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Stop all the yelling and get your terms straight
BY ART WILLIS For The Sunday Gazette
Art Willis lives on Quaker Street. The Gazette encourages readers to submit material on local issues for the Sunday Opinion section.

    As the shouting matches blare on impending health care reform, let us at least get our terms straight: Capitalism and socialism are economic and not political terms.
    Capitalism, sometimes called free-market economy, is an economic system wherein the distribution of goods and services is managed in private hands; socialism, in its many varieties, is an economic system wherein the distribution of goods and services is managed by public servants or by the government.
    Democracy (Greek for peoplerun government) and autocracy are political systems: Democracy occurs when the majority of people choose how they wish to be governed; autocracy occurs when the choice of governance is in the hands of a few.
    Historically, we can find many combinations of economics and politics: Hitler’s Third Reich, Tojo’s Japan and Mussolini’s Italy were essentially autocratic capitalism; Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s People’s Republic of China were autocratic socialism. Present-day Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are predominantly democratic socialist systems; the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, France and Germany are a mixture of democracy, socialism and capitalism. With the exception of public schools, the Postal Service, the national parks system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the United States has been largely based on democratic capitalism. .................>>>>..................>>>>................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r03001&AppName=1