[x]

Of course, they don’t exercise complete control over it, but in order to muck up the capitalist system, you don’t need to have complete control. All you’ve got to do is prevent the individual proprietors from running their businesses they way they want to in order to maximize their profits, and when you do that, you’ve effectively sabotaged the capitalist system as much as if you took complete control over the business.

True enough. But is what you get socialism or just a mucked-up capitalism? If you can't fix the economy, it may be socialism. If you can, is it still socialism? If Saab or Fiat turns a profit for its shareholders and competes with other manufacturers isn't what you have something different from a truly socialist society?

I guarantee you that this is not lost on the Europeans. They understand that their systems are socialist.

Take a good look at Volkswagen or BMW and then at Lada or at the Trabi makers. The products are different. The companies that made them are also different in kind. As are the societies that made those cars.

I can understand that the lines here aren't always clear. Maybe you can call Scandinavia socialist without the state owning everything. My point, though, was that you may want to call Germany or France socialist, but most informed people around when Romney was growing up wouldn't. They'd recognize that the difference between, say, East and West Germany, was greater than the difference between the US and West Germany.

[Brilliant]

“is what you get socialism or just a mucked-up capitalism?”

I think you get socialism. Capitalism requires free markets. If you don’t have free markets, you don’t have capitalism. Socialism is simply an economic system that seeks to substitute the political process for the market system. You could say that “mucked up capitalism” and socialism are the same thing.

That, by the way, is why socialism doesn’t work as well as capitalism. Political processes are inherently slower, less efficient, less accurate, and more arbitrary than market processes. In fact, that is the criticism that socialists use against capitalists. The markets adjust so quickly to changed economic conditions, that you have crashes, disruptions, etc. in a capitalist system.

The corresponding criticism of socialism is that it doesn’t necessarily EVER adjust to changed economic conditions. You can’t get away with the wasteful misuse of funds from the financial industry to fund subprime mortgages forever in a market system. At some point, the market refuses to accept more, and that’s it. If it were a socialist system, the politicians would be the ones who would have to make that decision, but they would insist that the money keep flowing.