From: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1998 00:38:57 -0700 (PDT)
To: jeffb@issl.atl.hp.com>
Subject: RE: Regulating the Regulators / Re: regulating the internet (fwd)
Message-ID: <896C7C3540C3D111AB9F00805FA78CE20278D4@MSX11002>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> Jeff Barber[SMTP:jeffb@issl.atl.hp.com]  wrote , in reply to Jim Choate,
> replying to William Geiger:
> 
> Many people will argue that Medicaid, Medicare and the like are not
> Bad Things.  But they can't honestly be labeled "insurance".  And they
> definitely *are* "socialist" mechanisms.

They're not socialist - just the welfare state. If that's all you mean by
"socialist" you end up including all sorts of odd people - like Bismarck's
Prussia, the arch-conservative empire which invented the welfare state.  In
fact you include practically all government. Even occupying armies usually
try to do famine relief, if only to get the refugees off the roads.   The
word becomes so broad it is emptied of meaning and is only used as an insult
- just like the way some peope on the left use "Nazi" or "fascist"

If "socialist" means anything it has to mean social control of the supply
side - as opposed to "capitialism" which is control by the suppliers of
capital. Like it says in a Good Old Clause: "to secure for the workers by
hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry ... upon the basis of
thwe common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and
exchange..."  It's possible to imagine a socialist economy in which there
was no welfare system - ownership of business distributed amongst everybody,
managers of each business appointed  democratically; everyone starts with an
equal share,  but no helping hand if you don't make out. Whether many people
who say they are socialists would want to live in such an economy is a
different question.