Socialism is alive and well. In America, as elsewhere, however, the socialist movement isn’t and never has been a worker’s movement, as it has been made out to be. Socialism has been, from the start, a movement of intellectuals. It festers on college campuses. It is a framework constructed by very [...]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” during his State of the Union Address in 1944. He noted that while “under the protection of certain inalienable rights…our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness….true [...]

An alternate history that I find interesting is a scenario where, in 1947, the British kept one city in India - e.g. Surat. This is analogous to the British control of Hong Kong in China after the communist revolution.
Why is Surat interesting for such an analysis, and not Bombay? It sounds too implausible for free [...]

At Casey Research, we are trying not to be overly pessimistic, but there’s no denying the mass of bad news coming to us from all fronts: the forces of collectivism are using the cover of the crisis they largely created, aided and abetted by capitalism’s quislings, to roll over the individual.
Even so, contained within the [...]

When I started Socialist Watch, I did not anticipate how quickly things would unravel in the US and abroad. Perhaps it is because despite my best judgment, I did not want to believe it. Unfortunately, my worst nightmares are being realized. This time, things are different. When Rahm Emanuel said, “You [...]

A few weeks before the election, “Joe the Plumber” asked Barack Obama about his tax plan, and Obama said that he intended to reform the tax code to “spread the wealth.” The McCain campaign seized on this gaffe and ran with it: what Obama was advocating, they said, was tantamount to “socialism.”
The “socialist” charge was [...]

For the time being, at least, the United States of America is still considered a “capitalist” country. But what does this mean? What would it take to make the U.S. not a “capitalist” nation, but a “socialist” one?
Generally, a country is considered to be more “capitalist” to the extent that it’s societal functions are handled [...]

Last week, I looked at the first five planks of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the extent to which they have been integrated into the U.S. government. This week, I’ll examine planks 6-10.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
Check. We have the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the [...]

All nation-states reside somewhere on the continuum between laissez-faire and total-state central planning. No country is completely capitalist and no country (with the possible exception of North Korea) is entirely socialist. So how are we to define roughly “capitalist” and “socialist” countries? Where is the dividing line? How do we know if we are still [...]

First, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were seized—Communist style—by the federal government. Then Lehman Brothers—which was worth $45 billion as recently as November—announced plans to file for bankruptcy. And now AIG, formerly one of the largest companies in the world, has been taken over by the Federal Reserve.
In 2000, American International Group, an insurance giant, [...]