Was the Interstate Highway System a Socialist project by Dwight Eisenhower?
If you're a con today you'd say it was. In fact, I recommend that all cons immedately stop using the Interstate highways as well as ceasing their unemployment, disability, Social Security and Medicare benefits. God, Eisenhower was right about the Military Industrial Complex. **EDIT** The interstate highways can hardly be considered "post roads". And for those of you cons saying it wasn't Socialism because private companies did the building, you do understand that it was monies from the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT that paid for them, right? Private entrepeneurs didn't fund the Interstate-that's why there aren't toll booths every fifteen feet. **EDIT** Yup "Chief RunningWater", you're correct, and those Socialist highways were a great boon to this nation. Too bad cons don't want to fund infrastructure anymore.
Are military, fire department and police all examples of "socialism" as some people claim?
Yes, in my broad definition of socialism as public provision of goods and services - in this case, protective services provided by government entities and paid for by taxes. You could arrange a society where these are provided by private organizations, and in fact we do have for-hire private security services. But most people across the political spectrum don’t object to military, fire protection, and police being provided by the government. (A lot of people bitch about paying taxes to pay for it, though.) Most people also don’t object to the government providing tax-payer funded primary and secondary education and old age insurance — Social Security and Medicare in the US. Again, these can be and in some cases are also provided by private entities.Where people in the US argue is whether the government should provide additional services like general health insurance (the Affordable Care Act or Medicare for All), “free” higher education, and so on. Far fewer people these days argue for the traditional socialist view that government ought to own businesses outright. The democratic socialist experiments in western Europe did not in the end produce good results.
What is the difference between Socialism and Progressivism?
Socialism is a system where the government runs businesses, provides services and even products. It is not a type of government, it is a type of economy. And it is never found in its pure state, always in some mixture with capitalism. For instance, we in the US are a capitalist country, but we have socialized police and fire protection, roads and bridges, water projects and other infrastructure, schools, public health (disease control), etc. Progressivism is a political philosophy. The idea is that you judge the success of a system by how much it raises the standard of living of the average worker. You don't have to be a socialist to be a progressive, or even a liberal. A good example is Teddy Roosevelt who was about as conservative as people got in those days, but was probably the most progressive president we've ever had. Real progressives are not anti-capitalism, because we all agree that capitalism creates wealth the fastest. But under-regulated, captialism becomes unstable and crashes. When that happens, we move a little back towards socialism. It happened in 1933 and it's happening again now. Socialism produces stability. Once the system is stable again, we move back towards capitalism. But progressives will measure the success of capitalism not by the GNP or GDP, not by the compensation of Fortune 500 execs, but by how it raises the standard of living of regular working people. (I just have to say I am appalled at how conservatives today throw around words like socialism, communism, marxism, fascism, etc. etc., using them all interchangeably to mean anything they don't like or anyone they disagree with. What this really shows me is that right wing talk radio doesn't really inform or educate people, it only serves to make them more ignorant than they were before!)
Socialism in America?
So far the only explanations are that they like to pretend that these are not socialistic institutions. Which they are! One guy thinks he's a Supreme Court Judge and another thinks that only people whose houses burn down should pay for the fire dept. Nice! By the way I have BS in Business with a minor in PoliSci. I paid for the degree with Federal Grants (aka socialism).
I'm not sure exactly what socialism is and I keep hearing different definitions. What exactly is the idea behind it?
Socialism tries to strike a compromise between capitalism and communism where industries are either run or regulated by the communities they impact so they better reflect the values of those communities.Workers unions, social works projects, public education, libraries, parks, roads, shelters, and clinics, regulations on products and pollution, etc. can all be considered ‘socialist’ and are generally considered good things.The problems with socialism tends to come in its application on a large scale. The more government runs things, the easier it is for those systems to be exploited by corrupt politicians. The more things are owned by everyone, the less motivation there is for someone to work harder. Few people are interested in taking on more responsibility without more reward and the ones who claim the responsibility without a clear reward tend to exploit their positions to reward themselves.Everyone focused on the common good is great but tricky when there are limited resources. Applications in specific fields funded by an outside system work and can work well. In fact, there necessary to progress as a society. However, there’s a reason why we don’t see many successful socialist countries outside of fiction where the human population has been disseminated, humans have spread across the stars and and found abundant resources, or some sort of replicator technology has been invented which allows people a theoretically unlimited supply of whatever they want or need for free.
Why do Americans hate/fear the dreaded 'socialism'?
They cannot both exist in the same country at the same time. One is not exactly better than the other, but socialist countries usually don't work too well. One of the things Americans generally believe in is hard work. Socialism takes away people's motivation because it really doesn't matter if you work hard or not; either way, the government would take care of you. Plus, the government is in too much control in socialist countries. I will give you an example. Some people on Welfare and government assistance really DO need help. I mean, we all go through hard times. But there are many people on Welfare who are not motivated at all, and continue to not work and not do anything because why should they? They're getting taken care of. I really don't buy the excuse of "I can't get a job". What they mean is, "I can't get a high paying job that I like". Well, not everyone is going to find a high paying job that they like, actually the majority don't. I now am college educated, and do have a nice job, but while struggling to get my degree, I worked at factories, fast food, making $6.50 to $7.00 an hour. There is no excuse. People can get jobs, they just choose not to.
Are government built roads socialism?
Only under the massively unhelpful definition that any government intervention in the economy is socialism.Unfortunately, words don’t have fixed immutable meanings but rather context-specific usages. If the propaganda against the term “socialism” and for the term “capitalism” exists for long enough, then people like me in the future will have to make up a new term for worker’s control of means of the production or an anti-capitalist agenda. Maybe “workerism” I guess?The problem with the capitalism-socialism continuum that many otherwise-informed people use to express basically a continuum from full privatization to full publicization is that neither has ever existed because both are practically logically impossible. Governments have always built roads. Toll roads historically have been the exception, not the rule. (In fact, most services that we think of as government services historically began under kings. There are some arguable exceptions, like libraries and fire departments where even back in the Roman day one had private fire departments, but still). So were feudal kings “socialist”? What about oligarchies?This is why I reject this idea so much: it becomes incoherent. Even Ayn Rand advocated for government involvement in the military. When we can call Ayn Rand a socialist, the term has lost all meaning.If, instead, we think about socialism as a specific political ideology that can produce a few different forms, all of which aim to constrain limits on worker’s autonomy, reduce the excesses of private ownership and thereby end private fiefdoms and neo-feudalism, improve working conditions so that at least the most abject forms of wage slavery are avoided, and provide for all members of society, then government roads don’t really count as socialist. They’re not capitalist, either: they’re just standard government policy. They’re not even statist, because while at present nation-states build roads, in a future that used alternative political forms those forms could still build roads.