Fundamentally, one key aspect of “American socialism” gets it wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it threatens to do the whole system in. Here it is: The government paying for our social services has little operational control over those services and does not partake receive any revenue from said services. In a nutshell, every social service we have is contracted out. Do we have Government run health care? Not there yet. Instead, we have intricate and often arcane laws that either directly or indirectly subsidizes private health insurance. The government pays (in part) and private entities manage, provide, and profit. The economic incentives of private health care design, if we must go there, have always been profoundly perverse: private health providers skimp on product for profit (to benefit shareholders) and run opaque businesses. And why shouldn’t they? There is no free market and quality measurements to facilitate consumer choice are laughable. But, the truly fucked up aspect is this: tax money helps pay for these services and we get nothing in return. What we have is the axiom of anti-capitalism: You pay, they profit. And their profit never returns to the purse in the form of government taxes.

-- NonaFarahnik - 20 Jul 2010