In what universe does “G.E.” not conceal your identity as Jason Seagraves?

Did you think *I* was being sarcastic? I was being precisely as sarcastic as you were.

“Behind a pseudonym” — it’s a HANDLE not a pseudonym. Jesus. If I changed my handle to Jason Seagraves there would be more confusion than it’s worth.

“Heroic capitalist” was the highest compliment I could pay!

I would have one primary condition for ending vouchers and leaving education completely privatized. There would need to be a functioning legal mechanism to correct the market failure in which poor minors needing tuition are unable to make binding commitments to repay tuition loans out of the increased future earnings that we education advocates say would result from the tuition. A possible alternative to this condition would be the correction of unjust site monopolization through something like a citizens’ dividend funded by the return of geo-rent from site monopolists such as through a site value tax.

You write:

“I’ve already defined socialism as the state ownership of the means of production and distribution.”

Then you’ve already mis-defined it.

Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production.

Some variants of socialist theory posit the necessity of a “workers state” as proxy for the exercise of said ownership. Others posit the impossibility of a state acting effectively as such a proxy.

The existence/role of the state is an optional and variable, not required and fixed, characteristic of socialism.

I think interventionism is a good name for the middle-ground. For the sake of clarity, it’s dumb for capitalists to call interventionism “socialism” and it’s dumb for socialists to call it “capitalism”.

The dividing line where interventionism becomes capitalism and where it becomes socialism is blurry. For the latter case, Mises suggested the lack of a stock market, which is as good as a divider as any.

(Theories like mutualism and anarcho-socialism can be safely ignored, as without a de facto government to enforce socialism it would be impossible to maintain. Those ideologies either devolve into statism or become capitalism.)

Thus, I think it’s safe to say there is a definite spectrum, running from socialism through interventionism to capitalism.

I’ve already defined socialism as the state ownership of the means of production and distribution. You can make up your own definition if you’d like, but you can’t compel the rest of the world to accept it. What is your problem with that, by the way?

When and if you manage to even noddingly acquaint yourself with what socialism means, I’ll be glad to discuss with you whether or not it’s “that bad.”

We pay tens of thousands of dollars of property taxes that mostly go to our school district, and that pays for “free” admission at our choice of exactly two government elementary schools

This is why I don’t understand why you favor vouchers.

From what I understand, Brian Holtz is a heroic capitalist who used his talents to accumulate wealth for the material betterment of himself and his family. Now he has a gun put to his head and is made to cough up vast sums of property taxes in order to fund the socialist propaganda mills known as public schools. The vouchers he would receive would clearly be for less than the amount that is stolen from him.

Brian, why can’t you come out in favor of complete privatization? I’m sure that you’d be willing to donate money to good “public” (i.e. free to the public) schools. I think many people of even greater wealth would be more willing.

No. Socialism is evil. And the greater extent to which something is socialized, the greater extent that it’s evil.

As for “nuttery”: It’s a fact that no nation (with perhaps the exception of North Korea) is entirely socialized — meaning that the state owns the means of production and distribution. And no “state” is completely free (which would be a non-state). So the continuum is obviously true, even if it doesn’t fit with Knapp’s “socialists are cool” fantasy.

Mises is quoted as defining socialism as “a completely integrated system which regulates all prices, wages, and interest rates, and which thus places full control of production and consumption in the hands of the authorities”. So I guess as long as my daughter is allowed to run her unregulated lemonade stand, we’re not yet at socialism.

Sorry, Ludwig, wrong answer. Firms, industries, and economies can each be socialized to various degrees. Mises apparently applied the term “interventionism” to situations which fell short of his definition of socialism.

We pay tens of thousands of dollars of property taxes that mostly go to our school district, and that pays for “free” admission at our choice of exactly two government elementary schools (because of a transition phase as the nearer school starts up). That’s not intervention, that’s socialized elementary education.

That’s possible. The definition I quoted was from the preface to Mises’s Socialism.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/023082.html

I can’t recall where the story comes from, but Ludwig von Mises was reportedly asked once how to distinguish between a capitalist and a socialist economy in light of the fact that there is so much interventionism in “capitalist” economies. His answer was that the defining characteristic of capitalism was private capital markets.