Political Labels

There is so much discussion in this country about Socialism vs. Capitalism etc., but most people seem to have little understanding of these terms. Lets begin with the socialism vs. Capitalism example. Capitalism believes in a free market, where businesses and individuals are free to do what they want with their money without any government intervention. Socialism basically means that the government either takes over parts of the free market, or forces people to buy certain products, or tells businesses what they can sell, or how much they can sell it for. By those definitions, you can conclude several things. First of all, the United States, and most other countries in the world are socialist. Now socialists themselves will tend to disagree with this, but by my very loose definition of the word, the U.S. definitely fits into this category. Another thing that you can conclude is that most conservatives will be in favor of capitalism, and quite a few liberals will be in favor of socialism. Now a lot of conservatives disagree with socialism simply because of socialist Russia during the cold war, but usually they don't have a real understanding of socialism. First let's take a look back into history to see if socialism really works. Some examples of socialist nations are, "Communist" USSR, NAZI Germany, "Communist" China, and plenty more. Now there are a lot more examples, but these are the most well known because these were nations that had been capitalist, and therefore were some of the most powerful nations in the world. Most people will also be confused by the labels, because communists aren't usually considered socialist, and a lot of people don't connect NAZI with socialism. NAZI stands for National Socialist German Workers Party. When Hitler gained power, he was able to take over the media, and the businesses, and therefore the individuals lost there power to fight him when he decided that the government should kill all Jews because Germany had become a socialist nation. In a capitalist nation, he would not have the power to take over those things and therefore the holocaust could have been avoided if the government's power was restricted. On to the argument about communists not being socialist. You are correct that communism is not socialism, but these countries were not really communist. If you look at Marx's writings, you will see that a "communist" government progresses from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, to communism. These countries were definitely not in the feudalism stage, and they had control over businesses and technology, so they could not be in the capitalist stage, and communism means that there is no government and all of the people's earnings are shared, so obviously the only stage left is socialism. These were socialist nations, with the government having the same amount of power that our government has today. The only difference was that these nations decided that it was right to stop people from earning more money than others, and so thousands of people died, because the obvious result of any socialist nation over an extended period of time isn't everyone becomes rich, but instead makes everyone poor. Now a Marxist will say that these examples were distortions of true Marxism, which according to Marx's theory they may have been. But if you were to attempt to achieve Marxism in any nation, you would end with very similar results. Why? The same reason why the United States has become socialist... political power. It corrupts anyone who it is given to, and they will use it to achieve their own goals instead of giving the people liberty. For this reason, Marxism is really not reasonable. You see, while feudalism, capitalism, and socialism were governments that he could observe around him, communism was only a hypothesis that doesn't agree with the data.
So now that we understand socialism, capitalism, and communism, let's move on to democracy, vs. republic. Most people think that it shouldn't be democracy vs. republic, but instead democracy vs. dictatorship, or some other label that accompanies governmental power. The truth is that democracy promotes "freedom", and a republic promotes "liberty". What's the difference? Freedom means that you are given the privilege by the government to do what you want, until they (or the voters) decide to take it away. Liberty means that you are given inalienable rights that cannot be taken away whether the majority says so or not. Obviously you can see the degradation of countries over time. The United States is a perfect example. It went from the weakest most inefficient government of all time, to the most powerful government in the history of the world. We've gone from capitalist to socialist, and from a republic, to a democracy. Luckily for us we have the constitution that puts so much restriction on what the government can do that it basically is just made to sit there and do nothing. In order to become a socialist democracy, our politicians had to squeeze past its regulations and restrictions, until they were completely forgotten all together. Since we were the most prosperous and free nation, we will most likely have the hardest fall onto poverty and desperation unless we go back to the original principles of our founders.