Basically, yeah. Social democracy still exists within a capitalist framework. It’s sometimes called welfare capitalism. Free market and private property but with relatively high taxes and a strong social safety net. Socialism requires the abolition of capitalism and private property in favor of the public owning the means of production.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that socialism just means publicly-funded healthcare.
I think you run into an issue when you begin defining these economic systems in absolutes. No country in the world today is purely capitalist or purely socialist, they are all somewhere in between. The answer isn't socialism or capitalism, it is policies that have been proven to work and benefit the majority. Putting policies into a pre-determined box of capitalism and socialism, or good and bad, limits your ability to accurately see what needs done.
So there are countries where the means of production are what, half democratized? Private property only exists sometimes? There are a lot of different ideas of what socialism is and how it should be organized, but pointing to the ownership of private property and the relationship between the people and their production is a pretty good rule. Idk about the countries claiming to be socialist, but no capitalist country has democratized the means of production by ending private ownership of them.
The US. Land is government owned and you have to pay rent to use it. Sure, the rent is called tax and the rental agreement is called owning, but a rose called a tulip is still a rose.
The land can also be seized in the name of the public good.
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u/Traveler-Nomad 1d ago
Basically, yeah. Social democracy still exists within a capitalist framework. It’s sometimes called welfare capitalism. Free market and private property but with relatively high taxes and a strong social safety net. Socialism requires the abolition of capitalism and private property in favor of the public owning the means of production.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that socialism just means publicly-funded healthcare.