its a regulation, legally its a tax. The government is forcing you to do something, like drive under 65mph or making leaded gasoline illegal to buy. Or making it illegal for you to smoke in certain areas.
In fact, when I hear people call the Individual Mandate "socialist", it tells me two things: 1. You don't know the meaning of socialism 2. You probably don't understand the Individual Mandate.
Maybe you don't like the Individual mandate. That is fine. I don't really like it either and preferred Mitt Romney's solution. It probably was possible to fix the Health Care system without resorting to the Individual Mandate... but to call it "socialism" is wrong.
How about you figure out how to criticize policy without resorting to words you don't even understand.
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Let me help you. I criticize the individual mandate as overhanded, excessive, burdensome regulation, difficult to enforce. Empowering to the IRS. An unnecessary tax on citizens. An abuse of the Commerce Clause.
You know, facts, real reasons why the Individual Mandate sucks. But to call it "socialism" is pure ignorance.
Of course this is all state regulated (and this is US-centric, but so is Obamacare), so it can work differently in different places.
Health insurance nominally protects you, though some make the argument that it protects society as a whole from any individual burdening the system.
In the car insurance case you can forgo the car and thereby forgo purchasing car insurance, but with the ACA you can't forgo health insurance.
I'll have to agree with you on this one. To me it always sounds for a split second that whoever compares it with socialism is joking, and then I'm reminded that Americans say this in all seriousness. I wonder, what's the Republican and Tea Party members views on public education? Are they against it? 100% free market education? (serious question)
When I use the term "socalism" or "socialist" while discussing a political topic, it doesn't mean I'm comparing it to, or saying it is Socialism. To me, like I would assume most other anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, socialism isn't a binary. It's a grey-scale towards socialism. So, while most would not say that public schooling or a social safety-net are "socialist" or meaning we have "Socialism", the anarcho-capitalists and libertarians would just be implying that this is one of the many things on the way to socialism.
Perhaps we're wrong, and these extras and government-projects, etc won't lead to a full socialist form of government. But every single time one of those things is enacted, it's a step in the direction of a less free society. A step in less voluntary and peaceful ways of solving problems. We say peaceful and voluntary because by our definition, government is neither of those (but that's a whole long discussion just by itself).
*edit: missing word.
I've talked to _real_ socialists, and I do believe myself to be ultimately a free market capitalist kind of guy... at least by default.
But unfortunately, the world isn't a simple place, and there are simple mathematical proofs in Game Theory that prove pure liassez-faire capitalism to be wrong. The free market fails in cases as simple as "The Stag Hunt", so it is ultimately the point of a capitalist government to intervene in any of the documented cases where the Free Market fails to work.
No anarcho-capitalist has ever given me a clear answer on how Cell Phones would work today if it weren't for government regulation enforcing the 2.4GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi, and also enforcing the licensing of spectrum. I like the fact that it is illegal to disturb other people's cell phones.
The Licensing of Spectrum is neither socialist, nor pure anarcho-capitalist. It is a mechanism Americans invented to avoid a market-failure cornercase. Without licensing of spectrum, competitors would create cell phones that disturbed cell phones from other companies. Without government intervention, it is impossible to create property-rights and "ownership of spectrum" that leads to today's cell phones.
And all anarcho-capitalists I know of also understand that a consistent viewpoint of "property rights" need to exist for any form of captialism to work. If you're like other anarcho-capitalists I've talked to, you'll go on about Dispute resolution organization and how they're different from judges.
The main problem is that if two Dispute resolution organization have different viewpoints on property rights (ie: one likes the concept of licensed spectrum and another one doesn't), then property rights ultimately fail to exist at all, and then capitalism breaks down entirely.
The socialist approach to solving the problem is to have the Government own all cell phone companies. This is _very_ distinct from the American solution, where the Federal Government created the concept of "spectrum" that different companies can then buy and sell to each other.
So seeing the world as "Socialist vs Anarcho-capitalist" is extremely naiive, and absolutely frustrating to those who like to discuss policy matters. The world is not binary, there are many different solutions to a single problem. Calling everything you disagree with as "socialism" simplifies arguments into a "them vs us" situation and stigmatizes debate.
Honest, learn to call _real_ socialist things as socialist. Not every single government intervention is a socialist plot.
People like to pretend Europe is only Germany, Britain, France, Norway etc.
Moldova, Czech, Belarus, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria and so on. These are countries that are dramatically poorer than the US. What does the amazing free education there get you? A $300 or $400 per month minimum wage.
An amazing social safety net where you're among the poorest 50% on earth? I don't get how that's something to celebrate.
I've known plenty of poor people, having grown up in dirt poor Appalachia, and growing up poor myself. I've never known a single truly poor person that couldn't get free healthcare from the government.
Much of the developed world