Socialism vs communism

[doodle]

I keep hearing socialism being conflated with communism. I'm listening to John Mackey from whole foods talk about why socialism doesn't work because humans need incentives and how it doesn't work when the government own the means of production and directs industry....yada yada yada..What am I missing here? To me there is a big difference between democratic socialism with a capitalist economy and soviet style communism. Why are these two terms being used interchangeably. When Trump says socialist, does he mean communist?

[vnatale]

I keep hearing socialism being conflated with communism. I'm listening to John Mackey from whole foods talk about why socialism doesn't work because humans need incentives and how it doesn't work when the government own the means of production and directs industry....yada yada yada..What am I missing here? To me there is a big difference between democratic socialism with a capitalist economy and soviet style communism. Why are these two terms being used interchangeably. When Trump says socialist, does he mean communist?

This is quite good at explaining the various strains of socialism (as a theory):


https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Vinny

[I Shrugged]

I keep hearing socialism being conflated with communism. I'm listening to John Mackey from whole foods talk about why socialism doesn't work because humans need incentives and how it doesn't work when the government own the means of production and directs industry....yada yada yada..What am I missing here? To me there is a big difference between democratic socialism with a capitalist economy and soviet style communism. Why are these two terms being used interchangeably. When Trump says socialist, does he mean communist?

Maybe read The Road To Serfdom. It’s a very short book.

If you don’t want to, here is a one paragraph overview. The persuasiveness is lost but whatever.
https://genzconservative.com/the-road-to-serfdom/
Edit: I see the one paragraph was the intro. There is a review following.

[I Shrugged]

I keep hearing fascism conflated with authoritarianism and even conservatism. That’s even more factually incorrect.

[Hal]

on topic https://www.americanthinker.com/article ... s_too.html

Off topic
Just saw your footnote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

We now return to the regular program.....

[pmward]

I keep hearing socialism being conflated with communism. I'm listening to John Mackey from whole foods talk about why socialism doesn't work because humans need incentives and how it doesn't work when the government own the means of production and directs industry....yada yada yada..What am I missing here? To me there is a big difference between democratic socialism with a capitalist economy and soviet style communism. Why are these two terms being used interchangeably. When Trump says socialist, does he mean communist?

I agree that there is a new school "democratic socialism" that starts with a base of capitalism and adds socialism in along the margins where necessary to set a floor of a standard of living. This is very different than old school socialism and communism. I think the branding could have been better. For instance instead of calling themselves "democratic socialists" it probably would have went over better to call them selves "democratic progressives" because the brand of socialism itself still has a bitter taste to it in the U.S. For instance, we were quicker to throw the baby out with the bath water than the EU was. We had decades of propaganda in the country about how "communism" and "socialism" was evil. It is hard to shake that story and get people to objectively look at the policies themselves, instead of just hearing the word "socialism" and having a knee jerk reflex to say (insert Bobby Boucher's mom's voice) "socialism is the devil!".

Now I'm not saying I necessarily support "democratic socialism", but I'm open to the ideas. For instance, when I first heard about MMT I had the same reaction everyone here probably had, "MMT is the devil!". But after actually taking the time to do the research, I came to understand how from a descriptive standpoint it actually is the reality of how government money works for a country that prints it's own currency (and especially one that is the global reserve currency). Now what prescription you come to with that is a different story. You can take the common "left" MMT route and put up a job guarantee, or you can take the Trump MMT route and cut taxes late in an economic expansion. Either way, it's the same thing. It's still MMT, it's just the stimulus in one area comes in the form of unskilled labor jobs and in the other it comes in the form of tax cuts. So I guess what I'm getting at is that we all need to set our biases aside at times an be willing to look objectively at things we have not allowed ourselves to consider in the past, and judge them on their own merit not on the story we've been told by some group or another.