Language is a social construct: words are just concepts and we hope for the sake of debate that we’re all sharing the same concept when we use the same words. But in many specialized jargons – and especially in politics – debates will often rage on for decades and generations at a time without the two sides ever coming to agree on what the words mean. Even if the denotation (dictionary definition) of a word is universal, the connotations (more culturally subjective meanings) can vary wildly from one group to another.
Of course, controlling the connotation of these words is an important part of ensuring that a debate will end up in a pre-defined way while retaining the illusion of earnest discussion and compromise… This is basically the job description of partisan political pundits – success means bending the meaning of a word to your goals, and failure means that someone else beat you to it.
Single-payer:
Single-payer healthcare is often discussed by Democrats as the “ideal” solution – the one goal we should be moving toward. But what does it mean? The UK‘s National Library of Medicine defines it as: “An approach to health care financing with only one source of money for paying health care providers.”
While that single source could be a private insurance monopoly or a publicly run government program, it can’t, by definition, be both! So in effect, when someone argues for Single-payer healthcare, they are not just talking about a system with universal coverage, they are explicitly referring to one that intentionally limits competition for service funding.
Anyone who understands America’s “spare no expense” mentality when it comes to medicine should immediately realize why the idea of single-payer healthcare is a non-starter in American domestic politics. Yet interestingly enough, multi-payer universal systems have never really come up as a topic in this so-called debate… So enjoy your mandates, I hope you can afford mandatory insurance with few caps on the cost of service!
Socialism:
Talk about a misused word – by both sides!
If you listen to Limbaugh or Maher, you might believe that socialism refers to any kind of welfare payment, social service, or social safety net. The big difference we might expect between these two groups is just that they disagree on whether or not that’s a good thing.
But what is the denotation of socialism? Wordnet at Princeton University defines it as: “a political theory advocating state ownership of industry” or “an economic system based on state ownership of capital.”
Well, last time I checked, food stamps have nothing to do with whether or not the government owns the farm and the grocery store. Ergo, social welfare programs are not socialism by any stretch of the dictionary’s definition. Further, universal healthcare isn’t even necessarily socialist in nature unless you have a very strict single-payer system that highly regulates or limits private funding and services.
When “socialism” becomes part of the typical left/right debate, the right will always win because people who actually know what socialism means won’t support it. History provides little evidence of instances where a state-owned monopoly outperforms more mixed economies.
Corporatism:
Corporatism is often thrown to imply a system of government captured by private corporate interests. What does San Jose State University say? Well, like most economics or political science professors they will tell you that “The basic idea of corporatism is that the society and economy of a country should be organized into major interest groups (sometimes called corporations) and representatives of those interest groups settle any problems through negotiation and joint agreement.”
Well now, that sounds like some kind of collectivist philosophy to me! Society is organized into interest groups, and they use some kind of centralized government to hammer out the negotiations. This is what Mussolini meant when he famously declared fascism to be a form of corporatism – he was not referring to what we have in America where banks and big manufacturers know that they can constantly come to the government for as much money or legislative protection as they could possibly want. Actually, Mussolini would have probably executed the CEOs if they tried to hold the economy of Italy hostage for the sake of bailouts and infinite loan guarantees – that kind of greed isn’t a rational compromise of society’s competing interests, its a giveaway to the most powerful ones.
More accurate ways to describe the political economy of America might be crony capitalism, a failed (or captured) state, regulatory capture run amok… etc… But corporatism? By definition, no.
So we’ve got self-proclaimed socialists railing against collectivism, we’ve set up this single-payer ideal for inevitable failure…
But who cares right?! These words will be misused so long as people continue to get their civic education from the TV and radio personalities instead of from books and academic sources. No specialist really expects non-specialists to understand and correctly use the jargon of their field, and politics is only different because non-specialists have a strong say in the decisions which will ultimately effect an entire society. Obviously, an autocratic political class is the only thing more dangerous than that, so we’ll just have to groan and chuckle and do our little bit to promote the neutral denotations that are more effective for constructive debate.
Want to kinow what socialism is? See my website. It has nothing to do with the state. Also, it implies a worldwide system, as well as the absence of such features of capitalism as money, profits, and wages. Goods and services would be freely available in socialism. This was the universal conception of socialism before the Bolsheviks distorted the term out of all recognition in their doomed attempt to ‘impose’ socialism on a backward largely agrarian society.