@maxdancona,
maxdancona wrote:
You really think that "National Socialists" are socialists because they have "socialist" in their name?
That is ridiculous.
Nazis deported people to concentration camps. Soviet socialists murdered the Czar's family and sent people to gulags.
The message seems to have been similar in both cases: dissenters will be treated as enemies of the state and heavily discriminated against and/or removed.
I don't think that's the only form socialism can take, but it is a good example of how applying social-political power to achieving economic goals can get very scary.
Now what about some softer form of power, such as using insurance-subsidized demand to drive up health care prices so that people are pushed into seeking employer-provided coverage and/or paying higher taxes and/or enrolling in government-mandated insurance?
In that case, the economic coercion is taking place in a different way and no one is getting sent off to work camps/prisons (unless they get arrested and convicted of a crime, of course), but there is still economic coercion going on.
In other words, it's different than just people just taking care of each other affordably within a free market situation where insurance doesn't push up prices and/or structure how people can get health care services, drugs, etc.
In order to have a broader discussion about how the politics and economics of labor participation, supply/demand, etc. for various products/services does, can, and/or should work, you have to think outside the box of what has been construed as 'normal' and/or 'socialist/capitalist' from an uncritical perspective.
You have to realize that 'socialism' and 'communism' have been demonized in political culture and so the people and industries that operate in a more socialistic way are going to fight against those terms being applied out of fear it would turn public opinion against them.
Meanwhile, people like B Sanders and AOC are trying to promote 'democratic socialism' in a way that makes the concept something that's not totally taboo, so there really needs to be a lot of public discussion to sort out what the term means so that it won't be simultaneously a stigma term as well as something that certain people want to promote as legitimate.