So we're still pretending the Democrats are pushing 100%, full-blown socialism, in which private property is eliminated and government owns all means of production and distribution.
Okay, sure, why not.
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True. But...
Are they proposing more regulation of various industries and markets rather than less? Yes.
Are they proposing higher corporate taxes? Yes.
Regulations influence or dictate how businesses run and taxes obviously take operating expenses away from them. They are very transparent about wanting more influence on how commerce is done in the U.S., not less. Pair that with their transparent desire for giant government funded programs at extremely high costs and it's very hard to take them at their word.
Why not be honest and call it what it is, or don't call it what it's not? Higher taxes and social programs is not socialism.
"Socialism" is just a concept of socializing resources. It can be applied to anything where there's more than one person involved. If you go out to lunch with 9 colleagues and just say "split the check evenly 10 ways" regardless of what was ordered by each person, then that's socialism of the cost of the lunch. To that end, i would agree that people on the right use the term like a boogeyman when it's convenient for them to. They're referring to economic socialism but calling it just "socialism."
At that point, i'd just refer you to the above. I don't trust people who call themselves "democratic socialists" when they say they don't want to socialize America's economy. They rarely have seen regulations they don't like and tend to think that every problem can be solved by taxing people more and creating a government program for it. As said above, that's further government control of the economy. The more powerful and intrusive government gets, the more powerful and intrusive the government will want to get.