Fencing Bear at Prayer

"Socialism means, among other things, using political agencies to provide goods and services that otherwise would be provided privately in the marketplace.  In its most extreme form, socialism means government direction of the economy as a whole.  Socialism in its milder expressions takes the form of nationalized industries (the Chilean copper-mining industry under Allende, Pakistan's petrochemical sector and heavy industries under Bhutto), government ownership or direction of firms (Alfa Romeo under Mussolini, the Japan National Railway), direct government provision of goods and services (the British Health Service), or government management of nominally private marketplace activities (farm subsidies in France, Fannie Mae in the United States). "A slightly more technical definition of socialism is this: the public provision of non-public goods .   'Public goods' is a loose phrase, of course, and it means different things to different people [explained more ful...

" The notion that there is a reservoir of wealth somewhere , either in the possession of the government or the rich, which might be made to diffuse 'plenty through a smiling land,' is a delusion to which nearly all the writings of the ethical economists tend to spread , and it is probably the most mischievous delusion which has ever taken hold on the popular mind.  It affects indirectly large numbers of persons, who, if it were presented to them boldly and without drapery, would probably repudiate it.  But it steals into their brain through sermons, speeches, pamphlets, Fabian essays, and Bellamy utopias, and disposes them, on humanitarian grounds, to great public extravagances, in buildings, in relief work, in pensions, in schools, in high State wages and philanthropic undertakings which promise at no distant day to land the modern world in bankruptcy.  It will be very well if the century closes without witnessing this catastrophe in France or Italy, or both, --the two c...