re: #536 HappyWarrior

The problem is too many Americans think there’s our system and there’s what happened in the USSR, There in fact are a lot of variants. That’s why someone should never call themselves a capitalist or socialist. i know I adhere to tenets of both schools of thoughts.

My view of socialism is that it means state ownership of the means of production, which in communism is just a phase before the state withers away. Thus I think all western nations are capitalist, in that they have private ownership of property and private for-profit companies and stock markets, but simply have differing levels of regulation and taxation to distribute the wealth generated by the capitalist economic system.