My wish for all Americans; IAmsterdam life

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

42. That's the point I'm trying to make, too. Trying to defend "socialism"

as it is commonly understood in this country - Soviet-style collectivism - is a fool's errand. Nobody is advocating for that kind of system, but that's what the term means to an awful lot of people after decades of cold-war rhetoric, and it's anathema. I remember when Medicare was first introduced (I'm old), and you'd think it was the end of Western civilization and we were all going to be shipped off to gulags. It was all, OMG, socialized medicine! The government is going to take away our doctors and make us stand in line for days to get prescriptions filled! and shit like that. Now, of course, everybody likes Medicare, which isn't socialism; it's a health insurance program funded by our FICA taxes and our employers and administered by a government agency. But the GOP used the threat of socialism to try to scuttle the program.

As I argued elsewhere in this thread, the existence of robust welfare programs in some other countries does not mean those countries are socialist countries; in fact, most of them (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands) are constitutional monarchies with democratically-elected parliaments and an economic system based on regulated capitalism. Those who are advocating "socialism" with respect to proposed changes in our system to copy those countries are using a term that is not only political Ebola, it's not even accurate.