With another State of the Union address in our rear view — and all of its “Greatest Show on Earth” excitement reverberating through the political firmament — the mainstream’s pallid analysis can begin. Pundits and politicians, their animated views all firmly grafted onto a broader, elite orthodoxy, have wasted no time in getting down to explaining “what it all means.”
By itself, the word socialism requires no statism whatsoever; instead it denotes a set of outcomes as an answer to the “Social Question” raised by disparities of wealth and economic power in society caused by statist intervention. On that account, it’s very possible to be both a socialist and an advocate for a truly free market, and American anarchists like Benjamin Tucker advocated for just this union of concepts “free market” and “socialism.”
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James Tuttle,
Regular Columnist, THL
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