I was surprised to hear Brit Hume and Newt Ginrich (former Speaker of the US House) (re)define socialism as “government control of private property.” My understanding of socialism is that the state owns as well as controls the means of production. By “owns,” I do not mean holding the majority of shares, for there are no stockholders in socialism. Government control of a give economic transaction is called government regulation; this is not to say that the government owns the economic institutions. Remember socialism is a type of economic, not political, system. Anyway, Ginrich then said that Obama would instill socialism in the US if he could…and that it would be like Western Europe (which by implication is socialist already)…but there are plenty of privately-held companies sourced in the EU. To say that the EU or any of its states own the businesses would be a gross error. But all too often, if someone on television says (or implies) that this is so, it is taken as such by the general public. What concerns me here is that our public political discourse over the airwaves lets such redefinition go unfettered. The graver implications from the real definition can still scare people even as some new definition is cited. That is to say, people who know what socialism really is might fear that the US Government may take ownership of their small businesses, when what is being feared is that government regulations will increase. That is a far different thing than government ownership of the means of production. When such distances are trespassed in the name of political expediency, we all lose.
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