A More Honest Debate

False binaries make everything nice and neat; it's either/or, makes everything tidy black and white, this or that, line in the sand and such and we all do it. I understand the appeal, I understand we all fall into their trap, and we aren't going to quit making them any time soon.

That having been said, the current false binary that appears to be dominating American political discourse (among many), is capitalism vs socialism, as in which type of nation do we want to be. As usual, both terms are utilized as though the meaning of both were clear to everyone, when of course they are obvious to no one. One side fears we are leaning too precariously close to nefarious socialism, and to a lesser extent another side fears we lean too far toward the other (there are more than 2 sides of course, but again, false binaries, neat and tidy and useful for rhetorical purposes though still dishonest).

I'm going to just go ahead and assume for the purposes of this inconsequential blog-post that socialism refers to govt-owned and tax-payer funded, while capitalism refers to private-owned and customer-revenue funded. Without getting into a debate about flip-sides-of-same-coin and such, I can say right off the bat that the United States of America is already heavily socialist just by virtue of having a govt-run, tax-payer-funded military, police force, fire depts, highway system, and that's even if we magically eliminated public education, welfare, national parks, and "Obama-care" (whatever that is). And on the other end, even nominally-communist China has a booming free-market economy, tyrannical North Korea has regular dealings with Japanese and South Korean business-men, and thoroughly socialist Sweden is home to corporate juggernaut IKEA (from whom I bought a cheap, crappy bed once that I had to put together myself).

My round-about point is that the much more honest debate America should be having isn't capitalism vs socialism, but rather how much capitalism and how much socialism should be the right balance? I doubt even the most fervent libertarian would wish to dispense with such socialist services as national defense; I doubt the most out-and-out socialist would wish to surrender his/her radical co-op's control to govt. control. We already have a mix of socialism and capitalism, and the real question is how we're going to mix balance them against each other. That's a much more difficult question, but also a much more honest (and relevant) one.

Again, I'm not expecting this debate to actually occur on a national level anytime soon, but it would be a more honest debate.