Tomcat, socialism is not regulation. The FDA and other government regulatory bodies are designed to prevent abuse by companies towards consumers.

The key is that the FDA isn't selling the food. As long as businesses play by the rules they can compete and innovate however they want. Socialism creates a government-run monopoly and is just as bad as the big corporations...the only difference being at least the big corporations tend to make money. The government systematically loses it, business-wise. I don't see how this is an improvement.

Other than some libertarian ideas most "capitalist" concepts require regulation, even back with Adam Smith. The regulation is designed to encourage competition, prevent fraud, and protect the system overall. This is not socialist.

Socialism is when a car company drives itself into the ground (no pun intended) financially and the government steps in and spends tax money to save them. It rewards failure on the grounds of "equality" which is really not (if Saab were going out of business in the U.S. would they have been given bailouts?).

I personally believe capitalism is egalitarian by nature. It gives everyone the same playing field and the same capacity to succeed in that field...as well as the same capacity to fail. Government regulation is necessary to capitalism in order to prevent it from being abused.

It's when the field no longer becomes equal that we get socialism. Socialism likes the "everyone can succeed!" motto but doesn't like how people can fail. So they create a safety net where the government, drawing on the resources of everyone in the society, supports anyone who "needs" it. In the extreme people lose their incentives to be productive as all failing means is that you get more money from everyone else. This creates a constant drain on the economic system until you have wonderful things like ten trillion dollars of debt.

What is really needed is a blend of the two systems. The safety net is a double-edged sword. Sure, it has the negatives I just mentioned, but it also has the positives of preventing someone who runs into truly unfortunate circumstances from becoming completely unproductive. Society as a whole does not benefit when people are being abused by the system.

The government is not a business. It makes and implements laws. Let businesses be businesses and let the government be the government. Regulating the economy was part of the original Constitution...in fact it was pretty much all the Articles of Confederation could do at all. Nothing in capitalism calls for deregulation. It does, however, call for the ability to compete. Socialism eliminates this component.

In doing so it tends to bring the quality of products to the consumer down as a whole. You just need to glance at Amtrak, public schools, and Medicare to see how utterly pathetic the government is as a business entity.

If it's capitalist, Wal-Mart greed versus socialist, Amtrak greed I'll take Wal-Mart any day.

Jacquesne