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Presidential Issues: Economic Growth

Economic Growth

View all Articles by Sean Parnell

Bernie’s Democratic Socialism Isn’t Socialism, It’s Social Democracy

May 18, 2016

By Tim Worstall

Over here in Europe, we’ve had more in-your-face experience with socialism than the U.S. so it might be the case that we pay more attention to the gradations of leftist political thought.

Socialism is a political (or economic, your choice) system in opposition to capitalism. The difference is who owns the productive assets. Under capitalism it is the capitalists: investors discrete from both the labor and the organization being labored in. Under socialism, some form of the people or labor own those same productive assets. It could be directly, through some local system,  through national government–but that’s the difference. Socialism means some collective method of the ownership of productive assets.

There’re all sorts of variations within that as well. You can have market socialism (not a bad system, large parts of our own modern economies work this way) and it can be non-market socialism, which is a very bad idea as all non-market systems are.

Read the full article at Forbes.com: Bernie's Democratic Socialism Isn't Socialism, It's Social Democracy

Issue Categories : Bernie Sanders, Economic Growth