[thankyoufriend]

How do you define socialism? I don't believe that we the people or the state collectively own the means of production in any major industry. Private ownership by capitalists is still the dominant economic system in the US.

[nine_zeros]

The US literally purchased shares of Intel - thus owning means of production.

The US also bails out a group of people all the time. The group is called the rich.

Furthermore, it subsidizes select groups like big ag.

Except these, the US is predominantly capitalistic but so was Argentina. Their populace was fed up with the pretense of helping the poor while bailing out oligarchs. America doesn't seem to pretend to help the poor. Poors are undesirables.

[flave]

Owning part of one company in one sector is not socialism unless you think nearly every country in the world since the invention of the limited company is socialist?

“Bailing out the rich” isn’t socialist is it? What do you think “socialist” means?

I don’t think you understand why the word “socialist” scares so many people. It’s not a word you can just slap on anything to make it “bad”, many people are actually scared about the underlying ideas not the word.

Some Americans seem to just think socialism=bad “because the CIA and the NYT does propaganda”. You may think America is bad and I may agree with you, that doesn’t make it socialist.

In the GDR you couldn’t start a private enterprise without a license. Any enterprise doing anything.

In socialist Burma, there were no privately-owned factories _at all_.

In Czechoslovakia the constitution banned a private company from employing anyone other than the owner of the company.

In Soviet Russia you needed a permit to move city. If you were a farmer you were unlikely to get that permit. You work for the collective farm, the government set the price they would pay you for your produce, and you couldn’t move city to a new job.

I hope these examples show why “the us government is socialist partly because it owns shares in Intel and partly because it’s a lender-of-last-resort for rich people” sounds fatuous.

[nine_zeros]

I'll tell you why you are wrong - you are wrong because you think that real socialism is only one that maps exactly to a prior example. You think it can't be real socialism if there is even one edge case that differs from a pre-existing example.

Your argument is a variant of the straw man fallacy. Look it up.

[thankyoufriend]

I think myself and the other poster are mainly taking issue in your use of a specific term "socialism." I think you could argue that if the US owned 51% stake in Intel, you could argue that would be socialism. I've heard the term "socialize" applied in similar conversations such as "privatize the profits, socialize the losses," which I believe is a more accurate rephrasing of your original point.