Socialism, capitalism, or what?

Is an individual mandate taxation without representation? In a New Year's Day interview on MSNBC, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, described the individual mandate as "worse than a tax," adding the understatement that both right and left are "finding that our politicians in Washington DC are much too responsive to what the corporations want these days."



Hamsher points out that the individual mandate is a legally required 8% income turnover to private corporations--entities over which the public has no control. Where any of that 8% winds up is up to the discretion of the corporation to which it is paid. (She didn't go into detail, but think about it--some might, for instance, be used for lobbying Congress to eliminate pesky regulations on providing or expanding patient care. Some might be used, depending on the Citizens United v. FEC outcome, to buoy independent campaigns promoting candidates friendly to the needs of insurance companies.)

"That's not capitalism, it's not socialism," says Hamsher. "It's socializing the loss and privatizing the profits."

We saw the same thing with the bank bailout--a government forced to prop up but unable to reform corporations and a greedy elite gone off the rails. So if it's not socialism, or capitalism, what's left? Corporism is a good start, if we don't want to go all the way and quote Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group.”

Hyperbole and history have made fascism a kind of political "that which must not be named." At a recent conference in Boston, keynoted Frances Moore Lappe said that she feels uncomfortable using "the 'f-word'" without also citing Roosevelt's definition. But regardless of what we call it, we need to start naming it out loud, now, before we all become so used to the withering away of democratically determined public purpose that using government to ensure private, short-term gain for a few becomes not an outrage, but the norm, accepted with cynicism and resignation.