I agree with much of your post, but this can all occur without being an equalist. I think limited government intervention is obv. needed. Otherwise the full market would become one massive corp. and it would be exactly as you made it. I am saying that the USA is becoming ridiculously over governmented (word) lol I even think that the new deal and stuff might have created some of the problems we face today. Correcting the market is good short term but long term it creates some serious problems.

Government should provide a rule of law - I would voice one that looks libertarian. The only other is to hold some intervention in the marketplace to keep it sorta fair. I don't need the government telling me when to run and what to eat and where to smoke and how to think and the list goes on forever.

From a purely economic idealist standpoint market intervention is bad long term. We are agreeing on this right?

If that is the case I still think we as a society need to make market corrections in order to make sure people don't start jumping off of buildings and stuff. I would rather slightly screw future generations than completely screw my own just for the sake of being an idealist. We always need to balance idealism and realism.

Pretty sure I just repeated your last post.

Also on the republicans and gay marriage thing. I actually don't believe that government should have anything to do with marriage. It should be purely an emotional and/or religious ceremony. This might be hard to believe from the other post we are working on.

Isn't this going back to the 'Why is Sweden have a higher quality of life than the US' thread?

A state needs to intervene to some extent in society or you have anarchy without government -it's primary role is to protect its citizens- to impose security/the rule of law and to prevent the worst excesses of unfettered capitalism (such as monopolies, pollution, pushing drugs, and exploiting minors).

The optimum level of state intervention is a moot point but probably changes according to societal norms and the current circumstances.

'liberalism', 'socialism', 'fascism' and 'communism' are all distinct concepts.

Liberalism does not imply any increase in the powers of the state (very often the opposite).

The other three, to a greater or lesser extent do, but socialism in the world outside the US is not a perjorative term. Social Democratic parties have run Japan and Germany (West) more or less since the 2nd WW. Tony Blair was, a least nominally, a socialist in that sense. The fundamental precepts of socialism are based on fairness of opportunity for all (so private schooling etc isn't much liked) and a limiting (rather then removal cf communism) of wealth inequalities to forge a 'fairer society' . The scandanavian and australasian countries spring to mind as successful examples of this.

Communism is in theory about an equal distribution of wealth and, as we can all see, in real life attempts to implement on a large scale suck. The main causes of that is that it tends to centralise a lot of intrusivepowers into the hands of a few (who are/become corrupt) and that it needs those very intrusive powers to try to work as the concept of giving the same share of wealth to everyone no matter how useful they are or how hard they work seems to go against how people are 'coded' to live their lives in the real world.

Fascism is mainly about the subsuming of individual identity into that of the State and is therefore also about increasing state control.

Can you point me to an example where there was absolutely no market intervention. I don't think that has ever happened. So my statement is kind of worthless because it is talking about a scenario that has never been giving a chance. So it would be hard for us to comment on its validity.