When you can’t pick an industrial or commercial activity in which the government is not extensively involved, such that kids need permits to set up sidewalk lemonade stands, you’re a socialist country whether anyone admits it or not. From Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com:
In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”
Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it.
I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind.
Socialism With a Whimper
So it is with our “woke”—a euphemism for the socialist revolution we are in and do not fully appreciate or even understand.
Socialism is variously defined. The Merriam-Webster dictionary emphasizes the role of the state in near-communist terms: “Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”
The Cambridge Dictionary more accurately notes that socialism is “the set of beliefs that states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country’s money, or the political systems based on these beliefs.”
The latter definition perhaps best sums up much of the operative ideology of the new Democratic Party, the Biden Administration, and its subordinates, both elected and administrative.
But perhaps socialism in America 2023 is even better described as something like “the doctrine of enforced ‘equity’ by government redistribution of money and power from one ‘oppressive’ group to another ‘oppressed,’ with the caveat that the elite redistributors have the right to supersede the law based on their own self-professed superior morality, and the assurance that they will never be subject to the baleful consequences of their own unnatural ideology.”
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
“In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”
The problem with the terminology of ‘Socialism’ is that this – at its broadest – is merely enforced control – dominion – over the levers of power, within a people or nation state.
The fevered ideologue does not see it as socialism when it benefits their own interests, in large part, I would argue, because they DO in fact see themselves as being of extraordinary merit, as the author asserts (in a much more limited context).
I like a lot of what Hanson writes, however when it comes to a nation state, social-ism is an inherent component of any state. When this is no longer the case, you are an empire in which the highest or lowest bidder – as the case may be – controls the levers of power, which dumps you into the (accurate) more dangerous and expansive conception of ‘socialism’.
If you look at the USA from the advent of the 401(k), the ‘markets’ have collapsed repeatedly, under the weight of corrupt HFT, which has been ‘remedied’ by forcibly compelling the general public to underwrite the re-capitalization of failed ‘private’ markets. This is the very epitome of a socialist system, it just operated in reverse – with the poorest being obligated to backstop the losses of the predatory speculator class that sits atop the social pyramid.
As soon as someone starts screaming about socialism I always find that it will generally result in a very predictable rant attributing this concept to Engels., Marx, Luxembourg, etc.. while totally ignoring that the actual compelled socialism we experience the most deleterious effect from is top down, not from the bottom up.
A basic function of humanity from ancient times is taking care of the needy, and it is structurally integral to Christianity in a way that Capitalism is certainly not. Global Capitalism is not only NOT structurally integral to nations, it is a death knell to self governance as the globocap elite class act every bit as the controller Politburo.
There is no rational self-interest (greed) that would motivate anyone, for instance, to submit to a draft and go fight in a war against a peer-adversary, which poses a significant risk of being maimed or killed.
The ‘social’ impetus to comply with a draft in wartime is based upon the concept that those who draw a benefit from national membership, have an equal duty to risk their own safety without compensation to defend the interests of that people.
The globocap perversion of socialism as a top-down controller class not of the worker, but of the CEO / Financier, seeks to deny the social contract except where it offers a gain to their own purposes, which is why this is a totally outdated and meaningless construct that deludes those who are targeted with such indoctrination.
The true purpose of the ruling GloboCap politburo, is in effect no different in any way.. or less radical than Marxism, Socialism, Communism, which is that all share a common root –
and their one true purpose is to gain an international status, free of the constraints of a defined people or nation.
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The purpose of socialism is communism.
Vladimir Lenin
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